NZ Herald: Cavas Cover & Interview - January 11, 2020

Bret McKenzie is done joking around
11 Jan, 2020 7:00am


Bret McKenzie for Canvas
By: Greg Bruce

Bret McKenzie tells Greg Bruce some hard truths about the world of musical comedy and beyond.

He's 43 now and he's starting to forget things. People approach him on the street and quote Flight of the Conchords jokes he can't remember. He can't remember exactly when the television series that made him internationally famous was filmed - he can remember it was cold but he can't remember whether that was during series one or series two or both. The other day he listened to a demo of one of his songs, which he does not recollect writing or recording. Thousands of times now, he has played the songs with which he and Jemaine Clement reinvented musical comedy. They're no longer funny to him. He says they stopped being funny after the first 10 or so performances. From that point, he's had to fake it. When he goes into the studio to record a song, he says, he hears that song for 11 straight hours. "It's absurd," he says. "By the time I've finished, I don't really want to hear it again."



He hasn't forgotten how to be funny. A year ago, he and Clement released a new song, Father and Son, which contains comfortably as many laughs as the material with which they rode to stardom. The pair hardly ever perform together anymore but the comedy of Father and Son feels as natural and unstrained and genuine as all their best work. "I don't think of that as something that's hard to do now," McKenzie says. "Whenever I'm working on projects, I'm not particularly worried about making them funny. I feel like, 'Oh we'll be able to do that.' It's how to make them work emotionally, or thematically connect things. That's what I find more interesting now." That's all well and good now he's a multimillionaire with a Grammy and an Oscar; and he and Clement can sell out London's 20,000 capacity O2 arena three nights running, as they did 18 months ago and as they could do pretty much whenever they choose to tour, which is almost never. McKenzie's a bigshot. He can do pretty much whatever he wants. Can't he?

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On the last Conchords tour in mid-2018, in trying to write some new songs, McKenzie and Clement found they were starting to repeat themselves, writing songs they'd already written.

"We've written maybe 60 or 70 comedy songs," McKenzie says now, "maybe more, including the ones that sort of didn't get finished. We definitely found ourselves having to work quite hard to find material that we hadn't already done, that wasn't another version of a similar idea. It was quite funny. Not funny, quite ... interesting."

McKenzie was talking recently with one of his friends, the brilliant, lauded, successful American comic Demetri Martin, who beat him and Clement to the supreme Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2003. Martin, now 46, told him: "I tour a lot and it's kind of lonely. You're touring around America, going to these hotels, these s***ty hotels, by yourself - or even not s***ty hotels - you're like a travelling salesman, right? And you're standing there making stupid dick jokes. It was all good when we were 20, like, 'Yeah we're getting paid to go and make dick jokes!' Then 30, and you're like, 'I've got this job - I get paid really well to do this, it's really fun!' Then you're 40. Like, 'This is kinda weird, making these stupid jokes.'"

McKenzie says: "I think it'll get good again once we're, like, 70." He spends more of his time now on music projects, his own and other people's. He often gets asked to write songs for movies based on books or toys or other easily marketed and merchandisable concepts. "That's the list I'm on," he says. He's in his 40s now, which is an age at which he says we find out that no one really knows what they're doing.

I asked him: "Does there come a point where we get the knowledge? Or do we just give up and start winging it?"

"Yeah, I don't know," he said. "We'll find that out in our 50s."  As a struggling artist, you do what you want and hope one day people will pay you big money and/or your life will improve. As a bigshot, you do what people pay you big money for and/or hope your life won't get any worse. In the first case, you're chasing success; in the second, you're avoiding failure.

"Film and TV are pretty attractive areas to work in," McKenzie says. "You have success in that and then weirdly it becomes less fun the more successful you are. It's pretty odd because there's so much responsibility in those industries to deliver the product, whatever it is."

Another way of looking at the same problem: When we get what we want, it doesn't feel the way we'd imagined I said: "Part of it is the fantasy, isn't it? You're attracted by the fantasy."

"Yeah, that's true," he said. "Yeah. I think I need a new fantasy."  I asked what bits from his and Clement's acclaimed, beloved, now-legendary, infinitely-quoted, embedded-in-the-culture, hit HBO television series he felt they had really nailed. He said: "I think the recording of the Mutha'Uckas song is really good, it really holds up, and the recording of Inner City Pressure really holds up. It's actually a really good recording."  Because I had been expecting him to quote favourite lines, gags or scenes and because that was not what he'd done and because I was confused as to exactly what he was going on about, I asked for clarification.

"The sound of it," he said. "The playing, the music - some of them sound a bit s***ty but some of those are really quite magic - like things fell in place. Like the recording, the performance, the song: it all kind of worked." Seriously? Regarding his groundbreaking, globally successful television series, with its multiple Emmy nominations, genre-shifting scripts and ongoing comedic influence, the thing he was most proud of was the quality of the sound recordings? I expressed surprise. He surprised me by also expressing surprise.

"Oh yeah," he said, thoughtfully. "Yeah. True. I guess that's what I'm more interested in. Yeah." I'm no mathemagician but it felt like this was all adding up to something fairly obvious - or possibly obvious to everyone but him. It looked like comedy was maybe not his ongoing passion but just a phase in his life, now past. I wondered if I should put that to him.

I put it to him. He was in the front seat of his PA's car. I was in the back. He turned to me, conspiratorially, and said: "You might be onto something."  It didn't sound like he was joking.

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