Free trips to Disneyland, more polar bears at the zoo and promises not to work with anyone who hasn’t watched the TV series “The Wire” aren’t the usual hallmarks of a successful political campaign.
But in Iceland’s capital Reykjavik, comedian Jon Gnarr’s political parody soon snowballed into a serious mayoral bid with his wacky, well-intended jokes catching on with a public fed up with politics and corporate malfeasance.
Such is the journey taken by a rollicking new documentary, “Gnarr,” — one of the few political films playing at the Tribeca Film Festival this week — as it gives a behind-the-scenes look at the performer’s hilarious, inspiring 2010 run for mayor.
The story of an unlikely political hero aims to be a lesson for all those fed up with campaigns full of shady candidates and empty promises. Film spoiler alert — Gnarr’s “The Best Party,” formed with others with no background in politics, joked all the way to eventually winning office.
“People want more reality in politics. Our policy has been to not have a policy, to mock the emptiness of contemporary politics because they are so hollow and meaningless,” Gnarr told Reuters in an interview. “People want more honesty.”
Once famed in Iceland solely as a performer and writer of stand-up comedy TV shows and movies, the documentary shows the early days of the comedian’s campaign as the public reeled from the collapse of the country’s banking system.
Gnarr then made the rounds with outrageous promises to a bewildered public and skeptical media.
The actor and comedian, who chuckles he is “43 or 44, I don’t remember,” said his most ridiculous promise was to build “a Jurassic Park in Reykjavik” out of a concern for the dinosaurs from the 1993 hit film, telling those who would listen, “we should move them to Iceland and adopt them.”
But the underlying message that politics was full of indecipherable language and false morality soon caught on.
“Politics has developed into a kind of subculture, they even develop their own language and that is universal that people have stopped understanding politicians and they have no idea what they are talking about,” Gnarr said.
But could his off-the-wall campaign really catch on in other cultures less attuned to such antics?
“Why not?” asked the Reykjavik-born performer. “We are only 300,000 people here, so that’s an advantage. But this demand for more honesty and simplicity is universal.”
Since winning office, with his party gaining 6 out of 15 seats on the city council last June, he has faced some unpleasant political realities and personal setbacks.
His popularity declined somewhat due to raising taxes and fees while cutting expenditure due to incurred debts. On a personal level, the deaths of his father-in-law and mother also affected his professional life, he said.
Still, being in office has brought new political lessons.
“It’s less corrupt than I imagined but it is more a world of fear than I thought. In general, politicians are no different from any other people,” he said. “I wouldn’t say they are corrupt, but they are very lost.”
And surprisingly for a politician, his humor remains.
“I manage to stay true to myself and be me and the minute I start pretending or trying to be somebody else, then I fail,” Gnarr said.
A follow-up film on his time in office is not yet planned and Gnarr has yet to decide if he will run for mayor again in three years time.
For now, he hoped the film would show that to make it in politics, “you don’t have to be seriously intelligent or seriously well connected or seriously beautiful.”