In the history of musical satire, there is nothing quite like Flight of the Conchords, the duo of sweetly mild-mannered New Zealanders who spoof everything from David Bowie to gangster rap with understatement and a romantic brand of absurdity that is as hummable as it is hilarious.<\/p>\n
In the aughts, Jemaine Clement, now 52, and Bret McKenzie, 49, who started in the alt comedy scene before starring on a hit HBO series<\/a> named for their group, were hipper than Weird Al and much softer spoken than Spinal Tap or Lonely Island.<\/p>\n Despite making only two seasons before moving on to careers in Hollywood, Flight of the Conchords has remained popular and influential (Bo Burnham said he copied them<\/a> early in his career), in part because their videos do well on social media. Clement, who can currently be seen in \u201cAlice and Steve<\/a>\u201d on Hulu, has appeared in many movies, and created the cult series \u201cWhat We Do in the Shadows,\u201d based on the film he directed with Taika Waititi. McKenzie won an Oscar for writing a song for the Muppets. But they say that their agent regularly asks about returning to Flight of the Conchords. After their last reunion, which resulted in an HBO special<\/a>, eight years ago, they repeatedly said no \u2014 until this year.<\/p>\n After starting to play together casually, they returned to perform at what ended up being a sold-out show at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles last month. Before that appearance, both men, dressed in T-shirts and looking like fit dads at the playground, met me at the club Largo. They sounded interested in doing a long-rumored Flight of the Conchords movie if they had the time and the right idea. But they spoke about it with a certain Gen-X indifference that suggested it could also very well never happen.<\/p>\n Here are edited excerpts from our conversation:<\/p>\n You have been performing as Flight of the Conchords for the first time in almost a decade. What has changed?<\/p>\n BRET McKENZIE I was joking that the songs are old, but we\u2019ve forgotten them, so they\u2019re new to us.<\/p>\n JEMAINE CLEMENT This is the first time we\u2019ve never done any new songs in our set. The one difference is people don\u2019t laugh in the same way, because they know the joke.<\/p>\n Has your relationship to the songs changed?<\/p>\n