16 minute read
STUMBLING INTO SUCCESS
Words by Ragnar Tómas Hallgrímsson
Photography by Golli
THE ENTERTAINER
Vigdís Hafliðadóttir is shuffling nervously in the foyer of the restaurant Nauthóll.
Inhabiting a baggy brown shirt, sleeves partly rolled up, she eavesdrops as Valgarð Már Jakobsson, a teacher at Mosfellsbær Junior College (FMOS), informs his colleagues in an adjoining room that alcohol “will now be served;” Vigdís, privy to this information, pops her blonde head across the dividing wall in delight.
“That makes me very happy!” she declares with a straight face, acknowledging that her job just got easier. Although familiarity with her set counteracts the nerves, she’s never quite sure how the audience is going to respond; like all comics, she’s not immune to bombing.
As Valgarð instructs the faculty to proceed into the main dining hall where “an entertainer will perform,” Vigdís points two thumbs at her person and mouths “that’s me!” – eyes wild with exaggerated excitement.
When everyone has settled in, Valgarð utters a few words of introduction before passing the mic to Vigdís, who takes her place between some tables near the back.
“It’s great being here,” she begins, making eye contact with as many onlookers as possible. “I’d like to start by saying a few words about myself because the other day I was performing at what will remain an anonymous Ministry – the Ministry of Transport [laughter from the crowd] – where I was hired as a surprise guest.”
“‘Ladies and gentlemen,’” Vigdís says, parroting an enthusiastic MC, “‘please welcome our surprise guest: Vigdís Hafliðadóttir!’ And they couldn’t have received a better surprise – because no one had any idea who I was!” The audience laughs.
Vigdís explains that her foray into stand-up comedy began with first place at a university contest. As this happened in 2020, however, it might as well not have happened.
“I always wanted to become an actress,” she goes on, occasionally looking down at her feet. “I joined drama club in junior college but soon realised that acting wasn’t the most practical of pursuits … and so I went to Sweden to study ballad singing.” A momentary silence follows this punchline, owing, in all likelihood, to the obscurity of the concept of “ballad singing,” but when the audience realises that this is where they’re supposed to laugh, they do. “... which wasn’t particularly practical either,” Vigdís continues. “After that, I said to myself, ‘Okay, let’s get serious here’ – which was when I enrolled at the philosophy department at the University of Iceland.” The audience appears to be enjoying themselves, with the exception of one man, who’s got a reddish beard and a heavy brow, and who is sitting not far from where Vigdís is standing. As she observes how studying philosophy is a great way to prepare for unemployment, the man continues to sit with a face of stone. “Having won the university stand-up contest,” Vigdís recounts, “my friends encouraged me to do more of it. I thought to myself, ‘Okay, doing stand-up comedy might be terrible – but it can't be any worse than watching it!”
“I’M AT THE STAGE The crowd laughs; the man with the red beard does not.
OF MY LIFE WHERE I’M “Which is not to say that I don't like stand-up comedy,” Vigdís goes TRYING TO CELEBRATE MY on, “just that I'm such an enabler; whenever I'm in the audience, I’m FLAWS.” keenly aware that here’s a person who wants other people to laugh, and if other people don’t laugh, then that person will become sad. And if that happens, well – that’s my fault.” Her face sours with earnestness. As the red-bearded man shifts in his seat, apparently unamused, Vigdís, drawing on her eclectic life experience, suddenly segues into plumbing. “On the subject of enabling, I’m at the stage of my life where I’m trying to celebrate my flaws; co-dependency leads you to such interesting places,” she says. “One evening, when I was contemplating the future, I was once again visited by a familiar thought: ‘I have to do something practical’ … and so I registered to study plumbing at the Technical College.” The man’s ears perk up; his stolidity no longer seems
quite as impregnable.
“A few weeks later, having mostly forgotten about my application, I was surprised to discover an email in my inbox – notifying me that I had been accepted.” She pauses. “‘Well, I’ve got to take responsibility here,’” she says with all the gravitas of an ancient philosopher. “‘After all, it was me who had enrolled; and someone had obviously taken the time to prepare this class schedule for me; and besides, it’s very important to send a message to society that women belong in this profession.’”
