"In terms of doing stand-up [as an Icelander] in English, yeah I'm probably some sort-of pioneer or trailblazer if you will" Comedy like most arts has traversed across many countries and ended up creating varying scenes around the world, however like the Grand National there are many hurdles to jump in order to reach the finishing line, in this context, bringing comedy from your own country to the fore. This is what has happened to Icelandic comedian Ari Eldjárn who on a whim, hedged his bet on a 20-1 to win and the result was that he won adulation at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and has performed gigs in many other countries, there may have been a few stumbles at some hurdles but ultimately his comedy career has been as successful as Red Rum. Flying the flag for Icelandic comedy in the English language, Ari has seen himself being invited to be on Mock The Week, appear at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and play at the legendary Soho Theatre... all stemming from one bet, he joined his musician friends at an open mic club in Reykjavík for a dare. We spoke to Ari about his rise to international acclaim, how he has coped during the lockdown, what the future holds for Icelandic comedy and why most non-Nordics won't understand the fun at 'Nordic stereotyping'. Watch Ari Eldjárn discuss 'Nordic stereotypes' below. Ari, could you tell us how you got into comedy in the first place? "Ha ha long story or short? It was around 10-11 years ago, when a couple of my friends who were super busy in music decided as a dare to do stand-up, just the two of them at a small bar, I saw them do it and just wanted to tag along. They tried it again two weeks later and I joined them and never looked back. This was the first summer after the bank collapse of 2008, so it was following not a lockdown, but a very 'cabin-fever' type of era in Iceland, where people were very ashamed and afraid because of financial recessions and wrongdoings, so doing comedy turned out to be a very welcomed distraction. My friends and I kind of fell into it on a whim and started up a group, we did club shows together and have been doing them for 10 years. My background at that point was that I went to film school to study screen-writing for a year in London and I have been working as a flight attendant and a copyright, I never really thought that I would end up as a comedian, that never crossed my mind... I think maybe because it just happened like that [click of the fingers], it didn't mess with my mind too much. My dream was to become a film director but I didn't take many steps towards achieving that goal and I found that the production of film is very long, time-consuming and expensive... I found out that I could easily freak out at scripts during post-production, stand-up for me was a way for me to circumvent my procrastination." Who were your comedic idols growing up? Who did you aspire to? "Well I think the earliest real comedy influence that I can remember and is one that I still go back to all the time is The Simpsons, I obsessed about The Simpsons and recorded every episode on VHS via the Icelandic Broadcasting Service, I knew most of it verbatim, by heart and did impressions of them; a friend of mine taped The Simpsons episodes on like cassettes and carried them around on his Walkman... a very crude version of Netflix on your phone, we would only listen to it during school and imagine the animation, I would say that's probably the one thing that inspired me the most. Also a HUGE comedy influence for me, that I always forget to talk about because it's not stand-up, is something I inherited for the lack of a better word, a huge box of Mad magazines from my funny uncle who actually is a dentist, those were magazines from like 1962 up until 1983, and I read all of it when I was around 9, I learned English when I was 7 and lived in England for a year... so I could read it and of course a lot of it went into my head, but I very quickly versed in the main tropes of these Mad magazines. Movie spoofs are ones that I enjoyed the most, Don Martin per se and there is a scene in The Simpsons where Millhouse and Bart find a Mad magazine and it's like a special edition, a compilation, recycling old stuff..." Talking about where comedy comes from, usually it's the USA or the UK, would you say you helped put Iceland on the comedy map? "Well there is one comedian who arguably has put Iceland on the map of comedy and that's Jón Gnarr, who was Iceland's real first big stand-up comedian and a massive TV star here doing sketch shows and series, he became Mayor of Reykjavík in 2010 and would show up to official ceremonies dressed up as Obi-Wan Kenobi, he is arguably the biggest export of Icelandic comedy ever, but in terms of doing stand-up in English, yeah I'm probably some sort-of pioneer or trailblazer if you will. But I'm this cosy living bubble in my small country, having enough work to keep me happy and busy for a long, long time. I have this side of me that really enjoys English as well, I learned it at such a young age and have always kept some connection to the UK even if sometimes I haven't visited in years and years, when I go there it all comes back to me very fast and the average humour level of any given person in the UK I would say is quite high, it is a country filled with people who are very capable of sarcasm and 'less is more', passive-aggressiveness, jokes here and there, so when I go there I feel a little bit refreshed... it's like an alter-ego." Having had experience in living in the UK, this must have helped in delivering your first show in the UK right? "Yes, it helps me to filter out the stuff that probably doesn't make sense over there, I'm a very simple person emotionally, once I get the idea in my head that this is going well I'm like 'well I belong here', I think a lot of it is just the pleasure of doing it in English, in my mind it's an absolute miracle I can do it and speak in English. I felt when I went back home when I was 8, that I learned