Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie were the last Kiwi comics to make it big in the US. You probably haven't heard of Guy Montgomery and Tim Batt: but a lot of Americans have. As their bizarre podcast clicks over the 3 million downloads mark, they tell Steve Kilgallon how it's happened.

Tim Batt and Guy Montgomery's third trip to Los Angeles was a "cataclysmic" 40-hour marathon which involved a cancelled flight, a broken plane, an unexpected diversion to Dallas, a closed rental car office, a sleeping Air B n B host who couldn't hear his doorbell ring, a fudged hotel booking and a lost laptop.

The secret to a good relationship, says Batt in the manner of a learned counsellor, is being able to travel well together. And not once, he reports proudly, did either lose their temper. "We're essentially married at this point," he considers. "And I think we've got a healthy relationship."

BEVAN READ/stuff.co.nz Felicity Ward opens up to Tim Batt about how a review early in her career influenced her mental health.

"Our girlfriends would have a real hot take on that," offers Montgomery.

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LAWRENCE SMITH/STUFF Tim Batt and Guy Montgomery.

The trip was still worth it. Batt and Montgomery's core audience isn't at home, where they are well-regarded but hardly famous stand-up comedians and Montgomery has a bizarre late-night television show (Fail Army), but in America, and more specifically, Los Angeles.

They perform a weekly podcast - The Worst Idea Ever - in which they watch and review the same movie once a week for a year. So far, they've endured a year of the frat-boy comedy Grown Ups 2, a year of the 150-minute marathon Sex and the City 2, and on the day we meet, are embarking on 12 months of consuming the vacuous Zac Efron vehicle We are your Friends.

The most recent US visit was in part to celebrate being able to never again watch Sarah Jessica Parker and her friends troop across a desert, broadcasting their final Sex and the City 2 episode live in New York on March 3.

Then they took what Montgomery calls a two-month "mental health hiatus". When they broke, the podcast was sitting at about three million total downloads and a per-episode audience now approaching 20,000.

Those numbers are gradually climbing, spiking with a mention on US podcaster Paul Sheer's show and a feature on the pair in the influential online journal VICE. "Guy Montgomery the comedian doesn't have fans, but the podcast has fans: people love it," says Montgomery.

For all their firm, travel-unbreakable friendship, it's happened very quickly. Batt and Montgomery first met three years ago when they were thrown together on a on the now-defunct youth TV programme UTV in which Montgomery hosted an increasingly-dishevelled Batt for a section reviewing public toilets ( The Loo Revue).

They had never met before. "We clicked quite instantly," says Batt. "I would be tempted to say that back then it wasn't like love, this guy wasn't my best mate but it was - 'whoah, we've got a good thing going on here, a good riff'."

Montgomery says the "fibres of the friendship were [further] bound" when they had the shared stress of being nominated for the Billy T award for emerging comedy talent at the 2014 New Zealand Comedy Festival (Montgomery won).

And the relationship clearly intensified when they decided to spend an afternoon together each week under increasing mental pressure watching the same movie on repeat. "The podcast puts us under duress - self-imposed duress, but duress nonetheless - and I think maybe we see when the other needs lifting,' says Montgomery. "And it segues quite nicely into real life."

Slowly it gained an audience. And their click stats could tell them exactly who was listening - and where. Thus the US trips: their first, in early 2015, was crowdfunded by those very passionate American fans, who also hosted them: they memorably stayed at one fans' mansion in the Hollywood hills (Batt: "lovely guy... lot of guns"). Those same fans insisted they mark the occasion with matching buttock tattoos of minor Grown Ups 2 actor Patrick Schwarzenegger. Their second trip involved a visit to a renowned podcast festival, and the third included a Sex and the City 2 script table read by actors including Melanie Lynskey and 'Busy' Phillipps and playing at an LA comedy night hosted by Rhys Darby and headlined by Kristen Schaal.

How to monetise anything online is a question torturing much bigger operations than two 20-somethings in the front room of a Grey Lynn villa, but it's starting to pay off for Batt and Montgomery.

The back catalogue has been sold behind the paywall of the 'Netflix of podcasting', Airwolf (which also hosts Jemaine Clement's podcast). They have a couple of sponsors and Batt sells a bit of "merch" but they say that while the fans don't mind them earning a dollar, knowing how they "spent a long time torturing ourselves for nothing" in the early days, they are determined to maintain a purity around the podcast. "A brand can hire Tim and Guy," says Montgomery, "but they can't hire The Worst Idea of All Time. The reason it works is because it is so unfiltered. The moment you have to do any form of compromise within the content of the podcast it just wont work. [And the audience] smell bullshit, and if you bury it anyway, it just stinks."

Ten years ago, two ambitious young comics like Batt and Montgomery would doubtlessly have declared their goals to have a primetime TV show. Now it's not so clearcut. Eventually, they settle for declaring they want to keep doing stuff they find funny and hoping some of it works. "There was no goal or intention for the podcast to become successful," Batt points out. "It just seemed like a real funny way to spend some time."

And Montgomery is dismissive of his own rather subversive work presenting the late-night TV3 clip show Fail Army, an appealingly low-budget affair where Montgomery and Joseph Moore voice over an imported selection of 'hilarious' US home video clips of people injuring themselves. "There is no one to take our homework to and say 'yes or no'," says Montgomery. Inside the three minute-long piece-to-camera clips in each show, he says, they've created their own world and storylines. "So we did something close to the TV show we would like to have made inside the TV show we were told to make."

The real career opportunities, says Batt, have come from the podcast, "a show that no network would ever have greenlit'. He's now trying to build a New Zealand comedy-focused podcast network, a project he initiated last year. "I am amazed no one has cracked it yet in New Zealand and it is a case of whoever gets there first and really nails it."

​​Both are mid-season at the New Zealand Comedy Festival, with concept shows in the same venue, an hour apart: Batt doing a mock-political husting, Montgomery a very unseasonal Christmas-themed show.

But already, they are back in the podcasting grind. Season three, however, will be the last for The Worst Idea Ever. "We want to adopt the British model of making something good for a set amount of time," says Batt, "rather than the American model of running it into the ground."

It's too early to say what they'll think about We are your Friends right now. Neither wishes to ever see Sex and the City 2 again (there's a thinly-disguised loathing for that piece of cinema) but Montgomery admits to a "nostalgic fondness" for Grown-Ups 2. "If I was in a hotel and it was on screen, I don't know if I would sit down and watch it to the end. But I would probably check in for five or ten minutes to see how the boys are doing."

Tim Batt's Vote Batt! and Guy Montgomery's Guy MontgoMERRY Christmas shows both play the Montecristo, Auckland, this week as part of the NZ International Comedy Festival. See comedyfestival.co.nz

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