Ari Eldjárn

Looking for a laugh in the MICF void? Meet Iceland’s biggest export since Björk.

It was only a trifling two years ago that Icelandic comedian Ari Eldjárn debuted his first English comedy show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Despite having no agent, his show (Pardon My Icelandic) quickly became a sold-out, cult hit. “I had no idea what I was getting into,” he says. Next minute, he’s on our radar starring on everything from the 2018 MICF Opening Night Comedy Allstars Supershow to Dara O Briain’s Mock the Week.

That said, by the time Eldjárn hit his straps with a foreign audience, he was already well-established as one of Iceland’s most popular comedians. However, even his rise to fame in his home country is mind-blowing. Although a flight attendant for two summer stints, Eldjárn was a copywriter nutting out sketches for funny Icelandic commercials at the time he threw his hat in the comedy ring, basically on a dare. A couple of mates had been toying with the idea of stand up. They went for it and inspired by their moxie, Eldjárn asked if I could have a bash next time, and within six months he’s quitting his day job. “I had to, because I was booking gigs full time,” he notes. “There turned out to be a lot of people who wanted standup.”

While Eldjárn’s demand as a comedian has always been high, given Iceland’s relatively small population (364,260), it comes at a price, namely that he has to turn over material super fast. “The tiny size of the market dictates that if you make the rounds doing standup, within the space of a few months you’re going to reach saturation, so it becomes essential that you don’t completely do 100 per cent of the same material all the time,” he reflects. “I think most Icelandic comedians struggle with this. You really just want to do your tight set and hang on to that for a couple of years, but you have to see your set more as a proof, like you’re making sourdough bread and constantly have to add something to it.”

In terms of what we can expect, Eldjárn’s forthcoming show Eagle Fire Iron continues the theme of his first English foray, exploring the (especially for Aussies) exotic intricacies of Icelandic culture. “It’s really the sister show of my first one, if you will,” he explains. “It delves more into the Icelandic-ness, and it’s a bit more anecdotal. My main objective when I was completing the set was to see how much I could get away with in terms of using my local material and how much of that would translate. To my sheer delight, almost all of it translated, with very few extra manoeuvres.”

As curious as Eldjárn’s Australian audiences have proved to be about all things Icelandic (this is his second MICF), there’s some reciprocal marvelling going on.

“Well, for one, football [soccer] definitely isn’t as big as it is over here, but Eurovision is way more popular than I could ever have imagined. That is possibly the single strangest thing about Australia.”