how to speak English earlier than my peers, they would say to me things like 'how do you say this or that'." Where was your first UK performance, what was the reception like? Have you performed elsewhere? "The first time I played in the UK was at open mic gigs at The Laughing Horse in 2010, I've been doing this for a living in Icelandic, I wrote up 5 minutes of English material which was all new, I didn't translate anything which is something I have not done since. I did this for a week at several places and ground it out, it was very daunting only because in my mind it was daunting... the reality though was that these were open mic gigs and so weren't so demanding, there were friends and families present of those competing... I think I blacked out doing my first gig because I forgot what I was going to say. The most daunting thing is always my head, in general you're not in danger if you decide to get up there and talk, you're not going to suffer serious consequences if you slip up, it's a live act. When I went to Norway to do some shows a year after the Icelandic banks collapsed and the Icelandic Krona was like halved and the Norwegian Krone was booming thanks to the oil prices; so connected to oil and I think I went to the Hard Rock Cafe in Oslo and ordered a hamburger and glass of coke, I think it was about £12 (laughs). There's this great Finnish comedian called André Wickström who had this bit about going to a bar in Norway and just buying the cheapest beer which is called Ringnes, which is like the lowest of the low and he asked how much it was as the price was in Norwegian Krone, how much is that in Euro's? It's uh 9 Euro's. 9 Euro's?!?! For a beer?!?! Yes it is happy hour." Do you feel at times that some people will laugh at a joke because everyone is laughing, even if they don't get it? "Yeah I do that, that's me watching Family Guy all the time, like most of the references in Family Guy I don't understand because I don't know what they're referring to, but I will still laugh because of the co-dependency you tend to have and also because they are actually funny even if you don't know what it's from. Sometimes somebody is so funny that you just go with it no matter what the person says, and then you do the research later." Where do you source your material from, is it from personal experiences such as from your previous jobs? "I've been able to mine some jokes from my job as a flight attendant, but a lot of it just comes from me talking all the time and trying to be funny, I keep little notes on my phone. The way I was raised where I come from a house with only brothers, a big brother, and younger brother and we would rip off each other all the time, have our own private sense of humour and just take the mick out of each other, it's like a social thing... I wouldn't say I spend a lot of time sitting down and writing any of the stuff that I do... I'm always trying to come up with something verbally and if I get a reaction from anyone I just write it down. I wish I knew how to write jokes, like some comedians work as comedy writers either for a sketch show or an awards show or what have you, they apply this professionally." What challenges did / do you have to overcome throughout your career in comedy? "Well the main challenges for me were when I always decided to do something new, but I think the biggest challenge for me when I first started was doing TV, I felt it was very different and didn't get the same instant gratification, I would always have to record it with a live audience obviously but airing it, made me realise that maybe I was not as self-secure as I thought I was, because I was actually quite terrified of having people judge me in their homes, I had to work on a bit of an obstacle there. But I'm very glad that I did because I think it helped me grow immensely in getting exposure much faster, I did a regular stand-up slot that was added to a new chat show that ran for half a season, which got panned by people in the early days of the internet. I was very happy that people liked my stand-up but they were like 'oh you're on that show, urgh it's going down like the Zeppelin', so that was a big challenge for me to overcome my controlling aspects of myself, I couldn't control how people perceive this and my perfectionism... I just had to let go and this may not be the best version of this bit, but this is the version that everyone is going to see and in the end, that is more valuable than having nothing seen." Tell us more about that Nordic Prize Award event you performed at, what was that like? "Ah the one that's on YouTube, that was a very strange one because I had been off for around 6 weeks and I hadn't done my English sets in ages, around 2-3 months before I took time off. I kind of showed up there and did it by memory, it went hugely well with the audience, I remember all of the prime ministers and foreign ministers of the Governments were there, I was ecstatic when I read some of the comments about the transmission locally, people were like saying 'woah, that seemed to be like a tough crowd' and I was like 'what tough crowd? It was a walk in the park', but then it turned out that it was perceived by people here the the audience was reserved... the mix was that you couldn't really hear laughter, this is a common problem with live comedy. I was like OK that's done, all good and then around a year and a half later it started to go viral on Facebook, mainly from Finland and expats who went to live in other Nordic countries, it got millions of views of which I would not discredit it at all, I think it probably helped me get my foot in Edinburgh as a result. My feeling at the time was that this was a strange gig, a woman behind me with a cello silently waiting, probably a gig that doesn't often have comedy and so I gave it my best. The joke regarding the social stereotypes alongside my Nordic stuff is meant to be based around me mocking Icelanders who have this inferiority complex and feeling hugely insecure, invalidated by the world and eager for any attention we can get. I'm playing off of the stereotypes that people draw up such as the Finnish always being drunk... I just found that these kind of stereotypes, addressing them as stereotypes I thought would be interesting. But, I don't really like comedy that relies on stereotypes, I don't like to say that this person is like this because they are from here, it's a double-edged thing and I think, with the stereotypes that I am playing, is like tiny little nuances between countries that are almost identical, it's just a bit of fun. I think social stereotypes that are made between Nordic countries are not widely known in the outside world and I thought it was interesting to show this, because like every small community or town says something about this town, that town, etc., it's like neighbouring towns... 