At Yuk Yuk’s on Friday, February 8

Former Vancouverite Irwin Barker is considered one of the best writers in comedy, and not because he has worked on both This Hour Has 22 Minutes and, currently, The Rick Mercer Report. Barker got those jobs because his standup act has long been considered the industry benchmark for well-crafted jokes.

Not only are his one-liners sublime (“My cousin has a serious gambling problem, so much so that his wife left him. He called me up and he’s trying to win her back”), but he absolutely exhausts a given topic. Just when you think he’s done with a particular subject, he’ll hit you with three more minutes of gold. On the Friday late show at Yuk Yuk’s, these hits included Costco, animal rights, the dictionary, and bears, as well as ferry, air, and bus travel.

Although some of these topics are overdone by lesser comics, Barker makes them fresh by offering hilarious new angles. For instance, everyone talks about the volume of the goods at Costco, but he does so in a unique and literate way. In mentioning that Costco has bookshelves and wading pools, Barker wonders who has wading pools on their grocery list. Especially there. “Just buy the giant margarine and wait till it’s empty.” That’s a first-rate line on its own, but he follows with the perfect tag: “It takes five years to empty it out and finally you’re sitting in the back yard reminiscing about it: ‘Ah! I still can’t believe it wasn’t butter.’ ”

One thing that makes him such a treat is that he never talks down to the audience, even in a late Friday show with a crowd full of young, beautiful, drunken people. The professorial Barker will still throw out references to Euclid and Pythagoras, for example, but he’s got enough jokes that if one flies over your head, there’s another one right around the corner. If you do get it, it’s doubly satisfying, not only for the laugh, but for the fleeting feeling of superiority. One brilliant line was met with precisely one genuine guffaw: “I got into an argument with a friend of mine over the meaning of the word semantics.” Everyone else, I presume, thought that was just the setup.

The material may seem overly jokey and groan-inducing in print, but Barker’s almost absent-minded and halting delivery makes it conversational. He doesn’t hit you over the head with a punch line; he eases you into it, so you don’t even see it coming.

Last year, Barker was diagnosed with a rare and terminal form of cancer, but he keeps on working and writing, as great as ever. In a recent interview, he told me his goal is not to do jokes about cancer, but to do jokes in spite of cancer. If anyone could make that evil disease funny, it’s Irwin Barker.