An Australian mother says she was “pretty humiliated” after comedian Arj Barker threw her out of one of his live performances over the weekend — but Barker is defending his decision.
The American comic — who co-starred in “Flight of the Conchords” and is very popular in Australia — was on stage at the Athenaeum Theatre in Melbourne on Saturday night as part of the city’s international comedy festival when he asked a breastfeeding audience member to leave because her baby was routinely making noises during his set.
The mother, Trish Faranda, told Australia radio station 3AW Melbourne that before she became a parent, she went to “lots” of Barker’s shows and “was trying to get back to enjoying something that I enjoyed before kids.”
So, when she bought tickets to his show, she “didn’t think much” of bringing her “generally happy baby” — a 7-month-old daughter named Clara — along because she “assumed that she wouldn’t be too much trouble.”
Faranda said she also made sure to sit close to an aisle so she could “make a quick exit if the baby got rowdy.”
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“So, I was sitting there, and she gurgled a bit,” Faranda told 3AW Melbourne. “It was probably the equivalent if someone was coughing.”
She said that Barker noticed the baby’s noises pretty early on in his set and cracked a few jokes about the situation.
“At the end of this little skit he did of a little baby in the room, he sort of said, ‘I speak baby, and she said, “Take me outside.”’ And at that point, I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t think he was joking about that,’” Faranda said.
Shortly after this, her daughter made a “little noise” again, which prompted Barker to give Faranda the boot.
“I was actually breastfeeding while he came and stood in front of me, and then he was basically telling me to leave,” she said. “People were laughing, so I was like, ‘I don’t think he’s joking, but everyone else seems to think he’s joking.’ So, I said to him, ‘Do you actually want me to leave?’ And he said, ′Yes, I do.’”
Faranda said that when she got up to leave, “10 or 12 people” walked out of the auditorium in an act of solidarity.
Barker gave his side of the story in a statement posted on Instagram Monday.
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“The Atheneum [sic] was pretty full and everyone seemed in a great mood,” he wrote. “Then I heard a baby — not crying but ‘talking’ as they do — a few rows from the stage. I made a few jokes about the baby not disrupting my show, and they were well received, then moved on.”
Barker said that a few minutes later, the baby “called out again.”
“Now I was quite concerned,” he wrote. “In my experience of doing comedy for nearly 35 years, an audience’s focus is a delicate thing. If a noise or movement distracts people mid joke, the payoff can be greatly diminished.”
Barker said that with about 50 minutes of his set remaining, he “made a difficult decision” to ask Faranda to leave.
“I then calmly informed the woman holding the baby that the baby couldn’t stay,” he wrote. “I felt bad doing so and stated this at the time as well as several times throughout the remainder of the show. As she was leaving, I offered for her to get a refund, as a gesture of good will.”
Barker described his decision as a “very tough call” he made “on behalf of the other 700 or so audience members who deserved to see the show they had paid for, uninterrupted.”
He noted that he did not know Faranda was breastfeeding at the time he kicked her out because, from his perspective on stage, the audience “was in the dark and I had bright light in my face.”
“This was ALL to do with AUDIO disruption of my show, nothing more,” Barker wrote. “For the record, I support public breastfeeding, as it’s perfectly natural.”
“This was a complicated situation, and I did what I thought was right, but I do feel bad for any upset it has caused the parties involved, or my fans, or babies,” he ended his statement with.
An audience member who was at the performance told the Guardian on Monday that the baby was a bit more rambunctious than Faranda has claimed, saying that the baby disrupted the set multiple times before Barker “politely” asked Faranda to leave.
Other people who claimed to be at the event corroborated this on X, formerly Twitter.