As she goes on to enumerate the various tentative names for her future plumbing-cum-philosophy business, the red-bearded man cannot help but chuckle.
Vigdís thanks her audience and walks off stage.
HÚLLUMHÆ AT THE LOCAL BANK, SORT OF …
“That went well,” I remark, as we speed away from Nauthólsvík.
“Yeah, I guess,” Vigdís replies with dejected nonchalance, slouching in the passenger seat next to me. “The sound wasn’t great, but otherwise, yeah, I’d say that went okay.”
I learn that Vigdís’ definition of success differs from that of the casual observer. The feeling of becoming “bummed out,” she observes, is only avoided if things go “extremely well” – a huge audience and a standing ovation, say.
“That’s the only time that I’m content,” she continues. “But right now, I’m like…” she turns her head, diva-like, in mock disappointment, lowers her voice and sighs: “that wasn’t marvellous.”
Despite what she perceived as an underwhelming response, the gig at Nauthóll was far from her worst experience in stand-up. That designation belongs to a 4:00-PM retirement party at the headquarters of a local bank. The word Húllumhæ (a silly Icelandic word meaning, essentially, “party”) had been cast onto the meeting-room screen, but the mood, contrary to the projected message, was lifeless. The sound was terrible. And no one laughed.
“I performed the same set later that evening,” she recalls, “and it was completely different. Totally different vibes. People are different. I don’t know …”
The lessons that comedians must internalise have, for Vigdís, been expedited by her induction into the popular stand-up troupe VHS, following a successful “guest spot” in the summer of 2020.
“That must have been quite the honour?” I ask, as we drive through Kópavogur.
“If it weren’t for them, I probably would have quit – or I definitely wouldn’t be so comfortable. They work really hard. And they have a much more blasé attitude than me. I tend to overthink things: ‘Are we really going to charge people to come? Is that a good idea?’” she asks, with a kind of Tina Fey humility. “‘Yes, Vigdís, we have to charge them,’ they say.”
I ask why she had entered the comedy competition in the first place, whether it had been at her friends’ encouragement.
“Yeah, I suppose I had sort of entertained the idea out loud. And then they urged me to take part. That’s how most things in my life begin: As a joke.”
The car stops. PERFORMING FOR ST. GUÐMUNDUR ÁRNI The muted rays of the sun twinkle down a quaint chicken coop on Austurgata.
Across the street, Vigdís – having now exchanged one hat for another – is lugging musical equipment in the direction of Austurgata 36: an imposing white house of solid concrete, whose owners have offered it up as a venue for the Heima í Hafnarfirði concert series.
The elder of two daughters, Vigdís was raised in the Laugardalur neighbourhood of Reykjavík by two loving academics. In her BA thesis in Philosophy, she recalls being inculcated with the mantra “duty first, fun later,” which, in more concrete terms, often meant “violin first, TV later.” She now performs with the band FLOTT, drawing on what she learned during her time studying ballad-singing in Sweden.
Founded in 2020, FLOTT (a vague Icelandic catch-all having a variety of meanings: smart, cool, sharp, etc.), like most of Vigdís’ projects, began as a kind of joke. To the band members’ surprise, the group quickly accumulated a strong following and was awarded Best Newcomer at this year’s Icelandic Music Awards.
With the same air of jittery restlessness previously on display at Nauthóll, Vigdís buzzes about Austurgata 36’s beautiful, bright living room, which opens onto a similarly modern kitchen. The owners of the house – a good-looking, affluent-seeming couple, in their late thirties or early forties – are proudly, though somewhat deferentially, hovering around their kitchen island, trying to ensure that everyone feels at home; a slightly fidgety Vigdís would suggest that they're not entirely successful.
