Jemaine Clement | Rotten Tomatoes (2024)

With only a handful of television and radio shows under his belt, Jemaine Clement became one of New Zealand's highest-profile exports since "Lord of the Rings" visionary Peter Jackson. As the tall, dark and bespectacled half of the musical comedy duo, Flight of the Conchords, Clement cemented his status as one of the most off-beat comics to cross over internationally. The "band," which Clement and partner Bret McKenzie described as "New Zealand's fourth most popular digi-folk parodists," became an unassuming comedy phenomenon with their R&B and hip-hop-infused songs about mundane superfluities of love and robots taking over the world, coupled with their bone-dry, self-satirizing HBO series. Playing themselves as frumpy, barely functional losers doomed by their own naiveté to musical obscurity in New York City, Clement and McKenzie carved out a niche as actors, comedians, musicians, writers and producers of their own show, as well as unofficial - and self-consciously inept - kiwi spokesmen.