Jemaine: We're Flight of the Conchords. We were formerly New Zealand's fourth most popular folk-parody duo. Unfortunately, another folk-parody duo has just slipped above us in the charts.
Bret: "Like of the Conchords." Tribute band. They're a tribute band.
Jemaine: They do our songs. They're slightly more popular than us.

Flight of the Conchords, a.k.a. Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie, began as a musical comedy duo who would perform awkward, geeky folk songs on stage, interspersed with odd stand-up style observations about music, women and city life. Years of touring got them several comedy awards and something of a cult following, and eventually, after a brief stint on BBC Radio, they got signed to an HBO television series whose first season ran in 2007.

I have to say I was a little skeptical about the show at first. Stand-up comedy doesn't translate well to TV, and FotC's style was always far too disjointed and too surreal to lend itself easily to the narrative coherence demanded by even the most superficial of sitcoms. And besides, what would happen to their marvellous songs? The retro-futuristic robotic manifesto of The Humans Are Dead? The uncanny impressions of every era of David Bowie's career in The Bowie Song? The profoundly embarrassing attempt at seduction in It's Business Time?

Well, I needn't have worried. Flight of the Conchords is hysterically funny. Wisely, it borrowed its tone and its tempo from the new generation of awkward, laughtrack-less comedies inspired by The Office -- particularly the U.K. version, with its excruciatingly uncomfortable pauses and desperately inept characters.

Jemaine: Man, back in New Zealand I was getting it on with lots of chicks.
Bret: Who?
Jemaine: Well, ah, Sarah Fitzpatrick, Michelle Fitzpatrick, Claire Fitzpatrick... the list goes on.
Bret: That was all of them.
Jemaine: Well, triple figures.
Bret: No, that's not triple figures. That's three.

Bret and Jemaine's characters are also named Bret and Jemaine, who happen to be in a band called Flight of the Conchords. Jemaine is -- well, let's just say that his face has character. Sporting thick glasses, mutton-chops, and the most horrific collection of 70's plaid jackets known to humanity, his social talents border on the autistic. Bret, more traditionally good-looking and marginally more socially adjusted, still manages to alienate people with the stupid things he blurts out from time to time; his fashion sense is no better than Jemaine's, with a penchant for sweatshirts with huge animal faces on them.

"Bret" and "Jemaine," recent immigrants from New Zealand, are trying to make it in New York City. They are impeded in their goals by their totally incompetent band manager Murray Hewitt, played with hilarious cluelessness by Rhys Darby, and their suffocating stalker Mel -- their only fan -- played creepily cheerfully by Kristen Schaal.

Murray, reading off his notepad: Band Agenda. Item one: Haircut, Bret.
Bret: No. Haven't had it done.
Murray: Well, get it cut. You don't hear about professional musicians with long hair.
Bret: Led Zeppelin?
Murray: No, I mean a man.

The dialogue is amusing enough, but the best part of the show by far is the music. Bret and Jemaine break into song in the most inappropriate situations, sometimes interrupting conversations to do it (one memorable ditty takes place as the band is being mugged). The song lyrics are what got FotC famous as comedians, and they are even funnier when accompanied by overwrought MTV-style camera angles and over-earnest acting. Clement and McKenzie are very talented musicians, which is easy to forget when you're laughing so hard. They do piss-takes on everybody from Barry White to the Pet Shop Boys, satirizing every style of popular music and making the saccharine predictability of love songs into something distinctly more awkward:

You're so beautiful
You could be a waitress
You're so beautiful
You could be an air hostess in the sixties
You're so beautiful
You could be a part-time model...

Many of the songs featured in the TV show are available on YouTube. They're worth watching, but they're not quite as funny as they are in the "context" of the episodes. I put "context" in scare-quotes because the humour value is usually drawn from incongruity rather than from narrative logic. The "plots" of the episodes, such as they are, are paper-thin, but I see this itself as a simultaneous parody of sitcoms and musicals, inverted by twenty-first century irony.

Plenty of FotC's older stand-up routines are available on YouTube as well, recorded at comedy festivals like Just for Laughs and Stand Up!. I'm not going to admit to how many times I've watched some of these. Let's just leave it at "a lot."