HBO Comedy Roundup: Apples and Kiwis

I'm starting to think that Flight of the Conchords has defined a category: the story-proof comedy. Last night's episode by rights should not have been any good. There was a weak premise. (Bret and Jemaine get discriminated against for being New Zealanders by a fruit vendor--by the way, did I miss it or was there not a single kiwi joke? Update: There was.) It was, more transparently than earlier episodes, a thrown-together concept that existed solely to work in a popular FOTC song, "Albi the Racist Dragon."

But while it was funny enough to see Albi come alive in claymation glory, the real high points of the show were the nonmusical bits: Murray finding excuses to talk to the hot tech girl ("25 years and obsolete already!"), Bret and Jemaine's inept war of insults with the fruit seller ("He... he just turned it back around on us!"). It's a good sign, because one of the open questions about FOTC is what the show will do once it exhausts the duo's greatest hits, which it just about has. And of course, there was the uplifting climax, in which the former foes were united in their common bigotry against Australians.

All of which, by the way, made the perfect ironic lead-out from this week's episode of Entourage, which did nothing whatsoever to advance the Medellin storyline, but did go out of its way to teach us the lesson that you should never send your kid to public school because they'll get kicked in the shin by a black kid. I'm starting to consider taking a half-hour nap from 10 to 10:30 on Sundays.