Arj Barker is here for just three nights in the final week of this World Buskers Festival and, if you’re a stand-up fan and can get to tonight’s final performance – Do it!  

Unlike previous years, this is the only international act among the stand-up line-up and, as good as the NZ performers are, it’s an aspect of the 2020 festival that I miss. Even with the plethora of quality comedians on Netflix and the occasional top touring comic, there’s nothing like a live stand-up act in a comedy festival setting.

During this hour, I laugh out loud far more than for any of the other shows that I’ve been to over the last few weeks. Like many comics, Arj Barker has a way of engaging audience members from the front row that makes his material seem spontaneous to the point of being improvised; and his witty, off-the-cuff comebacks to audience responses is evidence of a genuine comic talent.

Tonight’s show, We Need to Talk, focuses on changing lifestyles resulting from the progress of technology. Beginning with the technological world that ‘millennials’ are born into, e.g. unable to start a restaurant meal before taking a pic and posting it to the world, Arj then takes us back in time to the invention of the automobile and, even further, to the wheel.  And the stone age exploitation of fire as a heat source inspires a hilarious observation from Arj as to whether it can be called progress or not: “In my day we didn’t have fire; at night we just had to … !”

Finally, after getting a millennial in the front row to agree that his own generation would one day become the “In my day …” generation, Arj takes us into his imagined future and its hilariously scary possibilities.

Maybe, at times, Arj Barker gives a little too much attention to the audience’s sometimes subdued responses and to the fact that the venue isn’t packed but, as his publicity says, “It’s a joy to spend an hour in his world”.

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