KEY POINTS:
One half of the New Zealand comedy duo, Flight of the Conchords, says Americans are always surprised to hear that he is a comedian.
"The blessing of being a comedian from New Zealand is that your accent will make anything you say sound a little bit funny to American ears, whether you intend it or not," Jemaine Clement told the New York Times.
"The curse is that your naturally laid-back attitude and innate stoicism will cause some people to doubt your commitment to your art, and others to question your career choice altogether."
US cable channel HBO will feature the duo in a 12-episode television series starting on June 17.
The series centres on their adventures in being transplanted from New Zealand to New York's Lower East Side, where they struggle to find venues for their act.
Clement and Bret McKenzie agreed that they were perhaps not the best representatives of how their countrymen really behaved.
"Jemaine and I are both particularly understated," McKenzie, 30, from Wellington, said.
"When we're hanging out with other New Zealanders, we're still two of the quieter ones."
Clement, 33, who grew up Masterton, said: "Sometimes people think we aren't interested in things when we are. It's just that we don't express it.
"There's a very different energy level between the average New Zealander and the average American."
While students at Victoria University in the mid-1990s, Clement and McKenzie were already touring New Zealand and Australia with a five-member comedy act called So You're a Man.
After stints in comedy troupes with names like the Humourbeasts, the pair began performing under the name Flight of the Conchords, playing satirical songs (often about their affections for the opposite sex) on acoustic guitars.
Their music paid more homage to the eclectic funk and rock artists they had grown up listening to, including James Brown, Prince, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen.
"It was always going to be a strange band," McKenzie said.
"It might have been a very different story if we ended up playing rock venues. We just ended up playing comedy clubs."
In 2002 the Conchords played their first Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and they returned there twice more to increasing interest from the American and British comedy industries.
Though they were approached by American networks, including NBC and Fox, no one offered them a series.
But after performing at the US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen in 2005, the Conchords came to the attention of HBO, which was looking to develop more low-cost comedy shows based around relatively unknown talents.
- NZPA
