EMBRACING DARKNESS
One half of on of New Zealand's best-known cosmic duos is set to launch his first homegrown TV show. Jemaine Clement shows Greg Bruce around his Wellington roots.
‘‘DO you feel like you’ve found the thing in life you were meant to do?’’ I asked Jemaine Clement as we wandered down a hill on the residential edge of Wellington’s city centre, where he had just been showing me a house he used to live in with Bret McKenzie.
‘‘No,’’ he said. ‘‘No, no. I don’t think I’ll ever find it.’’
He thought for a second, then said, ‘‘I guess when I’m writing shows I do feel like, ‘I know how to do this.’ ’’
‘‘So you don’t feel like writing is it?’’ I asked.
‘‘Yeah, because I get bored writing as well, after a while.’’
He said: ‘‘I think it’s just a feeling that — I’m not sure if everyone has it but I’m sure most people have it — like that there should be something else I’m supposed to do.’’
I didn’t tell him that most people are spending most days sitting at their desks clicking between Twitter and a variety of Microsoft programs while staring out the window and dreaming of performing smashhit comedy songs for crowds of 20,000 people at London’s O2 arena while also starring in smashhit television shows and a variety of blockbuster movies.
What those people are probably not dreaming of, though, are the accompanying demands which go far beyond turning up with just a guitar, your amusing face and heroically fleshy lips to be adored by the multitudes.
When he and McKenzie were deep in making the television series of Flight
of the Conchords, he says, the stress was intense.
‘‘Not just acting and being on a TV show but also trying to record an album’s worth of music simultaneously. That was too much. And I would also think of [American comedian] Dave Chappelle and how he quit his show. Like, I could ‘Chappelle’. And I looked up to him for leaving it.
‘‘I probably wasn’t really close to leaving it but it was good to know that it had been done.’’
Clement (44) mentioned the appeal of doing a Daniel DayLewis, who quit acting for a while to make shoes.
‘‘Do you still think like that?’’ I asked.
‘‘I can see the appeal of it.’’
The problem with interviewing comedians is it can be quite hard to get them to think too deeply about themselves.
I asked him what the odds of him walking away were.
‘‘Oh yeah,’’ he said, ‘‘I’ll never do that.’’
‘‘Do you think you’ll always be writing and acting?’’
‘‘I really don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.’’
Contemporaneously with the production of Wellington Paranormal, his new show which starts on TVNZ 2 tomorrow, he’s been working on a
What We Do in the Shadows spinoff in the United States and he says there are other creative projects he wants to do, including a musical film he hasn’t yet pitched.
‘‘I’ve been too busy.’’
Part of the problem is that he’s not really interested in talking about this sort of thing. He’d prefer to talk about his creative process, which he says is what overseas media typically want to talk to him about. He says New Zealand media are always more interested in the drama of your life, the darkness, how you get on with your family.
‘‘Kiwis love darkness, but I’m a comedian, you know.’’
The TV show that made him famous when it first aired in the US in 2007 is,
We thought people weren’t going to be listening.
We thought we were going to be just like the house band. But people were listening. And they were laughing. They were kind of funny songs, but they were pretty dark, our first songs — a lot
of murders in them and stuff
of course, pretty dark: two broke guys living in a crappy New York apartment and working a series of terrible jobs to try to survive while their inept manager and lack of talent hamper any chance they have of success in their chosen field. Furthermore, their love lives are disasters.
Is it possible that Clement’s lack of conviction about his career choice is a harbinger of the doubt or despair at the centre of his soul, something that he prevents from spreading by singing, writing and performing comedy? Or is it something much, much less significant than that?
I asked how he thought he had changed over the course of his career, both as a person and a performer.
‘‘I’m not sure,’’ he said. ‘‘It feels pretty similar.’’
‘‘Any big philosophical shifts?’’ ‘‘No, I’m afraid not,’’ he said. He paused for a second, then added, ‘‘I guess I might be grumpier.’’
‘‘With?’’
‘‘With the world in general.’’
Wellington Paranormal is the first TV show he’s made in New Zealand, after years of trying and failing to get the networks interested in his work and a similar number of years saying bad things about TVNZ in the press.
For instance, he once said that, as the state broadcaster, ‘‘I think they’ve got a responsibility to reflect New Zealand culture, which they don’t. They take American programmes and copy them.’’ Tomorrow, Wellington
Paranormal’s first episode will screen on TVNZ 2, which proves there’s no good justification for being polite to a moneymaking organisation, particularly when your relative negotiating power has become significantly greater than that of the organisation.
‘‘We had one awkward meeting,’’ he says of the process leading to the new show. ‘‘That was the first thing they mentioned, why I always badmouth them in the press. But I have to say that when I would do that, I always laugh, I always laugh about it. But it doesn’t come out like that when you read it. And then they have a photo of me and I’m often looking grumpy in my photos so it’s like, ‘Jemaine Clement says TVNZ . . . ’ and then the photo’s like this and, ‘Oh no, that’s not what I meant! That’s not how I meant it, I just find it funny.’ ’’
With Wellington Paranormal, TVNZ has allowed him and his team to do what they want, but he has previously pitched lots of shows in New Zealand that nobody wanted him to do at all.
Not far along Cuba St from the bucket fountain, which provides the setting for the opening scene of the opening episode of Wellington
Paranormal, is the landmark bar/ venue now called San Fran, previously San Francisco Bath House, where Clement and McKenzie performed their first gig as Flight of the Conchords in 1998.
‘‘A friend of mine was organising a comedy gig and Bret and I —I think we’d made up one song, I had one song that I’d written for another show
and he had a song. So we had three songs. My friend said, ‘Do you want to try standup comedy?’ I said, ‘I don’t but I have this band. We’ve got three songs. Maybe we could play before the comedy starts.’
