Musical comedy is, of course, no laughing matter. So you have to be musical and funny at the same time? How does that work?

12,000 miles away from here the fourth best folk duo in New Zealand decided to give it a go. Drawn to the bright lights of London and New York, they eke out a marginal existence while their bumbling part-time manager (who holds down a lowly job at a NZ trade mission) tries and fails to secure them their big break. Ironically, this part time manager also gets to forge his own comedy career. Hang on – I’m forgetting in this post-modern world how art and reality fuse, and this is a form of fly on the wall Real-Komedie where an imaginary ordinary life becomes the vehicle for the comedy. Derrida would have had a lot to say about it. We are a long way from the music hall traditions that largely died after the 1960s.

This, however, is among the funniest musical comedy of its time. Listening to Flight of the Conchords with headphones in a public place is likely to get you some pretty strange looks.

Bret McKenzie went on to work with the Muppets in the recent movie (itself a movie about a bunch of fictional puppets fallen on hard times), winning an Academy Award for the hyperbolic comedy torch song, Man Or Muppet. This was a movie where disbelief is suspended on sky-hooks and powered by fairy dust. And nobody minded.

In a great example of life imitating art, the NZ channel TV3 supposedly denied the duo funding for a programme because their humour was deemed “too Wellington” – i.e. not likely to appeal to the average New Zealander outside the capital.

FoC’s comedy is deadpan understated ineptitude honed to perfection, but the songs wrap you totally into the genre whilst dissecting the style with gleeful irreverence and surgical accuracy and formulating lyrics that are varyingly absurd, surreal, tasteless or silly. What it has to do with folk music is strictly tangential.

The two albums – the second is called I Told You I Was Freaky – reveal a preoccupation with male inadequacies with the opposite sex, an unerring ear for a number of popular musical styles, notably soul, rap, a taste for surreal situations and a special interest in David Bowie.

They get a lot out of the male of the species’ pathetic attempts to seduce the female. The man – woman / man is generally useless / and transparent and unsubtle to boot. Rhys Darby features in the classic Leggy Blonde – an ode to a departed female employee – ‘Every day I look across the office floor / There you were / Your hair down to your legs / And your legs down to the floor’.

Bret, You’ve Got It Going On is Jermaine trying to make his buddy feel better about his ability to pull and perhaps going too far: ‘Don’t let anyone tell you you’re not humpable…In fact one time when we were touring and I was really lonely and we were sharing that twin room in the hotel, I put a wig on you.’

Business Time draws its inspiration from Barry White ‘Girl – tonight we’re going to make love. You know how I know? Because it’s Wednesday and Wednesday night is the night that we usually make love. Monday night is my night to cook, Tuesday night we go and visit your mother, but Wednesday we make sweet weekly love. It’s when everything is just right. There’s nothing good on TV, you haven’t had your after work social sports team practice so you’re not too tired.’

Ladies of the World does patronising, cringy and creepy all at once.

Rambling Through the Avenues of Time is a Donovan / Ralph McTell-style fantasy. Brett seems to be singing this rapture sitting on the sofa next to Jermaine, who is less than impressed with the precision with which this story is told. The bass clarinet is a stroke of genius.

‘Where are you going with this, Brett?’

‘We drank dandelion wine and we reminisced / about the moment we first met that day [I’m trying to watch TV] / Then we reminisced about how we first reminisced [Ah, yeah? Sounds a bit gay] …

[What was her name?] She said her name was a secret / Then she said her name was Sheree [Is her middle name Sheree? So it’s Asecret Sheree, maybe?] Maybe’

Inner City Pressure is pure Pet Shop Boys: ‘Counting coins on the counter of the 7-11 / From a quarter past 6 to a quarter to 7 / The manager – Bevan – starts to abuse me / Hey man, I just want some muesli’

I Told You I Was Freaky is – well, freaky. In an electronic David Bowie kind of way. Fashion Is Danger goes all New Romantic – Blancmange, Human League, that kind of thing :’President Reagan. Thatcher. Jazzercise. Lip gloss.’

The most surreally gruesome is Petrov, Yelyena & Me tells the story of three shipwrecked Russians adrift in a boat. The narrator finds his companions get him drunk and while he is unconscious they progressively eat away at his limbs. So he takes arsenic and finds his companions dead. The downside is he is reduced to a head.

The TV series were terrific but you wonder where next for this duo who are already a legend in their home land.

The Bowie thing comes in two bits on YouTube – Bret’s Bowie dream and the tribute song – as an affectionate leg pull, let’s say. You need to watch them both.

What keeps this all together is their profound musical ability. The comedy works because FoC are musically faultless. The same rigour is found a generation earlier, although there is something edgier and less stable about the earlier outfit – and that is where the Mornington Crescent time machine is going next.