Fifty Shades of Funny: Arrow’s John Barrowman at Heroes and Villains Fan Fest Chicago

If laughter is the best medicine, then John Barrowman should have been a pharmacist.

In fact, his recent panel at Heroes and Villains Fan Fest in Chicago could have resulted in the audience having an overdose.

The moment John Barrowman hit the stage in his Wonder Woman outfit — complete with high heels — the crowd knew they were in for a treat. When he finished his pirouette, he announced that he is indeed, “Wonder Man!”

He then launched into a recent story involving his sister, a group of millennials, and a drag club.

The episode appeared to come to an end with Barrowman and his sister leaving the club, drunk and alone. But actually, this is where the fun began.

A four-block uber ride became a forty-five minute road trip in a minivan with tinted windows and a stench of fast food. It turned out, John Barrowman in his drunken stupor, mistakenly told the uber driver that they were staying in Paris, Texas instead of the Paris Hotel in Pensacola.

The moral of the story here is: don’t fall asleep in a strange car before having concrete evidence of where you are going. You could wake up in Alabama!

As John Barrowman turned the panel over to the audience, the laughs didn’t stop. He laced each answer with sarcasm, innuendos, and inside jokes.

A crowd member asked him about his choice of anime and subtitles versus dub overs.

The answer morphed into satire, as Barrowman mentioned the fact that his voice is dubbed in episodes of Arrow and Torchwood overseas. “In Germany, I sound gayer than I am. In France, I sound dirty. I’d do myself!”

Soon after, John Barrowman broke into song. When he didn’t get the reaction he hoped for from a fan, John coerced the young man on stage with him.

They sang a couple of lines together as Barrowman continued to flirt a little. The panel then turned into John Barrowman asking this fan questions about his life.

Turns out this young man recently had his heart broken. John Barrowman took this as a cue to record a message to the offending lady who inflicted his pain. The beauty of cellphone cameras.

I’m sure this is posted somewhere online if you are interested in the scathing details. I’m a bit too classy to post it here, and darling, I’m a professional.

Next, a mini Deathstroke questioned John Barrowman about whether or not he remembered him from Heroes and Villains Fan Fest last year. Once again, he invited the child on stage to interact with him.

The two reminisced about the events of the last con when the child cosplayed as Green Arrow. Before sending him on his way, John Barrowman convinced the child to cosplay as Malcolm Merlyn next year. There’s nothing wrong with a shameless promotion every once in a while.

The funniest story told at the panel by far had to be John Barrowman versus the understudy. In this scenario,  Barrowman literally had a bowel movement in his pants while onstage.

He was wearing white polyester pants and performing in front of a large crowd. A sudden urge to pass gas overcame him, but he really thought nothing of it. He let it slip and continued on with his dance moves.

The presence of something warm in his pants clued him in that something was wrong.

Still, the show had to go on, so he continued to kick his legs out towards the crowd in what at the time was the performance of his life.

It turned out John Barrowman’s understudy slipped him a laxative during the day so that he would have to sit the rest of the performance out. The joke was on the understudy though, because Barrowman still counts this as a win. Not a beat was missed!

Eventually, the panel did take a more serious tone when a transgender man approached the microphone.

As the fan spoke, he poured his heart out to John Barrowman. He thanked him for his performance as Captain Jack on Doctor Who. The fan said that Captain Jack’s acceptance of all species and gender kept their heart open when he was just a “man with boobs.”

This openness kept him going until he met his current fiance.

The crowd burst into applause before John Barrowman replied, “How brilliant and how wonderful that you can be yourself, because in this space you are not going to be judged. You might be judged a little bit in some other spaces outside, but you know what I say to that?”

Barrowman then flipped the bird to the audience and continued, “Be yourself; be who you are. Have a voice; be proud. What is on the outside is not what is on the inside.”

As the panel came to a close, John Barrowman made sure he left enough time to serenade the audience with one last song. His choice of Christina Perri’s “A Thousand Years,” was perfect.

This isn’t a song that one would think a male singer could do justice to, but it was quite the contrary. The words rang true across the audience as he belted out, “Darling, don’t be afraid. I have loved you for a thousand years. I’ll love you for a thousand more.”

One couldn’t help but feel John Barrowman was singing to them personally. And here I am not even thinking to record the whole thing. Oh well, there is always next year.

For more coverage from Heroes and Villains Fan Fest, check back regularly. Find out more about Heroes and Villians Fan Fest here.

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