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From the New Zealand Listener (part 1
photo source: community.livejournal.com/conchords_hbo/NZ Listener
January 3-9 2009 Vol 217 No 3582
Flights of fancy
by Tim Wilson
An exclusive interview on the New York set of the second – and could it really be the last – series of Flight of the Conchords.
Consider the joys of being Flight of the Conchords. A cultish show filming a second series on a major cable network in the United States, which must be like having a hit anywhere else. (It’s not actually, but we’ll get to that.) Your fans are engaged, artsy-crafty, inclining to spooky. They send you knitted wool animals that look like you. Bret’s Jesus beard and gentle tortured eyes; Jemaine’s vigorous sideburns and primate sensuality.
Fan art, too! Paintings and hand drawings and the like, enough to fill a small room at Te Papa. You write in LA, film in the People’s Socialist Republic of Brooklyn, and sometimes dream of Newtown. You go out dancing with Drew Barrymore; Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins drop by at one of your shows, dragged there by their kids. You used to be broke; now you’re not. People know you. They want to be funny with you. Sometimes, they want to be you. Recently, Rhys Darby, who plays Murray Hewitt in the series, was signing autographs outside a New York comedy club; a man in his 50s blundered through the crowd, shouting: “I’m the real Rhys Darby! I’m the real Rhys Darby!” He was, to use the appropriate phrase, forcibly restrained.
It’s like the theme from Cheers: “Everyone knows your name, everyone’s glad you came.” Put it another way, the Public Enemy way: “Ice Cube is down with the PE/now every single b*tch wanna see me.”
“One of the funniest things I saw on tour,” says Jemaine Clement, “was this woman in the front row and she had a T-shirt with a womb on it and a fetus with glasses and sideburns, and my face.”
All of which goes to prove three points that on reflection are self-evident: 1) people are strange; 2) they form intimate attachments with characters on the boob tube; 3) they love a laff.
Flight of the Conchords, contenders for the best comedy album at the 2009 Grammys, are successfully mining the double-act seam of comedy, one that stems not from the tradition of speaking opposites (funny man v straight man – eg, Morecambe and Wise) but the setup in which similarity, and irony, loves company. The Blues Brothers and Cheech and Chong are part of this line, but neither expresses the minimalism, the texture of Conchord humour. Being a nerd. Being broke. Being useless with girls. It’s being and nothingness; some awkwardness but little angst. They’re like life, they’re like us, only they’re … different.
“Jemaine’s more staunch than me,” says Bret McKenzie. Slim and pale, he is slumped inside a large blue Swanndri. Call time for this morning’s filming was 5.30am, which is bad enough, and made rather worse if you’ve spent the night lying awake, worrying about sleeping through the alarm.
“When we deal with other people,” says Clement, “I’d expect Bret to be naturally diplomatic, whereas I wouldn’t like the person.”
“And that’s what we play off on the show,” adds McKenzie.
“It’s like a five-year-old and a three-year-old,” says show co-creator James Bobin, who has also worked with Sacha Baron Cohen, otherwise known as Borat. “Jemaine’s the five-year-old, and Bret’s the three-year-old. They’re both wrong, but the five-year-old thinks he’s right.”
McKenzie continues: “If we didn’t like the way HBO was doing something, even though we’d both agreed we didn’t like it, Jemaine would be the one who would probably say” – his fist thumps the table lightly – “we’re not doing it!”
So, the difference between them is good cop, bad cop?
“Mmmm, more like polite cop, less polite cop.”
Would you like fries with that drollery, sir? We’re sitting at a French joint near their studio. It’s a working lunch, one of these multi-tasking monstrosities that people who haven’t had a day off for four months must endure, as must those who want to talk to them. The Conchords are being served up to the world’s entertainment press: your own reporter, a chap from the Daily Telegraph in London, a woman from Time Out, and a Swede who, in the car coming here, leaned across to me and asked, “Are these guys any good?”
Well, yes, they are. The lunch/interview, filled with badinage, is how one imagines an orgy might be: nervously energetic, special moves being ventured and withdrawn hastily, abrupt changes in partner, some fumbling and groping to get from one sequence to the next. And that’s just the journalists.
McKenzie, as you’d expect, is the fret-artist; Clement swings casually from riff to riff. They footnote one another’s sentences. Fracturing, rather than cracking each other up, seems to be the MO, although Clement’s laugh can rise to a goofy full-throated bellow. McKenzie seems to like to hang on just a little, to keep something in reserve. But it’s a free-ranging session of target practice, a flurry of bullseyes: America, themselves, their fans, New Zealand. They describe how they created the name for bumbling manager Murray Hewitt, by cross-fertilising the names of former All Blacks Murray Mexted with Norm Hewitt. Then they googled the name, which produced two people who both lived in New Zealand. McKenzie says when he was back home at Christmas time, he actually met someone called Murray Hewitt.
“Good-looking guy, was he?” deadpans Rhys Darby.
Conchord humour is fungible, as useful for mocking the conventions of the showbiz interview as it is for neutralising enquiries considered a little too probing. When the Woman From Time Out says, “Jemaine, didn’t you just have a baby?”, posing a very standard fishing-expedition-type question, Clement replies, “I don’t talk about that.”
“Well,” she stammers, “ … ah … maybe, congratulations on having a baby?”
“Maybe I won’t accept them … What for?” And the bellows come again.
Now their tales of poverty are of poverty recalled. “We were so poor that when we first went to Edinburgh,” Clement remembers, “we didn’t have anywhere to stay and we were hoping to bump into the one guy we knew. And we bumped into him, and there were already all sorts of people staying there for the festival. And I literally stayed in a cupboard with just enough room for a mattress. And Bret was staying in a room infested with wasps.”
McKenzie: “It was infested with wasps. I’d say, ‘Why are all these wasps in my sleeping bag?’”
“And one night they all came,” says Clement, “though fortunately I didn’t have to deal with it because I was in the cupboard.”
And these days? Swimming pools, movie stars? “Friends with swimming pools,” says McKenzie, pointing down the table to co-creator Bobin. “James has a swimming pool.”
“It’s a very little swimming pool,” demurs Bobin, “more the size of a bath.”
“Our life is different,” continues McKenzie. “You get picked up by cars at the airport, and driven to work. You get to stay in apartments with spare rooms.”
“Rather than staying in the spare rooms,” says Clement. ...
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