Reykjavík Grapevine - 10.04.2015, Síða 20

Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland.
“I thought maybe the Icelandic
language wasn’t suited for stand-up,”
said Hugleikur. “When I saw Ari do it,
I thought maybe I can do it. The worst
thing that can happen is I’ll be totally
humiliated. I had an advantage, though.
People know my books and I can get
away with anything, I think.”
Hugleikur might be right. You can
hear when he’s crossed a line, or pushed
a boundary, but the audience trusts him.
The oohs and aahs only last a few sec-
onds. He has a Gluten Schizer joke that
ends with a Werner Herzog impression
describing the state of a recently used
toilet.
“I’m disguising a stupid poop joke
as something smart or profound,” said
Hugleikur. “The Mið-Ísland group are
all different from each other. I’m dif-
ferent from them too. I’m filthier. I talk
about edgier topics. I talk about racism.
Racism is really funny. I mean the thing
itself is terrible. It’s the fact that people
are racist that I find funny. We’re a cul-
ture of 300,000 people. We can’t afford
to be racist.”
Hugleikur performed two shows in
February with comedian and actress
Anna Svava at Cafe Rosenberg. Anna
was almost nine
months pregnant at
the time. Yet, with
her performance,
you can’t tell. She
holds court and de-
livers. She’s like your
funniest best friend
or who you wish
your best friend
was. She started do-
ing stand-up before
Mið-ísland. She
might be the precur-
sor to the new wave,
the seed of the scene.
Maybe.
“I never thought
of doing stand-up. I
never did it. It would
be the same as wak-
ing up one morning
and being like, ‘I think I’ll paint today.’
If you’ve never painted that would be
strange,” said Anna. “I was working
with the director of the New Year’s com-
edy show and we decided to do a one-
woman show. It was going to be about
my teenage years. One day, he said, ‘Why
don’t you just stand there and tell the
stories like you do to me?’ It was called
the ‘Diary of Anne’. We did the post-
ers just like the cover of ‘Diary of Anne
Frank’. People came to the show and
said, ‘Wow, you’re doing stand-up.’”
Anna started getting calls from busi-
nesses to do ten minutes at parties, and
getting paid. They would ask her to tell
her own stories plus write jokes specifi-
cally for them.
“I did this every weekend for three
years,” said Anna. “Maybe a few weeks
off in the summer, but I was booked
six months in advance. When I started
there was nobody. It was 2008.”
Anna performs with Mið-Ísland and
Hugleikur. She recently had a child. “I
have to perform now that I had a baby,”
Anna said. “I have so much more mate-
rial.”
The effects of the new
wave: the amateur
stand-up scene
The speed of Mið-Ísland’s evolution,
from a bar tab to an institution at the Na-
tional Theatre, feels unnatural. It’s not
that stand-up comedy was new, globally.
It was just not here, not in Iceland. A void
was filled with unlikely strands: poets, a
cartoonist, and a bellydancer. The scene
seemed to move at hyper-speed to catch
up with the rest of the world.
Yet, like in all stories, there were in-
dependent pockets bubbling in the pri-
mordial ooze, separate strands that are
apart of the story, without being the sto-
ry itself. The new wave
of amateur comedians
who are aspiring to
perform and succeed
may draw inspiration
from Mið-Ísland, but
the man who took the
time to run open mic
nights, or experimen-
tal gigs, started doing
stand-up twelve years
ago in 2003. His name
is Rökkvi Vésteinsson.
I met Rökkvi at
Rokkbarinn, a rock
bar in Hafnarfjörður,
at one of his monthly
gigs. He was hosting
the night. The crowd
was polite, but quiet.
He never flinched
and kept going until
finally, the crowd laughed. He’s never
been a professional comic, but he loves
stand-up. Over the past twelve years he’s
imported comedians to Iceland, per-
formed outside of Iceland in five differ-
ent languages, and lived and performed
in Montreal, Canada. He even entered
Yuk Yuk’s Canadian Laugh Off in Ot-
tawa.
