1.03 Mugged

Summary and spoilers

New York City can be a dangerous place to live, but Jemaine and Bret have the experience of Murray to guide them. Murray outfits them with New York tourist t-shirts, flouro belts, maps of New York (which he encourages them to keep open at all times) and instructs them to keep to back alleys to stay safe. Murray has noticed that despite his best efforts, many of the New Zealanders that he outfits seem to get mugged, but he has made no correlation between this statistic and his approach. Sure enough, Bret and Jemaine are mugged by two tough guys. The muggers take Jemaine’s prized camera-phone (a gift/invention of Bret, who created it by attaching Jemaine’s camera to Jemaine’s phone). The boys flee on foot with the muggers in pursuit. When Jemaine gets stuck on a fence, Bret flees in fear. Jemaine ends up in jail for two days with one of the muggers. They bond, mostly because they both feel similarly abandoned (the mugger’s friend also ran away from him). It takes a while for the trust between Jemaine and Bret to be restored; the catalyst is Bret retrieving that camera-phone (though in the process, he discovers that perhaps Jemaine doesn’t love it quite as much as was originally believed).

Comments

The two hilarious songs in this episode are:  ‘Rhymenocerous vs. Hiphopapotamus’ (Bret’s and Jemaine’s rapping names), a folk-rap meld that dates back to original Conchords material from 2004 or earlier. The second song is even funnier: ‘Think About It’, a Smokey Robinson-type soulful ballad about the mean streets of a city.

The simple comedy twists used in the show constantly catch me and send me laughing. For example, the show opens with Bret speaking to someone on the phone, while Jemaine listens in the background and constantly interjects little additions to the conversation or asks questions, then asks for the reaction of the caller. Finally, Bret finishes the call and hangs up. Jemaine says, "Who was that?" So all this time he has been almost passionately interjecting, and he didn’t even know who he was talking to!

Dave (Arj Barker) returns and takes part in a funny Who’s On First segment that uses the New Zealand pronunciation of ‘dead’ as its focus.

Flight of the Conchords Quotes

Murray: Okay guys, band meeting. Jemaine?
Jemaine: Yes.
Murray: Yes?
Jemaine: Yes.
Murray: Bret.
Bret: Uh, Murray, I was wondering if you could call me by my rapping name.
Murray: Your rapping name.
Bret: Rhyme-nocerous?
Murray: Rhinocerous.
Bret: The Rhyme-nocerous?
Murray: [looks at band sheet] No, that, well that not going to fit in here. I’ve got ‘Bret’. Can’t you just have ‘Bret’ as your rapping name?
Bret: No, it’s not a rapping name.
Murray: It’s a good rapping name. ‘Hello, everybody, I am Bret’.
Bret: No.
Murray: Rhymes with ‘wet’.
Bret: No. Rhyme-nocerous.
Murray: Look, if you’re gonna have some sort of ‘rap name’, just be careful you don’t do a drive-by.
Bret: I won’t.
Murray: You’d better not. You know what I mean by that? What about you, Jemaine; have you got a rapping name?
Jemaine: Yeah. Hiphopapotamus. But you can just call me Jemaine if you want.

Jemaine: We’ve never been ridiculed.
Bret: Nah.
Murray: You haven’t?
Bret: Nah.
Murray: Well, that’s a surprise. I get ridiculed all the time.
Bret: Really?
Murray: Yeah. ‘Whoa, hey – Ginger Balls!’ You know.
Jemaine: That was Bret. He called you that.

"My rhymes are so potent
That in this small segment
I made all of the ladies in the area pregnant"
- Jemaine the Hiphopopotamus

[for this excerpt, the New Zealand pronunciation of dead, which sounds like ‘did’ to the American ear, is the issue]
Murray: You just don’t know; you hear a lot of terrible things happening. He may be dead.
Dave: He maybe did what?
Murray: He may be dead.
Dave: Yeah, I know, but what did he maybe do?
Murray: He may be dead.
Dave: Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. What did he maybe do?
Bret: He may be dead.
Dave: Are you guys fuckin’ with me?
Bret: What?
Murray: Not alive, you know. Dead.
Dave: Oh! Oh!

Dave: [reminiscing about the missing Jemaine] Hey guys, remember the time he got his hand caught in that jar? What a dick! I mean, who gets their hand caught in a jar? Big fuckin’ asshole he was.
Bret: That was actually me.
Murray: That was Bret.
Dave: Are you sure, ‘cause I thought -
Murray: It was Bret, David. [to Bret] Jemaine was the one who helped you out. And he helped you when you got your head stuck in the chair. Remember?
Bret: Yeah.
Murray: He was there for hours. He was just a helpful guy, you know. Loyal…I just hope he’s not dead.

Jemaine: Yeah, one time we were supposed to go to the movies, and – March of the Penguins -
Hood #1: Oh, I love them.
Jemaine: And, he, I had bought the tickets, and he didn’t turn up, he texted me, said ‘I’m not coming’.
[pause]
Hood #1: Well, that’s…that’s not really the same thing, is it? I mean…I shot a guy…you know?
Jemaine: Yours was worse.

Jemaine: You abandoned me. You left me to die.
Bret: Well, I wouldn’t have done it if I had known you were gonna hassle me about it.

Jemaine: If I can’t trust him on the streets, I can’t trust him on the stage. I can’t do another gig with him without going against everything I stand for.
Murray: Well, what if you actually had another gig?
Jemaine: Well, then I would.

"I didn’t really love that camera-phone as much as you thought I loved it. In fact, I kind of think you ruined my phone when you made me that camera-phone…and my camera."
- Jemaine

"There’s people on the street, gettin’ diseases from monkeys
Yeah, that’s what I said, they’re gettin’ diseases from monkeys
Now there’s junkies with monkey disease
Who’s touching these monkeys, please
Leave these poor sick monkeys alone
They got problems enough as it is"
- Jemaine (from ‘Think About It’)

"What man, which man, who’s the man,
When’s a man a man,
What makes a man a man
Am I a man?
Yes
Technically I am"
- Jemaine (from ‘Think About It’)

Bret: Saw a man lying on the street half-dead, with knives and forks stickin’ out of his leg and he said, ‘Ow, wow, wow wow wow wow wow wow wow, can somebody get the knife and fork out of my leg please?’
Jemaine: Can somebody please, remove these, cutleries, from my knees?
- (from ‘Think About It’)