Arj Barker

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More About

• Arj Barker
• Flight of the Conchords

Bret and Jemaine who? On HBO’s spacy musical comedy Flight of the Conchords, Arj Barker’s Dave—the twosome’s best friend—stole every scene he was in. A pawn-shop employee who still lives with his parents, Dave’s defining trait is his constant muddling of reality, like his vague grasp of world geography and race relations. “It shouldn’t matter where you’re from when love’s involved,” he expounds to Jemaine in one episode. “It’s like that movie Interracial Hole Stretchers 2—she was white; they were black. But it didn’t matter in the end, did it?” As a stand-up comic, Barker really lets the high camp loose, approaching absurd ideas with a hilariously serious and pragmatic attitude. On his new live CD, LYAO(track listings include “<3” and “BFF”), Barker riffs on everything from the difficulty of pulling off jokes via text message (his solution? Tone-conveying fonts, like Sarcastica and Good Times Roman) to the oddity of living in the age of instant information to his memories of tearing it up with Ireland’s finest pub crawlers, in a manner at once impertinent, guileless, and lovable. E. THOMPSON <br>Feb. 4-6, 7:30 p.m., 2010