Flight of the Conchords: Live!

So, because of an odd twist of fate and one friend’s awesome relative, I got the chance to take in the Flight of the Conchords live show this past week. (Your jealousy is delicious.)

To those living in the, like, three cities left on the tour, you’re in for a treat.

The evening opened with Arj Barker, Dave on the show, doing a standup routine about why he doesn’t want kids and how maybe, just maybe, global warming is the sun’s fault and not the Earth’s. Funny stuff.

Once Bret and Jemaine walked out on stage, though, I couldn’t stop grinning.

Their songs are as hilarious as ever and even modified a bit, their witty banter was side splitting and, even when they screwed up a verse or were thrown off track by the audience, they used their magical comedy powers to take a lemon and turn it into liquid gold.

Sadly, Albi and Robots didn’t make an appearance, but that’s hard to complain about when you’ve just sat through about two hours of comedic bliss.

Other highlights included the guys having a roadie bring out jackets just so they could put them on and take them off for a drunken heckler who wanted them to “take it off,” then they even treated the audience to a FOTC-ized version of Freebird and about a third of When Dove’s Cry. It was at the one-third mark when Jemaine decided performing covers all night would just be silly.

More impressive than the songs was the duo’s ability to ad-lib and play off of each other no matter which direction the act was going. It felt like 50 percent of the show was literally off the top of their head and 100 percent of the show was awesome, so it works.

Flight of the Conchords may be New Zealand’s fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo accapella-rap-funk-comedy duo, but they’ll always be number three in my heart.