Flight of the Conchords wowed a packed house at Cahn Auditorium on Thursday night.
The New Zealand folk/parody duo packed the 1,011-seat auditorium, which took only 45 minutes to sell out. Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement spent the night playing songs from their eponymous HBO show and the Grammy-winning EP The Distant Future, and engaging the crowd with witty banter in the downtime between songs.
The night began with improv and sketch comedy group Mee-Ow. Warming up the crowd with a sketch on diversity and games like “World’s Worst”, Mee-Ow provided a hilarious and succinct opener to the show.
Kristen Schaal took the stage next. A Northwestern alumna, Schaal received tremendous applause from the crowd as she walked sheepishly up to the microphone. She spent most of her set lampooning her time at Northwestern; she told the crowd about being the only sober person during Dillo Day and getting a “D” on a senior performance studies assignment titled “Anne Boleyn on Fire.”
Schaal weaved her stand-up between reenacted sketches and performances from her Northwestern days, often with special guests; Bret and Jemaine joined in on her sketch “Cartwheels and Somersaults,” and she staged a fake wedding proposal with a Northwestern alum she claimed to have met and fell in love with at the Norris information desk.
While the Conchords hit fan favorites like “Business Time,” “The Most Beautiful Girl In the Room,” and “The Hiphopotamus vs. The Rhymenoceros,” there was an unfortunate flubbed lyric in “Bret, You’ve Got It Going On,” where Jemaine looked to the audience for help.
Their set was a study in informality, with the band adjusting their microphones and monitors, riffing on the audience’s heckling, and yelling to the person manning the lights to request “sad lights” for the more somber songs. They played a few brief excerpts of songs they said were part of their new material, and dropped various hints about their new season of episodes. There was even a tease of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy,” soon played over the Conchords’ “Mutha Uckas.”
To open up their song “Think About It,” a song about musical activism, Jemaine said, “Basically anything that Bono’s into. If Bono’s into it, then we’re right there with him.”
The Conchords were called back for an encore after an hour and twenty minutes on stage. They ended with “Angels,” a song off of their 2002 self-funded Folk The World album that describes the sex lives of angels. They offered the crowd a chance to go to heaven, hell (“Like Tenacious D… Satanic messages!” said Jemaine), or yes, even the bank, as pointed out by a heckler. But judging by the thunderous applause as the house lights went up, the Conchords’ concert seemed more like the former to their audience of avid Northwestern fans.