100 Favorite Shows: #95 — Flight of the Conchords
“Ladies wouldn’t pay you very much for this, looks like you’ll never be a concert flautist.”
Before they starred on an HBO series, Flight of the Conchords was a musical comedy duo from New Zealand that consisted of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement. When they brought their talents to an improvised, six-episode radio series on BBC Radio 2, it was clear that the brand of humor from Flight of the Conchords could translate around the globe. That’s what eventually prompted them to adapt their musical brand for a serialized comedy series on HBO, known, of course, as Flight of the Conchords. Creating the series with James Bobin and occasional direction from Taika Waititi, McKenzie and Clement portrayed fictional versions of themselves attempting break into the music scene while living in New York. Flight of the Conchords ran from June 2007 to March 2009 and consisted of just two seasons of twenty-two episodes in total. Their dry comedy and self-aware songs were delightful (and continue to be, as they most recently played in London for a live HBO special in October 2018), but when the duo ran out of ideas for songs, the series ended, content with acclaim and adoration over perpetuity.
(You might want to check out now if you’re wary of Flight of the Conchords spoilers, which are abound in this essay.)
Every episode of Flight of the Conchords begins with the series’ brief acoustic theme and the cardboard cutout-esque strumming of Bret and Jemaine, who stare blankly at the camera and go through the daily motions of sitting in the park and eating breakfast cereal. Ask anyone to watch this theme song and determine if they think the two characters in question are cool and you’re likely to get a resounding no.
That is, unless you ask someone who’s in the know. When their manager, Murray (Rhys Darby), pulls up outside of a night club in season two’s “Unnatural Love” (directed by Michel Gondry) and calls out to the bouncer (Randy Jones) in reference to Bret and Jemaine, “Excuse me, sir! I’ve got a couple very cool-looking guys in the back of my car. I don’t know whether you’re keen to have them in your club,” the answer seems obvious. But when they enter the club and bob to their own autotuned song, “Too Many Dicks on the Dance Floor” with the same lack of rhythm that’s present in the intro, it’s obvious that cool is relative. Yes, they’re dorks, but they’re also hysterical, like a drier version of the Lonely Island. I think they’re cool, for one. And for the devoted Conchords fans among us, we’ve evolved past the concept of coolness altogether.
In the world of Flight of the Conchords, though, it’s hard to take them seriously. Murray perpetually insists on getting them daytime gigs (when your own manager lacks confidence in you, it can be tough) and dismisses their attempts at crafting hip nicknames for themselves. (Murray thinks that “Bret” is a more accessible musician name than the “Rhymenoceros,” for example.) But for those of us unfamiliar with the culture of coolness in New Zealand, Conchords consistently exposes us to a group of people who seem so jarring to American culture, on paper. Throughout the niche, gleeful series, this unfolds in tandem with Bret, Jemaine, and the other Kiwis developing an understanding of the New York spectrum through a New Zealand sensibility.
This spectrum extends from Mel (Kristen Schaal), an obsessive Conchords groupie they strive to avoid, to Dave (Arj Barker), a pseudo-spirit guide/pawn shop worker who believably pretends to not know the difference between Bret and Jemaine, despite seeing them practically every day.
In New York, these are just two of the myriad people you can meet on any given day. For the characters of Bret and Jemaine, though, they’re fascinated by them with their New Zealand perspective on the United States. Whenever Bret’s mother calls, this fascination unfolds as he explains how many guns and television channels there are in the States. He also explains the Bruce Willis sightings are hardly so frequent as his mother thinks they are, in spite of her belief that Willis has a gun (and so should Bret) and a vest (which she buys for Bret, allegedly making him look like an Australian (which they hate)). Considering how New Zealand has long since surpassed the United States on the country power rankings, I’d say Bret and Jemaine were just as much in the know as the rest of us. Sorry, Bruce Willis.
What was always most impressive about Flight of the Conchords was the level of care Bret and Jemaine put into each song. Many of them were pre-written and didn’t necessarily adhere to the narrative constructed for the television series specifically, but they were always tonally appropriate and hilarious all the same. Bret and Jemaine were so talented at weaving between genres in each song (McKenzie came perilously close to three-quarters of an EGOT with Conchords), delivering 1980s-type pop ballads in tandem with some sort of hip hop and folk fusion. However, what set their songs apart was that they refused to compromise on them; when they ran out of tunes in their arsenal, they pulled the curtains on Conchords and laid it to rest before it spiraled into mediocrity.
My personal favorite song is also probably one of the Flight of the Conchords’ most mainstream successes, “Hiphopopotamus v. Rhymenoceros.” In the third episode of the series, “Mugged,” Bret and Jemaine’s friendship is put to the test after Bret abandons Jemaine to get mugged by a “gang of two” (Lenny Venito and Luther Creek) that steals his “camera phone” (it’s a camera Bret taped to Jemaine’s cell phone).
