Reykjavík Grapevine - ágú. 2020, Blaðsíða 16

Silhouetted against the red velvet
curtain, mic in hand, Arnór Da!i
Gunnarsson exudes an irresistible
awkward charm. Though you’d
never guess it from his easy stage
presence, he’s in the midst of his
Reykjavík Fringe Festival debut
and the premier of his first solo
show “Big Small Town Kid”. The
hour-long special sees the comedi-
an veer between deadpan self-dep-
recation and glimmers of childish
mischievousness,
all the while inter-
weaving observa-
tions about parent-
hood and Reykjavík’s
quirks as he regales
the crowd with a se-
ries of bizarre anec-
dotes from his rural
hometown.
When the Grapevine Comedy
Committee convenes some days
later in a top-secret bunker of un-
disclosed location, the decision is
unanimous: Arnór is granted the
most prestigious cultural accolade
in town—the inaugural Grapevine
Fringe Award.
Two weeks after his momen-
tous victory, Arnór sits back with a
coffee in the Icelandic Street Food
Café. He’s mentally preparing for
tonight’s show, which will be his
first stand-up performance since
the festival. “I feel like I’m just
getting back up from the dead,”
he laughs. “Fringe was so stress-
ful that I didn’t even want to think
about comedy for a week, but I’m
excited to get back on stage now.”
Lucky (for some)
Arnór is a familiar face on the
Reykjavík comedy scene, but this
year was the first time he’d braved
the Fringe stage, starring in not
one, but two shows (one the afore-
mentioned solo extravaganza and
the other in collaboration with
Huw Coverdale Jones).
“It’s the third year of the festival
and every year I was nearly going
to do it,” he explains. The first year
he felt too new to performing. The
second, he missed the application
deadline, and if it hadn’t been for
COVID-19, 2020 might have been
another no-show. “I applied too
late so I didn’t get in, but then the
pandemic happened and they were
looking for people. I got kind of
lucky, I guess. It’s bad for the world
but it benefitted
me,” he laughs awk-
wardly.
“I feel grateful
that I didn’t do a
show in those two
years because I’ve
become a stronger
comedian and per-
former over that
time,” he reflects. But while to-
day the comedian radiates a quiet
confidence, when Arnór first left
his small northern hometown for
Reykjavík, that was anything but
the case.
Geese and weirdos
Arnór first set his eyes on the
stand-up stage at age 18 thanks
to the nonchalant ease of Louis C.
K. “That kind of style looks easy. I
know now it’s one of the hardest to
achieve, but back then I thought if
he can do it, I can,” he relays, “I just
became obsessed, I thought about
it non-stop every day.”
But there was one problem:
Arnór lived in a rural northern vil-
lage, hundreds of miles from the
open-mics of Reykjavík. In fact, as
Arnór emphasises, there was no
comedy scene where he grew up
and in fact, very little organised
entertainment full stop. He subse-
quently launches into an anecdote
about the most thrilling summer
of his childhood, the year a goose
named Goosey arrived:
“She escaped from a near-by
farm and she lived in our town for
a summer. It was the summer of
2003, wonderful times, simpler
times,” he reminisces. “There
was an abandoned house that we
used to play in, but it burnt down
and after that there was nowhere
to hang out anymore, so when
Goosey turned up we had some-
thing to do. We could feed her
bread! It was great.” He pauses for
a moment. “Huh, it really shows
how little there was to do that the
highlight was a goose.”
Desperate to flee the monotony
of small-town life and achieve his
aspirations, Arnór made a plan. “I
applied to film school as a cover-
up to move to Reykjavík to do com-
edy without anybody knowing,” he
explains. “Where I come from, if
you say you want to be a stand-up
comedian people are not going to
take you seriously. They’re just go-
ing to think you’re a weirdo.”
Fuck Dalvík
After the big move, it took a year
before Arnór finally plucked up the
courage to make it up on stage. “I
even remember the day: 16th of
June. It was on a Friday, down-
town at Bar 11,” he reminisces.
“I remember everything because
I signed up two weeks early and
I couldn’t sleep for two weeks.”
When he turned up, his audience
was a resolutely bad-humoured
stag-do from Dalvík. “I was actual-
ly bailing as they introduced me on
stage. I was too nervous; I couldn’t
think. I had opened up the door
to leave, but I heard everyone clap
for me so I turned back. Then my
mind just went blank. Eventually, I
remembered the joke, but the tim-
ing was off and I held the mic at
my belly-button because I was too
nervous to think about my hands
and nobody was laughing because
nobody could hear me. Even if they
could hear me, they wouldn’t have
Culture
Just A Small Town Boy
Grapevine Frin!e Award winner
Arnór Da"i serves up rural charm
on the stand-up sta!e

Words: Poppy Askham Photos: Art Bicnick
16The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 06— 2020
EXPLORE
UNSEEN
ICELAND
WITHOUT
LEAVING
THE CITY!
“Sometimes
I feel more
like myself on
stage than in
real life.”