“It’s surprisingly harder than I
thought it would be,” Rökkvi laughed.
“I mean I can speak to people. But there
is so much added difficulty to perform-
ing stand-up. I tried to do small gigs
throughout 2006, but it wasn’t until
2009 that I really started doing amateur
stand-up gigs. In 2013, I started regular
experimental gigs for amateur comedi-
ans.”
Rökkvi has been trying since 2003
to make something with stand-up com-
edy in Iceland. He’s failed, bombed, and
even had a gig in Keflavík where no
one showed up, so the comedians had
to perform for themselves. He has an
affinity for dressing up like Borat and
filming himself. There are YouTube vid-
eos of him running down Laugavegur
in a mankini, not to mention a com-
missioned commercial for the fast-food
drive-thru Aktu Taktu, which has Rök-
kvi calling himself Borat and reading
the menu in English. He does, however,
donate nearly all the money he makes at
the door to the Children’s Hospital, and
Aktu Taktu gives Rökkvi meal coupons
to give to the parents of sick children.
“It was quite hard. If things had been
easy, I would be doing a lot better right
now,” said Rökkvi. “I would get momen-
tum and then lose momentum. I would
get the momentum again and lose it
again. I get momentum. I have kids. It
took a lot of runs at the wall for the wall
to break.”
Rökkvi’s amateur shows at Rokkbar-
inn and, in 101 Reykjavík, at Bar 11, have
opened the door for some great new tal-
ent.
I first saw Snjólaug Lúðviksdóttir, a
regular of Rökkvi’s rooms, perform at
Stúdentakjallarinn, in a monthly show
she runs with a sponsorship by GoMo-
bile. It’s a large room with students of
different nationalities. Her performance
is like a rockslide. She starts off slow,
controlled, even reticent, but as soon as
she hits her first punchline, her energy
crashes over the audience. She has a
distinctly British style—fast-paced with
storytelling.
“I was always funny, but as a writer.
I was too shy to be the class clown,” said
Snjólaug. “I used to write diary entries
and then read them out to my friends.
They loved them. I started a blog and
people would write me to tell me my blog
was funny. That would make my day.”
Snjólaug did a masters in creative
writing in London. Her first stand-up
gig was in English while she studied
there.
“London has a tradition of stand-up.
You can go everyday of the week. The
audiences are used to it, so you can get
away with more,” said Snjólaug. “It’s
always been the reverse in Iceland.
People are famous, then they get a one-
man show. Mið-Ísland changed all that,
and now it’s possible to have a career in
stand-up comedy—or at least it will be
possible soon.”
Snjólaug’s Stúdentakjallarinn show
featured two other up-and-coming co-
medians: Andri Ívarsson and Bylgja
Babylons. Both of them got their start
through Rökkvi’s Bar 11 shows. Andri
performs musical comedy, a niche posi-
tion in the amateur scene. He plays gui-
tar so well that it becomes funny that
he’s doing stand up. He plays such an in-
nocent, lovable guy on stage that he gets
away with almost anything—ask him
about Type II diabetes.
“I always wanted to be a rockstar. I
love videos where the guy is standing on
top of a mountain shredding,” said An-
dri. “I always feel there is a place for a
ripping guitar solo. Now, I do that in the
middle of jokes.”
Bylgja is no stranger to comedy. She
had a web series, which was briefly aired
on television. She played in a double act
called Tinna & Tota, pretending to be a
gym queen. She regularly does YouTube
videos giving out humorous beauty
tips—like using a vacuum to make your
lips poutier, or using packing tape to get
rid of wrinkles.
“I wanted to do stand-up for two
or three years, but then I heard of this
thing going on at Bar 11,” said Bylgja.
“There is some momentum. People are
seeing you at Bar 11 and offering you
other gigs. However, those people want
stand-up but don’t know how to host it.
