Kiwi comic Rhys Darby is perhaps best known to American audiences from the two recent Jumanji films and his show-stealing role on Flight of the Conchords as the eponymous band’s well-meaning but hapless manager Murray Hewitt. Darby returned to the Washington area the weekend of March 6 to perform a series of stand-up shows at the Arlington Cinema & Drafthouse. It feels like a lifetime ago now, after just a few weeks of social isolation that quite rightly put the kibosh on such gatherings. But as live shows on the eve of quarantine go, it would have been hard to do better. Darby was joined by Steve Wrigley, a fellow U.S.-based Kiwi comedian, and Jared Stern, a D.C. area local.
On the screen, I’ve always been struck by Darby’s perfect comedic timing. It shines across both his starring roles, such as on Flight of the Conchords, and his bit parts, from Hewlett-Packard commercials to voice acting on popular animated shows such as Bob’s Burgers.
Flight of the Conchords followed Jemaine and Bret, two Kiwi musicians living in New York’s Chinatown who are trying to make it big with their novelty act. Murray works as the cultural attache for the New Zealand consulate and moonlights as the band’s manager, a role for which he has no background experience. His management style is focused on his “band meetings,” during which he always takes attendance of all three people “present” in the room. Although these attendance checks recur in virtually every episode, Darby’s delivery makes them hilarious beyond their absurdity and fresh each time.
Murray, as the band’s manager, is Bret and Jemaine’s link to the world of music and New York (even though he’s about as new to both as they are). He recounts some of his well-intentioned yet counterproductive advice in an early episode: “A lot of New Zealanders come over here, and they come into my office. I give them reflective vests, a map, I tell them to stay away from large crowds by going through back alleys, yet almost every day, a New Zealander is mugged!” At the same time, Murray is the duo’s anchor to New Zealand. He is the emotional center of the show, and the character would be impossible without Darby’s performance. Darby is not Murray Hewitt, of course, but there is certainly something of Rhys in him.
Seeing Darby perform his particular brand of stand-up went a long way in showing where this impeccable timing is rooted. His set in Arlington, Virginia, was full of physical comedy, ranging from a quite accurate approximation of equestrian dressage and an account of auditioning for HBO’s Westworld as a Jetsons-style creaking robot to the way in which his childhood talent for producing accurate vocal sound effects (such as shooting) made him a top performer in New Zealand’s military training. If timing or movement were even slightly off in those bits, they would fall flat. But Darby carried them off to perfection.
Darby’s set abounded in jokes about New Zealand, but it is a good-natured form of humor, an affection for the smallness of home. It is anything but the sort of disdainful look back sometimes heard from performers who came from a “small” place before finding fame in the big city. Rather, it comes across as an extension of Darby’s self-deprecation, a comedic musing on how he, a New Zealander, came to enjoy Hollywood success. There was a large contingent of New Zealanders at the show, and I got the impression that they are regulars at Darby’s frequent appearances at the Arlington Drafthouse. Darby riffed off of them, joking that they were all shouting out their home towns at once to prove New Zealand has more than one city.
The show was, of course, not for children, and this was borne out in the language. All the same, Darby’s form of comedy is quite wholesome and family-friendly. His newest project is a Spotify Studios weekly podcast series, Aliens Like Us, which looks into UFO phenomena through news reports and accounts of sightings and discussions among the hosts. The podcast includes “Buttons,” Rhys’s co-host on the long-running podcast The Cryptid Factor, which takes a similar approach but is a bit more homebrew and focuses on cryptozoology (the study of and search for unconfirmed animals such as the sasquatch) with occasional forays into other paranormal phenomena. The hosts’ family members often appear as guests on the show, which speaks to the friendly, inquisitive atmosphere that Darby hopes to maintain in his projects.
Darby has also written and drawn an ongoing children’s book series called The Top Secret Undercover Notes of Buttons McGinty, which is formatted as a 12-year-old adventurer’s scrapbook that needs to be studied and figured out by the reader, presumably of the same age.
Local comic Jared Stern was the host for the night and did a small observational set at the beginning before announcing the program. The opening act was Steve Wrigley, whose set ranged from a first principles-level mockery of cancel culture to everyday divided-by-a-common-language absurdities of being a Kiwi in the United States. Both acts were excellent and perhaps acclimated the American audience to Kiwi mores before Rhys took the stage.
With releases such as Taika Waititi’s recent films Thor: Ragnarok and Jojo Rabbit, a particular brand of New Zealand comedy is certainly entering the mainstream. But live performances are the purest form of comedy, and to see Rhys Darby live is an opportunity to watch one of this style’s greatest exponents in action. With live performances on hold for the pandemic, the podcast will serve us well in the meantime.
Jibran Khan is a freelance writer and researcher. From 2017 to 2019, he was the Thomas L. Rhodes fellow at the National Review Institute.
