HBO

Philly article on HBO show

Read it at Philly.com

Soaring with silliness

HBO’s new “Flight of the Conchords” tracks the exploits of “New Zealand’s fourth most popular folk-parody duo.”

By Dan DeLuca
Posted on Sun, Jun. 17, 2007
Inquirer Music Critic

Is there anything more desperate than a couple of guys strumming acoustic guitars and singing songs that try to be funny?
Brett McKenzie doesn’t think so. In fact, the bearded half of the New Zealand musical comedy duo Flight of the Conchords, whose self-titled show debuts on HBO tonight, would agree that the very idea of what he and Jemaine Clement do sounds “massively unfunny.”

And Clement - who also stars as a nunchaku-wielding nerd in the uncomfortable Kiwi comedy Eagle vs. Shark, which opens Friday - doesn’t disagree. In fact, he can’t think of a single funny comedy song in the history of pop music, with the possible exception of Dr. Hook’s “Sex Drive,” which he immediately begins to burble in his love-man lower register: “Women turn me on/Potatoes turn me off . . . ” (”I don’t know,” he says, sounding embarrassed. “I find that funny.”)

So why is Flight of the Conchords, which follows two unassuming characters from New Zealand named Jemaine and Brett (pronounced “Britt”) as they seek fame in New York, so frequently hilarious?

“One of the keys is that we don’t try to be too funny,” says McKenzie, 30, who first met Clement back home Down Under in 1998. “It’s a very understated, dry performance.”

Clement, 32, whose bespectacled visage will be familiar to many U.S. viewers from his Outback Steakhouse TV commercials, at first professes that the question “is too hard for me.” But then, he gets to the heart of it: “I think it’s because we both love music.”

And not only do they love it, they’re good at making it. That was apparent at the sold-out show at the Fillmore at the TLA last week, where the duo kept a twentysomething audience in stitches. HBO is hoping the pair can entice that same crowd to stick around after Entourage on Sundays.

At the Fillmore, they did it with droll stage patter (including a shaggy-dog tale of a time-traveling acid trip to the early 1970s during which Clement found himself locked in a bathroom with both a young Tina Turner and an older also-time-traveling Tina Turner) and inspired musical goofs such as “Albi the Racist Dragon” and the sexed-up “Business Time,” on which Clement sings, “You tell me you want some more/Well I’m not surprised . . . but I’m quite sleepy.”

And the musical skills of the Conchords - whose name derives from a dream McKenzie had about supersonic Concorde jets, and who bill themselves as “New Zealand’s fourth most popular folk-parody duo” - are immediately apparent in their HBO show.

In the first episode, which is viewable for free online at www.hbo.com/conchords, Clement and McKenzie go to a party on the Lower East Side, where the Wellington, New Zealand-based duo lived while filming the show. Seeing a woman across the room, Clement bursts into the Prince parody “The Most Beautiful Girl in the Room,” displaying a perfectly credible falsetto as he suggests, “Let’s get in a cab/I’ll buy you a kebab!”

The Prince influence is obvious in the awkward-but-endearing music of the Conchords, who cite The Garry Shandling Show and the BBC’s Blackadder and Young Ones as comedic models. But what sets them apart from other parodic musical duos, such as their HBO predecessors Tenacious D., is not just that they’re endearing rather than obnoxious.

It’s that they have a multiplicity of musical moves. They successfully spoof reggae dancehall star Sean Paul in “The Boom King,” send up David Bowie in “Bowie’s in Space,” and mock their own impoverished circumstances in the style of the Pet Shop Boys. “You’re standing in the sitting room totally skint,” McKenzie rhymes in “Inner City Pressure.” “Your favorite shirt is covered with lint.”

“We write jokes into the songs,” says McKenzie, who has toured as a guitarist with such “serious” bands as the Black Seeds. “But we also commit to the music to the point where we can channel some irony out of the various musical styles.”

“They’re not comedians with guitars,” says James Bobin, the Conchords’ cocreator and writer who wore those same hats on HBO’s Da Ali G Show. “They’re proper musicians who are also very funny.”

Bobin, a Brit considered “the third Conchord,” first spotted the twosome playing in a cave - don’t ask - at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2002. Together they began thinking of ways to adapt the act to the small screen.

Clement and McKenzie soon scored an HBO One Night Stand special as well as a development deal with NBC. They filmed a pilot “about the Flight of the Conchords living in L.A. and trying to make it,” McKenzie says. But it didn’t get picked up, “so when we got to HBO, we wrote a very different show, which was the Flight of the Conchords living in New York trying to make it.”

In the meantime, Clement filmed Eagle vs. Shark with his other comedic partner, director Taika Cohen, with whom he also paired on the 2002 super-low-budget film Tongan Ninja. In the Napoleon Dynamite-ish Eagle, Clement plays Jarrod, an absurdly self-involved video-store clerk who would seem all but irredeemable, were it not for the considerable patience of his fellow misfit and far more empathetic girlfriend, Lily, soulfully played by Loren Horsley.

Jarrod’s quite the jerk, “but in my possibly pretentious brain I see it as more layered than that,” Clement says. “He pushes people away as a defense. It works on some people, but not on others, his family for instance. I don’t know if it’s as serious as that, but that’s the way I think of it.”

The Conchords’ characters share some of the cluelessness of Jarrod - who is Eagle, in the movie’s battle of the sexes, to Lily’s Shark - but none of his meanness. They exist in an alternate universe where their slackerish existence can turn into a music video at a moment’s notice.

Compared to Ali G’s Sacha Baron Cohen, Bobin says, the ‘chords are “equally talented in a very different way. With Sacha, it’s always about the character, who is the opposite of who he is, interacting with the real world. The Conchords are more structured and more surreal, and the characters are much closer to who they are. They play an extended version of themselves. Rather than talking about their emotions, they sing their emotions.”

Clement claims to not be nervous about having to stand in for The Sopranos on Sunday night. “I’ve got HBO, but I don’t how to use the cable box,” he says. “I’m not sure where the remote is.”

McKenzie, however, is obviously more concerned about the big shoes they’re trying to fill. “To get the show, we told HBO it was going to be a Mafia musical,” he says. “And in the second season, we’re talking about getting James Gandolfini to be the drummer.”

From: The Philadelphia Inquirer

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Discussion

One comment for “Philly article on HBO show”

1. Posted by indigo_jones | June 19, 2007, 7:47 am

   While funny and entertaining, this article needed a good proof-reader. Bret, not Brett. And he played keyboards in The Black Seeds. Some sentence restructuring wouldn’t have hurt either. [/former editor nitpicking]

   I’m sitting her giggling at the thought of James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano joining the band.

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