Initially, the interaction is humorous in that Conchords style dryness as the gang initially tries to get money from the pair. (They confess that if the muggers want their fifteen dollars, they’ll have to go to the bank first.) When the gang presses on, though, Bret and Jemaine demonstrate that faux-coolness once more by attempting to unleash a rap that is allegedly intimidating and tough. The pair brings out the monikers of “Hiphopopotamus” and “Rhymenoceros” they attempted to pass by Murray and gesticulate their arms wildly to convey a rugged sense of “don’t mess with us.”
However, the song is more aligned with the Hot Cops from Arrested Development than anything one might expect to hear from, say, Killer Mike. The muggers already think they’re British dandies (they’re at least relieved to not be mistaken for Australians) and the rap they commit to does nothing to alleviate the thought of trifling with them. Jemaine rhyming “Hiphopopotamus” with “bottomless” is great, for example, but it’s immediately undercut by softness as the song progresses nowhere following the one rhyme he was able to devise in the heat of the moment.
One similarly funny song from the Conchords that explicitly pertains to the subject of the episode stems from the aforementioned, “Unnatural Love.” Jemaine croons about Keitha (Sarah Wynter), his new Australian girlfriend (his friends hate him for dating an Aussie), through the song of “Carol Brown,” which is all about the delicacy of love. Like “Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros,” though, “Carol Brown” is also a misguided tribute to a musical subject matter that Jemaine knows nothing about. In classic Conchords fashion, the song was as hysterically unaware as the rest of the “Unnatural Love” episode.
Frequently, a laugh could come from Conchords in the form of a simple sigh or a click of the tongue or a slight head tilt when one is told not to listen to a private conversation, even though they’re sitting mere inches away from it. That’s how brilliant Conchords’ deadpan sense of humor was. It’s a style observed specifically by the police officers who find Jemaine after he’s mugged and Bret searches the city for him. Jemaine is described as someone who “talks in a monotone” and “sounds like a robot.” As Bret admits, “That’s just the New Zealand accent,” but it’s a particular international sensibility that contributes directly to the dry humor of the series.
In “Unnatural Love,” after Jemaine realizes he’s slept with an Australian woman, he’s consumed with immediate regret and calls Bret for advice. Bret’s advice consists of jumping out the window and doing “one of those dive rolls when you land.” Brilliantly combining the deadpan humor with the somewhat lack of self-awareness as to his own level of coolness, Jemaine agrees, lifts the window, and states, “Okay, I’ll try.” He states this even though everything we’ve ever learned about these characters suggests that if they attempted to jump from a five-story window, they’d be killed on impact.
Fortunately, Keitha arrives at the perfect moment and unwittingly prevents Jemaine from leaping to his death, all because he slept with an Aussie. For most viewers, it doesn’t seem like a big deal to sleep with an Australian woman any more than it wouldn’t be a big deal for a Frenchman to sleep with a German woman. For Jemaine, though, he’s mortified and he’s immediately shit on by all of his friends for sleeping with Keitha in the first place and continuing to date her after the fact.
It’s just that particular brand of niche Oceanic humor that develops a Kiwi-Aussie rivalry throughout Flight of the Conchords, even if it’s a cold war that no one really seems to give a shit about.
Keitha, in particular, is depicted with as vivid a slew of Australian stereotypes as Cletus on The Simpsons is imbued with southern slackjaw yokel stereotypes. It makes sense, of course. Keitha is a Bogan, after all (she uses Froot Loops to make her tea), with a grating accent that sounds like Marilyn Monroe only if you “squint your ears,” as Bret winces.
Throughout “Unnatural Love,” Bret warns Jemaine that Australian women are like mermaids or sirens from old stories of mythology; they’re only trying to ensnare New Zealanders. When Keitha convinces Jemaine that she wants to run away (to New Jersey) with him, she takes the opportunity to storm his apartment with her friends, overwhelm Bret, duct tape him to the door, and steal all their belongings. Jemaine feels as heartbroken as he does embarrassed that Bret was right about this Australian woman all along.
Yet, it’s another moment in Flight of the Conchords that sees Bret and Jemaine comforting one another after a robbery is inflicted against them. When the gang eventually returned Jemaine’s camera phone, they reflected on the happy memories they had from the developed photographs and they remembered their friendship matters most. The same is true after Keitha’s burglary when Jemaine hugs Bret, even though Bret is initially reluctant to hug back. At the core of the series, they’re just good pals.
They’re also just chill people, both in the series and out of it. McKenzie and Clement always stayed true to their sense of humor and the comedy they wanted to see in the world. It was niche, dry, and obscure, at first, but steadily, the popularity of it grew concurrently with the Conchords themselves. Now, James Bobin infuses his particular sensibility into Muppets and Dora the Explorer movies, McKenzie develops a number of offbeat properties off the heels of his Oscar win for The Muppets, Clement transferred What We Do in the Shadows to American television and Emmy nominations, and Waititi is an Oscar-nominated director, who is as comfortable on the indie scene as he is in a Marvel sandbox. At first, the group of silly New Zealanders were minimalist in all facets with confidence in their talent and material to carry them through. Now, they’re among those dominating Hollywood and the industries we love most. Like their rhymes, their ambitions are bottomless.
