Arj Barker Im Socially Not Wired The Same As Other People

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Arj Barker doesn’t answer questions the way other people do. When we meet outside a cafe in the inner-city suburb of Richmond and I ask if he lives locally, he shuffles slightly, stops walking and looks directly at me as if he’s about to be searingly honest, then fudges an answer and mumbles.

“My dogs live here, so I’m here a lot … is how I like to say it.”

When the subject of his age comes up – even his Wikipedia page contradicts itself on this point, claiming he’s both 51 and 54 – he says: “Something like that.” When I press the subject, he simply replies, “I can neither confirm nor deny.”

After decades of public exposure and media interaction, this reluctance to be too specific is both understandable and telling, in an age where comedians can be siloed into political camps based on the reception of a single joke or social media controversy. Barker doesn’t seem avoidant or uncommunicative – “ask me anything you like,” he says at one point with that breezy California lilt – but he is cautious and keen to be precisely understood. There’s a serious, contemplative air about him, at odds with the slacker vibe he gives off in public.

Perhaps it’s all the change that comes with midlife. Barker recently lost several key people in his life, including his closest friend from primary school, forcing a rethink on the meaning of life and death and the nature of consciousness. He’s also recently divorced – “we share custody of the dogs, it’s very modern” – and taken a break from alcohol, and it seems to have reinvigorated his love of standup. Barker is no stranger to optimism, having named one of his albums Joy Harvest, but he seems more positive about his profession than ever.

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“I’ve fallen back in love with comedy for the sake of doing it,” Barker says as we set off on our walk around the back streets of Richmond Hill (we discuss the absurd “realtor speak” that came up with that name), the brief afternoon sun warming our faces. “I’ve been through different stages of my career – I went through a phase where I yelled all the time and when I started out I was really deadpan – and now I feel I’ve rediscovered what a joyous, fun activity it is.”

It’s an image of standup we don’t see often, the performer animated entirely by a love of the craft rather than any hunger for validation or applause. “I was very ambitious when I was starting out,” Barker admits. “My ambition kind of faded for a little while. As you get older you think, ‘there’s more important things than this’. I don’t live for success.”

Born in San Anselmo, California, 40 minutes north of San Francisco, Barker grew up in a mixed-race family – his father has Punjabi Sikh heritage and his mother is European – without feeling “self-conscious about my race because I lived in a fairly multicultural neighbourhood. It was just what I knew.” He was an outsider in other ways, with a small coterie of close friends and a general aversion to groups. “I’m socially not wired the same as other people. If I go out with friends, it will split into two groups of loud people talking and I’ll be the one sitting silently in the middle.”

Barker’s rise within the standup circuit wasn’t accidental or merely fortuitous, despite the lackadaisical stoner persona he projects. He worked incredibly hard to hit certain markers of success, appearing on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Comedy Central Presents and eventually a recurring role on cult hit show Flight of the Conchords. “It was once I started getting paid, and thought maybe I could do this for a living. Then you’re trying to get the TV spot, then you wanna get a special, then a sitcom and all that shit.”

We turn down a street lined with Victorian cottages, and Barker points up at the reverse side of the Pelaco sign, looming huge and white, scaffolded against the skyline. The conversation moves to questions of national identity, about whether he feels more Australian now he’s lived here for decades, or American given it was where he grew up and returns to periodically. “I’m not very nationalistic,” he says without emphasis. “I don’t want to piss a bunch of people off, but a lot of people are just happy to be born somewhere.”

It’s a political discussion heating up around the country, but Barker’s approach seems rooted in a basic rationality. “The more nationalistic people are, the more they tend to be anti-immigration. But immigrants, who are often risking their lives to get into a country, put a lot more effort to be in that country than the folks who were born there.” It feels like the set up for a gag, but it also points to a value system underlying Barker’s observational comedy: a tendency to side with the underdog. “I’m really not into that greatest country on earth crap.”

We turn briefly on to a main road before weaving around St Ignatius’s Church to head back to our starting point. The view of Melbourne suddenly opens out, majestic in the midwinter sun. Barker glances at me as I take in the vista, the tiniest hint of pride in his large brown eyes. “This is my route with the dogs. One of them has problems walking so I carry her most of the way.” He shows me live CCTV footage of his two French bulldogs cuddled together on a day bed.

While Barker has often used comedy as a way of talking about his interests – for a long time, he was fascinated by UFOs and scattered references to them throughout his material – his new album, Mind Field, wades into areas in which he’s long been engrossed but rarely discussed. “It’s tricky with subjects you really care about, to handle them respectfully and get laughs,” Barker says. In Mind Field, he talks about existentialism, meditation and death in a way that constantly teases the laugh response without reducing the topics to glibness.

Some of this expansiveness can be attributed to maturity, but the recent death of his friend – “we’d known each other since first grade” – shook him up like a snow globe. It’s evident in the way he scurries over the topic, as if avoiding a tripping hazard. “It was a real shock, because he was only a few months younger than me. It became more urgent to look into the idea of dying.”

The question of life after death became more pressing, which led to further questions about consciousness itself, the mind and its relationship to reality. Rather than reassuring answers, Barker was left with more and more questions.

“Everything that exists is within our field of consciousness,” Barker says, “and we can’t explain what our consciousness is. Science has theories, but that’s all they are, theories.” It’s one of the only areas of scientific research that still feels embryonic, which is a key part of its appeal. “I think that’s the most incredible mystery in the world; it’s gotta be.”

In Mind Field, Barker leads his audience to the gates of consciousness – with discursions about coffee breath, New Zealand biosecurity and being eaten by your own dogs (turns out he’s in favour) – without leaving them confused or bored. The general feeling the album evokes is one of bemused awe. On the track The Big Question Remains, Barker riffs: “95% of the universe, they don’t know what it is. They call it dark matter … Oh, no big deal, Science. It’s only 95% of fucking everything! What are you doing in the laboratory all day?”

Big questions can be a great way to distract from private griefs. Barker admits the last few years have been characterised by loss, from the death of his oldest friend to the breakdown of a marriage. “I needed to step back and take a little breather. I’ll go into my usual grind next year,” he says, referring to an upcoming international tour.

Right now, his focus is on his dogs, one of which has been seriously ill. “A few weeks back, we thought she was going to die,” Barker remembers, the emotion cracking his voice slightly. “I went through terrible grief thinking what I would do without her; the world’s gonna seem so bleak. But of course, the flip side of grief is love. And gratitude. I was lucky to have her for 15 years.”

Does he think comedy can coexist with kindness and gratitude, or has the culture of offence broken standup? “I think it can,” Barker says. “I’m not really drawn to mean-spirited comedy. I want people to leave my shows feeling better than when they came in. Not, ‘I had a laugh because it appealed to my inner bully. I think joyous, positive comedy is the future, actually. I love it.”