As she helps her bandmates set up the equipment, the audience slowly gathers ‘round. Someone brings a missing mic cord; Vigdís throws her hands up and exclaims, “Yay!” – only to realise that she’s now misplaced the microphone. Rifling through the pillows on the living-room couch, right next to the makeshift stage, she apologises to a middleaged man who had ensconced himself on the sofa – before eventually finding the mic in her bag. All the requisite wires being attached, FLOTT performs an impromptu sound check – involving a few hilarious adlibs on Vígdís’ part – which serves to attract more people into the house; those who had been loitering outside on the street, some of them sipping beer from their backpacks, now hurry inside to occupy the few remaining spaces. Among recent arrivals is former mayor of
“I TEND Hafnarfjörður Guðmundur Árni Stefánsson, who strolls inside and TO OVERTHINK takes his place near the wall by the entrance. A sun wall sconce directly
THINGS.” behind his head gives him the appearance of a saint. It’s less than a month till the elections, and, much to the annoyance of the current mayor, St. Guðmundur is vying for his former office. As she works her way through the band’s catalogue, Vigdís takes the time to address the audience between songs, mixing stand-up comedy with musical performance. At one point, she introduces a song as “an ode to the subjunctive mood,” which is the kind of preamble you get when you combine a philosophy student with a ballad singer with a stand-up comic. She boasts a singular voice – high-pitched, svelte, charming – which, if one understands correctly, is a product of the ballad-singing philosophy: a person should sing with their own voice as opposed to adjusting to accepted standards of beauty. Not Tom Waits, but whatever else resides on the other end of that metaphorical spectrum. The concert culminates with FLOTT’s performance of Mér er drull, with which everyone in the crowd is obviously quite familiar; it was chosen Pop Song of the Year at the 2022 Icelandic Music Awards. As the audience cheers and sways, Vigdís, in her heart of hearts, wishes they would sit still and listen very carefully to her lyrics. COMFORTING A DISTRAUGHT PENIS COLLECTOR A bald-headed priest and coiner of hit-and-miss neologisms is sitting at a table in the crepuscular cellar of Iceland’s National Theatre. Above him, on stage, Vigdís – dressed in black sweatpants, a blue sweater, and white sneakers – is trying desperately to console her distraught husband. As the proprietor-cum-curator of a phallological
museum, her partner has just presented his most remarkable exhibit, the elephantine penis of a Blue Whale, and has had his frail ego torn asunder by the unimpressed reception of two women. Sobbing loudly in the corner of the room, he declares that he’s a complete failure. “No one likes my exhibit!” he screams.
“That’s nonsense, dear!” Vigdís responds. “Everyone loves the museum! No one has collected as many penises as you!”
“They hate it!” he yells back. “They laughed in my face. And I had just regaled them with a very lengthy explication of a whale cock.”
“Don’t worry about them!” she shoots back. “Besides, you’ve always stood by my side. Like that time that I opened …” She tries to come up with something clever. “A small …” The words are elusive. “Coffeehouse …” Still nothing. “That sold …”
“Coffee!” her husband interjects.
“Yes … coffee,” Vigdís says, slowly, trying not to laugh at the inanity of the concept.
As the audience cheers, another actor pounces onto stage, pretending that he’s a patron of her humdrum café: “Uhhh, so you only serve coffee?” he inquires.
“Yes,” Vigdís replies.
“So no tea then?”
“No,” she responds. Her face sours, and her husband rushes through the doors. “Baby, are you crying!?”
Vigdís begins to sob uncontrollably: “All they want is tea!”
He tries to allay her misery – and then asks the obvious question: “But, baby. Why don’t you just serve coffee and tea?”
“Because I thought dealing exclusively in coffee was a grand idea, and I don’t want to let on that I’m so stupid!”
The audience erupts in laughter.
ACTIVE MIND, PASSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS
“Sometimes, the ideas don’t come quick enough,” Vigdís explains, sitting across from me at the coffeehouse Kaffibrennslan on Laugavegur – where they do serve tea.
Dissecting her recent performance with Improv Iceland, she observes that the ideas that are born on stage “aren’t always great,” but that that’s not always a bad thing.
“It’s about listening,” she goes on. “About creating patterns; given that my husband had just been wrecked by his experience at the Phallological Museum, it made sense that we’d mirror that ordeal in the coffeehouse.”
Improv preceded stand-up comedy for Vigdís. She began taking classes in 2015 before auditioning for the Improv Iceland troupe five years later. Without being asked to earn her stripes with an apprentice group, she was inducted immediately.
“Which has never happened before,” she says in a self-deprecating voice. “But as opposed to viewing it as a testimony to my own talent, I began to obsess. ‘Why me? I’m not ready!’”
Referring to how seemingly ubiquitous her person has seemed of late – receiving prizes at the Icelandic Music Awards, for example, or hosting an election special with the state broadcaster – I ask if she feels like a sort of “man of the moment.”
