Comic Todd Barry is at The Comedy Bar this weekend. (Francine Daveta Photo)

When he was last in Toronto, deadpan comedian Todd Barry wasn't called upon to be funny.

He was at the Toronto International Film Festival as part of the posse from Mickey Rourke's The Wrestler, in which he played Wayne, the title character's humourless boss in his supermarket day job.

"It was fun," he said by phone from his New York home, "and it was right on the heels of the Venice Film Festival, where we saw the movie for the first time. That was really cool. But I knew I wanted to come back to Toronto to work."

But like most of his screen roles, The Wrestler almost fell into the category of accident. Barry, who performs Friday and Saturday at the Bloor Street alternative club The Comedy Bar, professes to be happy doing nothing but standup. Laid-back to the point of almost-painful shyness, it's easy to believe he's not exactly proactive about being a star.

But the comic's comic has a lot of friends who vouch for him. He was cast by The Wrestler director Darren Aronofsky on a chance encounter at a restaurant. "We have a casual friendship. Occasionally, we email each other.

"And at the restaurant, he basically said he might have a part for me, and it turned out he did."

He had a scene-stealing turn in the season finale of Flight of the Conchords, in which he played an annoying bongo player who basically appoints himself the third Conchord. And in the season finale of the cable series Bored to Death, he played a blackmailer who eventually comes to fisticuffs with Jason Schwartzman's protagonist. "They actually had a fight coordinator for that scene, which is pretty ridiculous when you see it," he said.

And fans of Jonathan Katz' strange animated series Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, will have heard him in no fewer than 16 episodes.

All this, essentially without trying. Asked about his career goals, he said, "I've already reached them. I never got into standup as a springboard to an acting career or anything. I started in Florida and was never like 'As soon as I get seven minutes, I'll get an agent and get a show.' A lot of people are into that mindset, but good luck to them."

His quirky observational material runs the gamut from the protests in his East Village neighbourhood against the opening of a K-Mart ("Down with K-Mart, and their merchandise that people can afford!") to the ludicrousness of people with no money to manage buying the accounting program Quicken, to the truth about party invitations that say "from 9 p.m. to ?"

"Usually that means 'from 9 to 9:15.' "

Even his own website has a left-field component -- a page entirely devoted to restaurant receipts, and his own interpretation of the printout shorthand -- like the one that from Portland, Ore. that reads "Hamburger: No choice." Or the Fargo, N.D. restaurant that had a "Bottomless Chili Upcharge" of 50 cents.

He's even had fun with the fact that some people don't find him funny.

Several years ago, a Conan O'Brien fansite on Usenet "flamed" him as the worst guest of the week. The piling-on got so intense, he wrote a one-man show called Icky (one of the online adjectives applied to him) that played at New York's Upright Citizen's Brigade Theatre.

"I think the Internet's gotten worse since then," he said. "Usenet is pretty dead. Now you get ripped apart on blogs. Every comedian has a Google alert set up to torture themselves with. I guess the curiosity outweighs the logic of ignoring it.

"But with the Icky incident, it was so ridiculously over the top that it was hilarious. Someone said 'Apologize to America!' People would get very grandiose.

"Now, when you look at comments on YouTube or Amazon, it's not even original. It's 'This guy sucks. He isn't funny.' Every idiot gets to comment."