'ah you know what they say about the people over there'... it's basically a very innocent version of England vs. Scotland, England vs. France and England vs. Germany ha ha." Tell us about the Icelandic comedy circuit, what is it like? "It's very small and very new, there was not much going on when my friends and I started doing it in 2009, however there is a comedy club here now called The Secret Cellar and has been running for I think 4 years, it had closed during lockdown but they reopened and have only shows in English, so this is a very interesting thing because a lot of cities have an English scene as well so... Stockholm has a club called The Big Ben, but there is a scene emerging here... there was a huge explosion in 2015 with loads of bars offering comedy, it's stable and very home-made but still there comedians who are full-time or people who work whilst doing comedy like I do... some people may work as caterers for big events or work in theatre production like I do. It's around and all of the big acts tend to come here when they're doing big European tours, there's a booking agency in Norway who always adds Iceland to the tour list but either gives us the first or last date of the tour, so we get the big stars who could be knackered after the European tour, those can get interesting." Are there any upcoming comedians that you could recommend for people to check out? "If we took out the word 'upcoming' and pointed you towards an Icelandic comedian who is performing and touring in English, Hugleikur Dagsson - he's a cartoonist and stand-up comedian, he's pretty known for his very dark cartoons with stick-men figures; you can see his work at (Dagsson.com), I highly recommend him to everyone, also he is my cousin ha ha! We have the same grandfathers who were brothers. He is in the same style as your Jimmy Carr but not as gag-based maybe but otherwise for sure he is that dark. Many of his cartoons go viral all the time, not everyone realises where they're from, for example he did a collection of cartoons called 'Greatest Hits' which went viral, basically he did these cartoons that have to illustrate a song; he did one way before Amy Winehouse, years before, he did one where someone was standing by an open grave and there's someone singing from the grave 'you tried to make me go to rehab, I said no no no' - this is like years before she died, that one when she died looked very grim. The most famous one was 'Anarchy In The UK' where a woman is holding a pot of tea and a man sitting at the table, she says 'would you like some tea?' and he says 'No. Anarchy In The UK!'You can buy all of his cartoons and stuff online, I bought his t-shirt during my friends run and on 'Mock The Week' as well. Other Icelandic comedians I could recommend include Bylgja Babýlons (who is Edinburgh based) and Snjólaug Lúðvíksdóttir." What was it like appearing on 'Mock The Week'? "Lovely! It was fantastic! The host Dara O'Briain is possibly the funniest and nicest person that I've met in my life, I didn't know the other guests personally but they were all really nice too and it was fun, of course I had to read up on the news and I don't live in the UK, so a lot of it was about the Labour Party and things like that I don't necessarily follow, but they were lovely and were really supportive when they said 'hey just come, it's your first time, try to do something, don't worry you don't have to dominate the show the first time you come, just relax, enjoy it, try to be funny, try to understand what Dara says and off you go'. Obviously I was a little nervous about it, but it was so awesome to do it because I've seen the show millions of times, my main memory was just sitting behind the desk, a desk I had seen so often and just realising 'hang on, these are all made from plywood, it's not painted on the inside, there's a cup of coffee here', that's my main memory, I was obsessed! That's how innocent I was. It was a tremendous experience, very proud and happy that I did it." Outside of comedy, what hobbies and interests do you have? "Too many, way too many and I've always been a person who gets completely consumed by some hobby usually during a period of anxiety leading up to a big project. At the moment, I'm completely obsessed with vintage film shooting on super 8mm and 68mm, developing it and have discovered a community of people on Facebook, I've spent a big part during lockdown researching how to process films. Vinyl is a passion of mine, I've been doing some hip-hop scratching... I used to do that 20 years ago, I was a hip-hop DJ, anything I really and I guess I'm just one of those poor lost souls who spends all their time on YouTube watching DIY videos, and feeling that I've done something myself... 