“A friend of mine attended the VHS premiere last fall,” she begins, “where I was describing my trajectory after junior college: how lost I had been, studying philosophy, plumbing, etc. She was in the audience again this spring and mentioned how quickly that narrative seemed to have altered.”
“The material has become less relevant?” I inquire.
“I’m becoming more familiar to people, which is also true for FLOTT. But it’s taken me a while to recognise this myself; I’m emceeing an anniversary in a few days, and during the preparations, I suggested that I go undercover into a clothing store as a skit, but my friends were like, ‘No, I think people know you by now.’”
“And where are you now,” I ask, “as far as a narrative is concerned?”
“I feel, in some sense, like I’ve arrived. Or, well,” she corrects herself. “I feel like this path is being carved out for me. The ball’s rolling – and I’m playing along. ‘Okay, then, I guess I’m a stand-up comic,’” Vigdís says in a fatalistic sort of way. “It wasn’t something I decided. They’ve just made me into this thing, and…”
Startled by the passivity of her grammar, I cannot help but interrupt. “Wait, what do you mean? You’ve decided all of this yourself, right?”
“I decided to have a go at it,” she clarifies. “And then they’ve gone along with it.”
“But isn’t that, generally speaking, how it works?” I laugh.
“I guess.”
“There’s a picture emerging here, as you’ve noted, where everything with you begins as a kind of joke. But then, as it turns out, you’re very good at this thing you pretend to be joking about – and people take you seriously.”
“It’s a matter of give-and-take, I suppose. I create something, which wasn’t there before, and then people accept that thing. ‘Yes, this exists – and we want more of it.’”
“Most people would probably describe their success very differently. With a kind of pride, even. ‘I did this. I’m good at this,’ and so on.” “I’ve always been a bit mousy. Uncomfortable with titles. When I’m making jokes somewhere, someone will interject, ‘Yes, as you know, she’s a stand-up comedian.’ And I reply, ‘Well, I’m more of a singer.’ And then I’ll be singing somewhere, and someone will say, ‘Yes, as you know, she’s a singer,’ but I’ll be like, ‘Well, I’m actually more of a comic.’ It’s a mechanism for evading responsibility, I suppose. I just find it hard to accept that I’m part of some group that, just a few months ago, seemed so distant.”
“Does this have something to do with being a former student of philosophy?”
“Well, research has shown that studying philosophy deals a fatal blow to one’s confidence,” she laughs. “Because
you grow so convinced of your own ignorance. I know nothing. I am nothing.”
She laughs heartily, blue eyes wide open.
“I don’t want to come across as cocky,” she continues, “Because I see all of my own flaws. I know what I was doing right before I came here: I was screaming in panic having lost my keys and struggling to do my own make-up; I’m a complete mess. ‘Singers, well, that’s Sigríður Thorlacius. Pop stars, well that’s GDRN. I’m just a girl who sometimes sings. Comics, well that’s Ari Eldjárn. Saga Garðarsdóttir. Me? I just tell the occasional joke.”
To put all of this in perspective, Vigdís points out that a few days after winning an Icelandic Music Award, she struggled to play He’s Got the Whole World on the piano.
“I just started taking lessons,” she explains. “Being an eternal novice serves to bring one back to Earth quite quickly.”
“Do you feel you’ve changed?”
“I don’t think so. I feel better, generally speaking, in my own skin…” Vigdís continues to talk as I sit and listen. She pushes back against the extremes of cancel culture, expresses optimism at our collective ability to learn, and swears casual allegiance to Aristotle’s golden mean.
Having shadowed her for the past few weeks, pored over old interviews, glanced at her BA essay in philosophy, and generally contemplated her person as an almost abstract entity, I am left with the feeling that my strongest intuition about life has been confirmed: That life is a process of discovery, of shuffling through one perspective after another, and bringing what one has gleaned to bear on the next. If this process can teach us anything about life, it is that committing too fully to any particular perspective is unwise. The most certain sign that we are making progress is that our emotions begin to settle.
We are less anxious about our place in the world. Less concerned with what others may think of us. Less eager to evangelise about our particular truth. Less judgmental.
Less afraid.
