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" In this series, we ask comedians to name the comedians they enjoy. Then we ask those people, too. Last week, Moshe Kasher chose Brent Weinbach, a Los Angeles-based comedian whose new album is called Brent Weinbach: Mostly Live (see his YouTube page here). Below, Weinbach talks about Arj Barker, an American comedian now based in Australia, who&amp;#039;s currently on tour. Come back next week to read about Barker&amp;#039;s comic&amp;#039;s comic. Arj Barker is a bit of a vet. He&amp;#039;s been doing comedy longer than me. He&amp;#039;s somebody I looked up to. To me, he does everything a comedian does to be a great comedian. I always say writing is secondary to stage presence and delivery. But Arj \u2014 not only does he have really great stage presence and funny delivery, he also has really good writing. And full-on commitment: no wink to the audience that he&amp;#039;s joking. Arj is really good at keeping a straight face. When I started in San Francisco and saw him do sets, that was something I wanted to emulate.  He&amp;#039;ll make a joke or an observation, and then he&amp;#039;ll do an act-out of it, and then he&amp;#039;ll take that act-out to an absurd level. He has this bit about a car that&amp;#039;s advertised as built in such a way that it tunes itself as it drives. A car that tunes itself while you drive goes against all the laws of wear and tear. Arj started to do an act-out of the next step for this company. He talks about the tires: The more you drive them, the wheels get bigger and tread-ier, and soon the tires will be so big that you&amp;#039;ll have to trade them in to a monster-truck guy and get regular tires again. He does another act-out, and he says, The more you drive the car, the more oil and gasoline it creates, and eventually, you&amp;#039;ll have to open your own gas station, and you may have to call it Sarah&amp;#039;s Gas Station, but if your name&amp;#039;s not Sarah, don&amp;#039;t call it that. He would go into details that are so irrelevant. Structurally, I think that was how I wanted to make jokes. I wanted to make this observation or a joke, and then take it to this absurd level, where it&amp;#039;s so far removed from the original joke, but it&amp;#039;s still a funny act-out. I think commitment makes the audience trust you. That&amp;#039;s something I&amp;#039;ve learned from watching him. If you are so committed to something, you can get the audience to go along with it. He does have some one-liners, but that&amp;#039;s not his focus. He doesn&amp;#039;t do storytelling comedy. He does really what I think is the hardest thing to do in comedy, which is write actual bits, and he&amp;#039;s prolific about it. The punch lines end up making him look stupid, but that&amp;#039;s the genius of his comedy, because they are really smartly done jokes. Even if you know the punch line, if you&amp;#039;ve seen the act before, it actually increases the value of his joke. Now the setup becomes a lot funnier. I see there&amp;#039;s a lot more nuance put into the setup. Arj is one of the few comics I&amp;#039;d watch do the same jokes over and over, and I would laugh more and more as I watch. \u2014As told to Paul Schrodt PLUS: Meet the Other Comic&amp;#039;s Comics &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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