Yaaseen Barnes: 'I'm not here to change your mind, just your mood'

Bringing the silliness back: Comedian Yaaseen Barnes is set to perform his "Just Jokes" show at the Homecoming Centre this August.

The show is literally the title, Just Jokes . In an exclusive interview with IOL, Yaaseen Barnes discussed his upcoming show at the Homecoming Centre in District Six, scheduled for August 28 and 29.

The premise is “I'm not here to change your mind. I'm just here to change your mood," he tells IOL.

Operating without any formal theatrical training or university degrees, Barnes notes his formal qualifications: "I only have a matric. I've made a career out of just figuring it out."

Barnes did not take a conventional route into stand-up comedy, nor did he possess a lifelong ambition to hold a microphone. " Strangely enough, I did not grow up with stand-up. I never wanted to be a stand-up comedian until the day I did stand up for the first time.

"I watched stand-up growing up, but it was always the alternative boys, the nerds. Steven Wright, the one-liner guy. Demetri Martin is also a one-liner, but also a nerd. And also Jimmy Carr again, where words were the trick."

After his adult ADHD diagnosis in 2019, Barnes began incorporating elements from the comedy he admired into his work. Over the years, his journey navigating his identity has helped him develop his own genuine, emerging voice.

After being diagnosed in 2019, clarity was brought to many years before, when he recalls, "I could not keep a story for long. If I start talking for long, I just stop talking like I can't hold it together. The sentence just ends. So for that reason, I learned how to play with words."

Barnes learned the mechanics of language early on, later perfecting his brevity during the early character-constrained days of Twitter, now X, where he holds the crown as the Prince of one-liners.

To stay true to his rigorous professional standards and creative output, Barnes relies on deep structural discipline. He treats his smartphone Notes application as a workspace, creating a dedicated log each month to capture observations, lines, and emerging concepts.

"Every time I think of a thing, if I speak to someone, or I get an idea, I just go put it down. Then throughout the month I'll look through it and go, 'This is the thing, I must do this'.”

This operational rigour extends into long-range planning, where every November and December, he restarts a bucket list for the following year that is fully completed by April.

The core of his work is a rooted understanding of humour and why we, as human beings, need to escape our daily misery. Humour is not a polite entertainment, but an indispensable utility against literal psychological exhaustion.

"It's just that there's no better feeling when you laugh and at the end of the laugh, when your body just goes, 'ah'," he says. And I agreed; strangely, a few nights ago I found myself in one of these moments while watching a movie, and to my agreement with Yaaseen, the connection resonated.