'I wonder how you make a clock'. So I have many interests but my main ones are film and music; I mean most people would say that." What music are you currently into now seeing as you said you were a Hip-Hop DJ? What are your thoughts on Eurovision? "I find that as I get older, I'm going close to 40 now, I do find I am listening less to new music and having to have people programme me a bit and tell me you should check this out, but I'm a bit of an omnivore when it comes to music, I think these periods of being very nostalgic like listening to 60's rock and then I may do a full-on Kraftwerk bender, but the 90's Hip-Hop is a very specific period in my life when I was 15 to 17, when that Hip-Hop scene was very big in Iceland; probably wasn't that big though but very underground compared to modern day rap which is absolutely massive, Icelandic rappers are huge stars. I will always at any given moment get heavily immersed in The Beatles as this was my first big love after the band Kiss. Kiss, Madness and The Beatles are the first 3 groups that I listened to as a child so I go back to that a lot, especially The Beatles. Eurovision is huge and I know a lot of people who have competed in Eurovision, Eurovision is a big thing here and always has been, I might be right in saying that for other countries Eurovision is a joke, but for us it's our foreign policy - one of our 5 main goals in life is to win Eurovision and then people will see what we're made of, I think there's a tongue-in-cheek factor with it always. But people are always generally happy that we contest from around these parts, that we do a big TV competition... we're that innocent when we participate in Eurovision. I have no idea what the ratings are for Eurovision, but I'm guessing around 80% of the population watches it, it's insane engagement. Regarding last year's entry Hatari (who I know), I was very happy to see them go and compete, they were very obscure in the rules of Eurovision and the moment it was announced that they won the Icelandic national finals, the feeling was that they have to win Eurovision, they must surely are going to win Eurovision because they are unique; it got noticed all over the world I think for being original and I think that they trolled the contest as well, like if anyone congratulated them, they would somehow flip it around and they always claim to be aiming to expose the weaknesses of capitalism, as an act though I thought it was a very original one. This year though the uniqueness carried on with Daði Freyr Pétursson and Gagnamagnið and their song / video "Think About Things" went even more viral, I'm sure that one was a heavy contestant... every year we say we are going to win, but that one was getting a lot of attention naturally and I saw a lot of comedians in the UK tweeting about it very early on, it seemed to get a lot of love. But I think he has followed up on it and is making an album or something; I think he has got a record deal. He's based in Berlin and doesn't live here, so it must have been strange for him to keep going back and forth and to find out that Eurovision has been cancelled. I think we were a little sad to not see them proceed and I think so was the rest of the world. It's a shame cause we would have won it this year!!" Do you feel that we are seeing a renaissance in comedy in that international comedy is ramping up more and more? "I think so, I mean for example the German comedian Henning Wehn is a star, he is so funny and is also quite British, he's completely mastered what the British like, he can play up his German side but then he also talks about taking the piss, he completely gets what it means to 'take the piss'; culturally he is British... almost. The thing is, comedians like South Africa's Schalk Bezuidenhout and myself all come from Mick Perrin's roster and Mick Perrin himself has made a huge difference in bringing on more diverse comedians from different backgrounds. I think also with the invention of the internet, with streaming platforms like Netflix you are getting a more variety of comedians. It's great that you can see many different types of comedian from both genders and backgrounds, I think the market for comedy is very big, and I think that international comedians are going to be more in demand than they've been before. A Finnish friend and comedian of mine in Ismo Leikola has become big in the USA, I got to know him in Finland and got my first gigs from Iceland in Finland through some friends, and met Ismo there, he is a complete testament to the power of joke writing and universal gags. His whole attitude in English is that he is the foreigner who comes and observes the Americans, he has some material there. Most of the stuff he does is just so warm, fizzy, bubbly and imaginative like Steven Wright or Mitch Hedberg, those kind of characters, surreal even and I think Ismo studied physics so he's a bit scientific; he deconstructs a lot and it's so fun to see someone from Finland breaking America." What are your plans leading towards late 2020 (COVID-19 depending) and into early 2021? Do you have any greetings / thanks you wish to send out? "Stick around in Iceland, lockdown forced me to completely stop, take a beat and I've been working for a long time and getting overworked because of it, I think it was actually starting to hurt my output just a little bit, because I was under too much stress and I think I'm not going to jump right back in. I'm going to do some test shows here where I'm doing new material and tossing it out, I'll do a New Years show in Icelandic as well. But my plans for the year are very minimal, I'm just going to sleep well, exercise and write 2 hours of new comedy, that's all. But hopefully I'll be back in the UK next year because I miss it really badly, I was going to do Edinburgh this year but obviously that's not going to happen, also Soho Theatre in London, I've always done Soho Theatre twice every year, which has been a massive support for me, a huge breath of fresh air for me. The Monkey Barrel in Edinburgh is in lockdown as well, they took a chance with me and gave me my first show in Edinburgh; they are really supportive, they are now releasing vinyl albums with shows recorded last year - it's John Kearns, Olga Koch and myself - it was on Kickstarter. I love that club and the people that work there, they are very supportive for comedians, they've done a lot to make the Fringe very fresh."
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