I still get brought on stage to, ‘Welcome
Bylgja, she’s funny and she’s a girl.’”
Stand-up is so new here that it’s
avoided many of the issues other scenes
have dealt with. The audiences are well
behaved and heckling isn’t very com-
mon. Comedians of every gender feel
comfortable performing. It’s not male-
dominated. Iceland is a fairly PC coun-
try—especially with the 101 Reykjavík
and university crowd—weeding out pos-
sible problems before they begin.
The harshest heckler I’ve had here
was in Bar 11 when I was doing a bit that
involved Michael Jackson and Mickey
Mouse. One audience member thought it
was in bad taste and waited till everyone
quit laughing to yell, “That wasn’t very
nice.”
A question of language:
the future of stand-up
in Icelandic
If you ask any of the comedians, they’ll
say they don’t think there is anything
particularly special about Iceland’s
comedy scene. It’s too small, too young.
Its market is too little to be exciting or
glamorous. It’s not New York or London
or, even, Edmonton (where?). There is
no chance of marketing outside of Ice-
land. The limits of exposure are clearly
defined.
Ari has been travelling to Finland
and doing sets in English—along with
Hugleikur. Dóri and Ari have both done
corporate sets in English.
“I want to have an international cir-
cuit that I can be a part of, but I always
want to based here,” said Ari. “It’s not
about fame or money. I just want to meet
colleagues and other comedians. Share
a beer with them. Maybe when I’m 60
I can be like, ‘Yeah, I toured with him.
That guy was fun.’”
I know what Ari is saying. I have the
same feeling here. I have been studying,
researching, and becoming involved in
this scene for months, and I don’t ex-
pect anything from it. I don’t speak the
language. I’m a conspicuous audience
member and a forgettable fellow per-
former. This is their show. Yet, I want to
be able to say, “Yeah, I met those come-
dians. They were great. I got to perform
with them when they really started to
take off. You all should have been there.”
It doesn’t really matter if Iceland’s
scene grows or shrinks. It happened and
they did it. In a country of 330,000 peo-
ple, performing in a language spoken by
roughly the same number of people, they
made something spectacular. They built
a creative space. They built an institu-
tion. They inspired their friends, family
and citizens. It was always for Iceland,
to give something more, to be something
more.
“My comedy career, professionally, is
what I’m most proud of in my life,” said
Dóri. “This is the biggest thing I’ve ever
done. We started from nothing. We were
a couple of guys with ideas and jokes. All
of a sudden we have posters and spon-
sors that meet with us in an advertising
agency and present us with a marketing
plan. I’m so proud of it. I’m not jaded.
I don’t take this for granted at all. We
know this is a high spot right now and
I know it will eventually fade. It will
probably end like every story: We made
it. We’re jaded. We fucking hate it. Ha.”
I don’t think the high spot has been
reached yet. Mið-Ísland has inspired
so many people not only to try stand-
up, but also to watch it. There are more
shows than ever before and the audi-
ences are filing in. Shows at Stúden-
takjallarinn are packed. Bar 11 usually
has standing room only. Rokkbarinn in
Hafnarfjörður sells out every time. Mið-
Ísland’s shows are packed every Thurs-
day, Friday, and Saturday all winter. Hí
á Húrra has the energy of a comedy club.
Comedy is snowballing and you can be a
part of it. By the time you read this, there
will probably be a new show started.
Hell, if you hurry, maybe you can learn
the language by the time the scene actu-
ally peaks. I’m starting classes today.
20
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 4 — 2015
“I thought maybe the
Icelandic language
wasn’t suited for
stand-up. When I saw
Ari do it, I thought
maybe I can do it. The
worst thing that can
happen is I’ll be to-
tally humiliated. I had
an advantage, though.
People know my
books and I can get
away with anything,
I think.” – Hugleikur
Dagsson
We invited the comedians to discuss cover ideas and record-
ed them. Check grapevine.is for the podcast!