Funny business: Men and humour

Being a Dagg isn't peculiar to Fred. Mark Broatch celebrates the face of Kiwi humour.

Having a chat with a mate over a wine at a high-brow social function, as you do, and a fellow traveller leaned in and said, "You two sound like Flight of the Conchords."

Bollocks. We have no illusions we're anywhere near as funny as "New Zealand's fourth most popular folk act". And hopefully not as... dim. We were just talking.

But it was in that deadpan one-upmanship way that New Zealand men have, where the first one to break into a smile cedes a silent and largely unacknowledged humour victory.

The odd thing is, not a few New Zealand men (and some women) talk something like Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement. And now the rest of the world has found out.

Because New Zealand men are laconic, determinedly phlegmatic, our humour is largely an understated, not long-winded, sideways sort. It is often self-deprecating, dark and ironic (Sam Neill might call it our humour of unease). But at its other extreme it's exaggerated and whimsical to the point of absurdist. As McKenzie has noted about his work, it deals with surreal ideas in a very ordinary way.

John Clarke's Fred Dagg created an entire rural surreality of sons and gumboots. Here's his suit-wearing descendant talking, in 1998 TV series The Games, co-written by Clarke: "Bryan, if the world champion draws the outside lane in your event [the circular 100m sprint] the centrifugal force acting on him when he comes off the home turn will be absolutely enormous. He'll rip his freckle out. He'll be over here like a bloody sheep dog across the top of the crowd."

Male chit-chat is often about stuff and nonsense; serious concerns and non-blokey ideas have to seep through unannounced, like Auckland damp. In Conchords, intimate matters are expressed in song, usually in larynx-straining falsetto. "One time when we were touring and I was really lonely... I put a wig on you when you were sleeping... and I just laid there and spooned you."

It's a humour that mocks our weaknesses the inability to take a compliment, or to give one fulsomely: "You could be a part-time model." Filmmaker Taika Waititi probably overstated it when he said about American showbiz flattery and fawning: "We're immune to this bullshit." But we are fairly resistant.

There's a downside. The requirement to strip something down to its basics can lead to meanspiritedness and to the (much overstated) snipping of tall poppies. Though perhaps our small but surprising global successes in areas such as humour, film and fashion have led us past much of that accompanying cultural cringe. The cringe that actor Michael Galvin has written in a short story about an expat: "Backpacks, frumpy clothes, fresh open faces and buoyant good humour: he knows, even before he hears them talking too loudly in that terrible accent, that they're New Zealanders."

Whereas once we were flat-out embarrassed by ungainly and naive provincialism, now it's an odd but accepted part of the family. Peter Wells has written: "All of New Zealand is a variant on a small town, regardless of how large the city." If some still regret our smallness and distance from the world, we at least now mostly shrug about it.

Many still leave to have a bigger career. But most return. As UK politician Austin Mitchell has said, "The world is New Zealand's finishing school."

This recent valuing of our humour is a much-needed antidote to the other side of our moody character. "There is an enormous melancholy in much of what New Zealanders write," noted writer Vincent O'Sullivan. And the Conchords do suffer gigs, girls, band manager Murray.

The need for the common touch rules out intellectualism. Barry Crump, after consulting a dictionary on the definition of bastard, noted: "Nothing much use in that lot. One of those dictionary blokes is going to fall back into a heap of his own verbiage one of these days and smother himself."

Staunchness has become slightly more modern in recent years though we still clearly keep the old rules to hand. Writer William Brandt nails the irony in a story in which a child asks why his father is not crying about his dying father: "I'm letting your mother have a turn. I'll have one later on when you kids are in bed."

New Zealand men often have an ability to simultaneously hold a thing dear and to gently undercut its failings, something columnist Steve Braunias has often tapped into. Novelist Alan Duff notes the tension between experienced emotion and irony: "Dangerboy leaned right back on his heels how many Maoris do, with mocking gratitude and yet part of it really genuine."

We share many aspects of humour with our anglophone cousins. The unaware punctiliousness of the Conchords' Murray is not unlike David Brent's from The Office. But Murray is much more likeable. As is most New Zealand humour. On the blokier side, it has brought us Pulp Sport, That Guy, Bro'Town, Eating Media Lunch, Back of the Y, McPhail and Gadsby, Billy T James, Fred Dagg and a ragtag of comedy films.

Whatever our humour is, through the endless talents of the Conchords it has come into some sort of vogue. Perhaps it's a vogue of two men and two minutes, but it's ours and we should celebrate it. Quietly, phlegmatically. Good on ya, mates.

• Mark Broatch is the Sunday Star-Times interactive editor.

   

   

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