Lament For Kiwi Comedy

Misguidedly, we rented NZ sheep-zombie horror-comedy Black Sheep on Sunday night. Made it about halfway through before we could take it no more. Just not any good. In many ways, actively bad. I’d heard mixed reviews – how is that possible? Where did all the positive reviews come from? (I detect the stern hand of Robert McKee in the script. It was by-the-numbers Story. )
After this and poor old Welcome to Paradise, my new before-breakfast theory of why NZ comedy so often fails: we try and do American comedy, but we are not Americans. Let me expand: comedy, by and large, emerges fully-formed from its culture. Friends and Seinfeld are a direct expression of the deepest recesses of the peculiarities of American culture. We can get enough from it to laugh our Antipodean rears off, but it is foreign to us. That culture isn’t our culture.
And here’s the trick: we sit down to write, and our ideas of what is funny are structured by US content. We think we can ape the mannerisms and affect of US comedy and put in a Maori dude and somehow we’ll make comedy happen. But it doesn’t work. We just don’t get US culture on a deep enough level to make US-style comedy, and years of data have shown we’re not going to accidentally create a new Kiwi-style comedy that way either.
The Conchords are born out of Kiwi culture. Stone-faced guys, a bit out of their depth, with inner wells of emotion and expression, watching out for each other while wrestling with the anxiety of the tiniest absurd success – this digs right into what it is to be a New Zealander.
The irony that the most Kiwi comedy since Fred Dagg and Billy T James had to be made in New York using American money is lost on no-one at all, of course.
(That said, there were one or two good lines in the half of Black Sheep we watched. “Those fish died free”. )