‘‘So we thought people weren’t going to be listening. We thought we were going to be just like the house band. But people were listening. And they were laughing. They were kind of funny songs, but they were pretty dark, our first songs — a lot of murders in them and stuff.
‘‘So we did those and people listened, which is not what we wanted. I got so nervous I couldn’t even move my right hand.’’
‘‘Why didn’t you want people to listen?’’ I asked.
‘‘Cause I just wanted to play music,’’ he said.
Initially, it was just about playing guitar and making up songs, he said. But because it was part of a comedy night, and there was an expectation from the audience, the songs got increasingly jokey.
But where the standups they performed alongside were shouting and waving their hands in the air, trying to be big, he and Bret would be as small as possible.
‘‘I guess it’s one way to get people to listen. If you’ve got a microphone — a microphone’s a lot of power — if you’ve got a microphone, you can be quiet. Most people are shouting into it in a bar.’’
He led me along Courtenay Pl, pointed to a corner and said, ‘‘This is where me and Taika [Waititi] used to busk.
‘‘Sometimes people would complain,’’ he said, ‘‘because there was a guy called Country Kenny. He used to dress like Kenny Rogers and he got his amplifier taken away from him, but he was so popular that if we were in his place, even though he hadn’t played there for years, it would be like, ‘Wait! What? This is Kenny’s spot! Where’s Kenny?!’
‘‘We’d do mostly Violent Femmes songs.’’
‘‘Not comedy covers, but actual Violent Femmes songs?’’ I asked.
‘‘I think we had one original that we did, which I wrote. Nah, it wasn’t really a comedy song but it had a couple of funny lines in it, I guess. But no, not comedy, just singing. Taika’s a good guitarist, really good. He’s better than Bret or me.’’
There’s an earnestness that exists in offstage Clement, or at least a large part of him that seems to have no real interest in being funny. It’s a hard thing to calibrate to when you’re meeting a famous comedian for the first time because you expect — more than with probably any other type of performer — that their private and performance persona will be the same, even though you know from experience they never are.
He told me a story about going to a bar in his home town of Masterton with some friends when he was in his late teens.
‘‘The only girls at the bar were with us and I remember this guy coming up and wanting to dance with the girls but he did it sitting in his chair. Like, he wouldn’t dance, so he brought his chair up on to the dance floor and he wants to be cool, but he’s sitting in his chair.
‘‘And to me that stuck out in my head as, ‘That’s a New Zealand guy trying so hard to be cool that he doesn’t realise what a dick he looks like.’ That’s the New Zealand cool to me, like, ‘I’m not going to dance, I’ll sit in my chair on the dance floor.’ ’’
I asked if he felt like he had always stood apart from that sort of thing.
‘‘No,’’ he said. ‘‘I totally feel like part of that. I relate to that guy.’’
We go to Bats, the edgy Wellington theatre where, with McKenzie, Waititi and others, he had performed a range of edgy, funny and sometimes terrible shows while he was still at university.
It was a Monday morning, so he didn’t know if we’d be able to get in. When he pushed the door, it opened to reveal a woman and man sitting chatting in the bar area.
‘‘Can I show these guys Bats?’’ Clement asked the woman, called Heather and who was the theatre manager and had known Clement for decades.
‘‘Yes,’’ she said, ‘‘but kind of . . .’’ There was an awkward silence. ‘‘We don’t have to go in the theatre,’’ he said. ‘‘Are there people packing in?’’
‘‘Yeah,’’ she said.
‘‘I felt it,’’ he said. ‘‘Oh, so we can just sit in there,’’ he said, gesturing nonspecifically.
‘‘Yeah, totally,’’ she said.
‘‘All right,’’ he said, starting to lead us across the lobby.
‘‘Oh,’’ she said. ‘‘Sit in where?’’ He stopped. There was an awkward silence.
‘‘Oh, in the . . . uhhh . . . oh . . . ‘‘We’ll just walk around here,’’ he said, pointing nonspecifically to a different area. He laughed one of his awkward laughs.
‘‘Me and Taika’s show was very energetic and frenetic and then Bret’s all about subtlety so our show was really subtle. Have you seen [Netflix movie] Annihilation? It’s quite good — you know how they take on the genes of other things? Other people? It’s like that.’’
I asked Heather if his early work at Bats had been good.
‘‘Oh yeah,’’ she said. ‘‘I loved it.’’ He laughed. ‘‘You’ve gotta say that!’’ he said.He showed me a little spot off to the side of the theatre lobby where there used to be a tiny place called Pit Bar, where he and McKenzie used to play sometimes.
‘‘It’s still not our smallest gig,’’ Clement said. ‘‘We did a little one in Edinburgh where you do it in a pretend elevator. It’s pretty hard. It’s harder to do that than to play in front of 13,000. People can see that you don’t mean what you say.’’
I asked whether he feels creatively fulfilled. He said: ‘‘I love it when a joke works, when a show works. Like, an episode. Like, all these elements coming together.’’
That didn’t answer the question, obviously, but I guess it was at least heading in the right direction.
By way of explanation, he referred the final scene of the second episode of Wellington Paranormal, which features an extended version of what’s called in the comedy world a ‘‘callback’’ — a joke that refers back to an earlier joke.
‘‘I love that,’’ he said of the way that scene came off. ‘‘We’d been talking about that for a long time and, yeah, so that’s a victory for me.’’
I asked, ‘‘What tells you that it worked?’’
He said, ‘‘It just makes me laugh.’’
Wellington Paranormal premieres tomorrow at 8.30pm, on TVNZ 2. It will also be available at TVNZOnDemand.