Ablasted landscape. Charred husks of SUVs scattered along silent highways, ruptured like cicada shells. Ruined cities on the horizon, colossal fires and irradiated rain. And Rhys Darby, rifle at the ready, leading a ragtag group of haunted survivors to escape the zombie apocalypse/giant death robot invasion.
Sure, this may not be the Rhys Darby that most people are familiar with. It’s a far cry from his stand-up career, and further still from Flight Of The Conchords. It may not be the Rhys Darby we want, but when the dead start a-stirring or the spaceships descend, it’s the Rhys Darby we’re going to need.
At first glance, a jaunt in the army isn’t the most obvious prerequisite to a career in comedy. A witty retort seems more likely to land you in the stockade than The Comedy Store. Yet this is precisely the trajectory Darby followed after leaving school and finding himself trained as a signaller in the New Zealand Army. His soldiering days have left him in good stead, and when the inevitable monster apocalypse rolls around, he feels fairly confident.
“I reckon I’d do pretty well. I’ve got the survival skills from my military training, I can do Morse code. I’m physically fit, and I can act, so I can get behind enemy lines, I can blend in with the zombies or become some 50-foot robot. I might struggle with the height, but then I’m a good mime artist. I was the last of the Morse coders in my army, and I really think they should bring it back. I’ve always said that even if you’re crushed under rubble, if you can at least tap you can communicate.”
This does presuppose, however, that someone knows Morse code well enough to realise you’re actually in trouble. It’s all too easy to imagine your potential rescuer hearing your frantic taps and decoding, “He’s saying ‘S … O … T! It’s just ‘S.O.T.’ guys, he’s OK!”
Darby laughs. “‘Yep, he’s fine down there, don’t worry about him!’ That could be an issue. The only problem with Morse code is, it’s all well and good knowing how to use it but you need other people to be able to receive it. It took me about six months to get to this level. And at the end the army just said, ‘Well, you can still do it with a couple of the other guys here on the course, but otherwise that’s it.’”
Darby’s formative days as a soldier and then journalism student have provided ample material for his stand-up career, and both were instrumental in determining that comedy was to be the unlikely path he would try to pursue. One can picture Darby as the large, humorously shaped fish in a small bowl, given the paucity of opportunities for fledgling comics in NZ in the mid-’90s.
“I was in the army for about four years before realising it wasn’t what I should be doing. I went to university, and found myself onstage as part of a comedy club that got together once a week to write sketches. In New Zealand there really wasn’t any stand-up happening at that time. One comedy club had opened in Auckland. It really wasn’t a career, but then I found myself in a right-place-right-time moment. I started a duo with my friend Grant [Lobban] – we were called Rhysently Granted, which we thought was pretty funny. We did musical stuff, wanky sketches, that kind of thing. It was always just more of a hobby, and then gradually it turned into a proper job. Back in those days you only had that one comedy club and maybe a couple of bars that would do something once a month, and I was just performing pretty much in front of the same people. They’d come along on a Thursday and say, ‘Oi mate, I saw you say that on Tuesday.’ I hit the ceiling there pretty quickly.”
As seems to be the habit of most Australasian performers, the allure of international success saw Darby relocate abroad to follow his inspirations. Having already begun developing the style of performance that would characterise his comedy – highly physical, story-based humour – a move to the UK to follow in the footsteps of his idols made perfect sense.
“There are so many different levels and aspects and genres of stand-up. For me, I was very obsessed with British sketch comedy, in particular Monty Python. From the start, that silly, surreal aspect of humour, the ridiculousness, I brought into my act. I really wanted to be in a sketch troupe, but didn’t really have anyone else, so I just ended up playing all of the roles. My stand-up became kind of sketch pieces, where I’d just play all of these different characters, so that’s where the physicality came into it; that’s how my stand-up was created. I didn’t start out saying, ‘Right! I’m going to be a physical comedian!’ I really just ended up moving around the stage quite a bit because I wanted to be all of these different people at once.”
In an age where every audience member may potentially be a walking camera, there is a lesson to be learnt in Darby’s brand of absurd storytelling. His jokes take time to unfold, and his movements across stage are difficult to capture on a jolting mobile phone screen. Comics who hit their peak from the ’90s onwards, like Jerry Seinfeld or the late, great Mitch Hedberg, could too easily find their punchlines floating around on the internet before they’d even arrived in town. Rather than risk a routine that everyone has already heard, illicit recordings now almost force comedians into improvisation.
“I think that’s one of the things comedians of this era need to know and need to be able to do,” says Darby. “You’ve got your material, fine; you try out new stuff, that’s fine too. But feel free to develop the skills to make stuff up on the night that you can work into your act, because that will all be fresh and exciting to people. As far as people filming stuff, if material does end up on the internet you just have to try and get it taken down. Comics who do the one-liners or gags are worse off in that instance, while ones like myself who tell stories or who are more performance-based are better off, because seeing some grainy thing on a video doesn’t really show you what the act is. But it is very much a different world these days.”
Seven years have now passed since Flight Of The Conchords introduced Darby to the world, although he had already been performing on some of the most prestigious stand-up stages long before his character, Murray Hewitt, was born. Yet the curse of the comedian – to be expected to always have a joke at the ready for any situation – is a pressure he has so far managed to avoid.
“Here in the States, it’s pretty rare that I’ll get recognised. Sometimes if I open my mouth people will recognise the voice. During the Conchord days there were definitely moments of people running across the street and yelling out, ‘Hey, Murray!’ There was a connection with the character that people, to this day, found it hard to separate from me. Family and friends, they tend to just treat me very regularly. But if you don’t know me, if you’ve only seen me or heard me through the work I’ve done, people think they know what to expect from you. But I’m really very normal. Well, I think so. Others might disagree. My friends and family, for the most part.”
Rhys Darby is perfoming at Just For Laughs 2014 at theConcert Hall, Sydney Opera House onFriday October 17, tickets online.
