Barry sees Bill Hader and Henry Winkler shine

A new HBO comedy infuses the ruthlessness of a hit-man with the passion of an acting class.

Bill Hader stars, directs and writes the new comedy Barry.

‘Los Angeles was the kind of place where everybody was from somewhere else and nobody really dropped anchor,” the great crime writer Michael Connelly said of his home town. “People drawn by the dream, people running from the nightmare; twelve million people and all of them ready to make a break for it if necessary.”

He could have been writing of the new very dark comedy from HBO called Barry, which stars Bill Hader as Barry Birkman — not necessarily his real name, as you will discover — a former marine and veteran of Iraq and ­Afghanistan, now a depressed, low-rent hit man from the Midwest. (The show premiered on Monday on Showcase but it’s repeated ­tomorrow night and available on ­demand as the episodes arrive weekly straight from the US.)

Barry is lonely and somewhat alienated; his only purpose in life is killing “bad” people in hits arranged by his manic manager, a character straight out of Elmore Leonard called Fuches — played with ferocious energy by that consummate character actor Stephen Root (Justified).

At the start of the eight-episode series he ­reluctantly travels to LA, assigned to the ­profoundly violent Chechen mob in that city led by Goran Pazer (Glenn Fleshler) and his right-hand man NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan), who wants a physical trainer rubbed out for sleeping with his wife. (Yet the gangster takes moral umbrage at the suggestion of “a knife through the nuts” as the suggested means of dispatch, an idea from the hyperactive Fuches.)

Barry proficiently follows his mark, who is an aspiring actor — like everybody else he encounters on the streets of LA.

Henry Winkler makes the most of the finely written role of Cousineau.

More than a little intrigued, he follows him into an acting class for Hollywood hopefuls held in a small theatre, after a perplexing ­encounter with a young blonde called Sally Reed (Sarah Goldberg), who is running lines to herself outside before being called to perform.

All the material the aspiring actors work on in front of their peers is taken from well-known movie scripts. The class fascinates Barry; it’s a place, he discovers, where people create new lives on the stage, even if those lives were actual­ly created by someone else and the characters actually performed by much better known actors in movies. It’s a droll conceit.

In a kind of epiphany, he suddenly finds himself accepted by a group of eager hopefuls in the LA theatre scene, even accidentally appearing on stage himself in a sequence from Tony Scott’s True Romance, the script by Quentin Tarantino. His totally in-character deadpan performance as his rather taciturn self impresses the group.

He decides he wants to start a new life as an actor under the inspiring teacher who conducts the workshop, Gene Cousineau (his mantra: “Hit your marks and say your lines”), played with wonderful comic passion by Henry Wink­ler. But Barry’s criminal past and the insistent Fuches, really his surrogate father, won’t let him walk away.

Can he find a way to reconcile the contradictions he finds facing him? Can acting provide the sense of “purpose” he so desperately seeks in his largely mundane existence?

There’s a neat paradox at the centre of this clever comedy. Barry needs to let his guard down in order to meaningfully connect with his fellow actors but the greater his vulnerability, the greater his risk of exposure. He discovers that art really is more beautiful and terrible than real life, but it doesn’t stop him using the lethal handgun delivered to him by FedEx when confronted by the gangsters who had hired him. (There is cause to suspect each episode will end in some kind of bloodshed.)

Bill Hader and Sarah Goldberg learning the art of acting.

Hader — tall and rather gawky, a Saturday Night Live veteran (who recently returned to the sketch show as fired White House mouthpiece Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci) — is brilliant in his first leading role, totally ­believable as a highly efficient assassin and a would-be actor opening himself to the emotional vagaries of the profession.

He also directs with flair, adding a touch of noir style to his visual compositions, and co-writes the script with Alec Berg (Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm).

Once you get the style — Hader as director achieves a delicate counterpoint between the ironic and the gruesome, no easy task for a first-timer — it is really very funny. What Hader gives us is a variation on the Coen Brothers’ elided kind of storytelling, featuring true grit dialogue from underworld characters whose first language is slang or who have a hazy grasp of syntax, and a group of well-cast performers playing actors who talk in a language few can really understand when they discuss their parlous profession and the problems of emotional truth that so bedevil their craft.

Winkler is a standout as the Lee Strasberg-like Cousineau: the same aura of cult leader and petty tyrant surrounds him, and he is not above reducing the women in his class to tears in order to elicit emotion.

I was fortunate enough to see Strasberg, the irritable and ageing disciple of theatre great Konstantin Stanislavski, at the famous Actors Studio in New York just before he died. The famous “method” as interpreted by Strasberg was basic­ally self-psycho­analy­sis, with the actors drawing on their deepest exper­iences to interpret character.

His ­public tantrums were at once appalling and fas­cin­ating, and he seemed to delight in exposing and humiliating his charges. He savagely criticised two young women who awkwardly performed a scene from a rather anodyne play called The Pious Pussycat. Strasberg was urged on by a big woman in a red cardigan furiously knitting in the audience, the famous actress Shelley Winters, one of his graduates. “Don’t you realise that thinking and doing have no connection on the stage?” he yelled. “You must show, show, show!”

Winkler gets the wilfulness just right.

It’s a finely written role. As Winkler says in an HBO interview: “If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage, and that is the truth. You can do backflips if the script isn’t good and you still are not an acrobat. You can do a script like Barry, which is like cashmere to read, and all you have to do is walk and it lights up. And that is true. I’ve been doing this a long time.”

HBO has long produced classy, offbeat comedy such as The Larry Sanders Show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Flight of the Conchords, Veep and Insecure, but Barry is certainly one of the more obscure and one of the funniest.

The most encompassing theory of comedy is known as incongruity theory and it suggests that humour arises when things that do not ­customarily go together supplant logic and familiarity, or that jokes and laughter are produced through the juxtaposition of incongruous ­elements. Comedy scholars like to cite a ­common example of a comedian describing an act of some kind and then revealing that it is taking place in a grossly inappropriate setting, the punch­line shattering the initial image and drawing us into a radically different world.

Something of that sort happens with Barry. The world of the seemingly heartless assassin obviously clashes and collides with the heartfelt, deeply emotional world of the actor. The solitary pursuits of the skilled killer are existentially at odds with the theatre, which brings ­audiences to some communal belief in the possibilities of society.

Hader has pointed in interviews to his sense of the comic incongruity at the heart of Barry — that the things he is as good at, he is in fact a prisoner of and then conversely the thing that he wants to do, he’s terrible at, no matter how passionately driven he is to be good at it. Hader says that the anxiety and stage fright he experienced while working in Saturday Night Live ­inspired the concept, the sense of desperately wanting to be part of that community of comics but feeling ill-equipped to be treated as an equal, the hit man idea coming later when the original idea failed to fully coalesce.

He calls it the dramatic conflict “of living in the shadows and being in the spotlight and the guy wants these two things that just are polar opposite from each other”. Watching his new show, I was delighted that I, hopefully, will never have to do an acting class again.

Barry, Monday, 8.30pm, Showcase.