The more civilized one becomes, the better one learns to lie—this is a fact of near-anthropological proportions. It’s hard to survive in polite society, after all, unless one knows how to delude, deceive, and dissimulate. Ivy Leaguers are well aware of this—we all know just how dangerous it is to reveal our innermost feelings to the people around us. It’s no surprise, then, that social interaction at Columbia often becomes a Kafka-esque affair. In the Ivy League world, the sharpest thorns can be found beneath the sweetest smiles, and even the bitterest enemies serenade one another with affected politeness. It’s hard to tell how people really feel about each other, and one has to be an Old Testament scholar—or a feminist literary theorist—if one wants to get to the bottom of things.
Associated with the tendency of Ivy Leaguers to disguise their feelings is a convoluted psycho-emotional situation. In our environment, at least, the most disparate emotions blend into one another with impunity, making it hard for people to recognize the moods and feelings of those around them. There may have been a time—in our prehistory, perhaps—when our emotions were unambiguous, when they could be distinguished from one another. That time, however, has passed. These days, every emotion has the potential to transform into its opposite—respect can morph into jealousy, fear can give way to lust, and even the warmest love can slowly grow into a desire to inflict pain. The complexity of our emotional life is a sight to behold—if one has eyes for it, that is. But this is obvious, and even the intellectuals among us are perceptive enough to realize it.
All of this is by way of introducing Flight of the Conchords, the popular comedy series that recently finished its two-season run on HBO. Conchords has managed to acquire a following among Ivy Leaguers, most of whom tend to be quite humorless. The show follows the exploits of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, two New Zealand-based songwriters who come to New York in an effort to make it big. Various commentators have written about Conchords, but few have pointed out that the show has a lot to say about the Byzantine complexity that characterizes Ivy League social life.
Nearly every episode of Conchords reveals the remarkable guilelessness, candor, and sincerity of Bret and Jemaine. Since the men are too simple to understand duplicity, they’re routinely deceived by the people around them. Bret and Jemaine, moreover, are strangers to sarcasm, and they display anger, sadness, and joy with Pinocchio-like naïveté. In Conchords, one finds two men who are incapable of being anyone but themselves, who have no idea how to use trickery and deceit to their advantage. It’s a fact of Darwinian necessity that characters like Bret and Jemaine would find it hard to survive in the Ivy League world.
Flight of the Conchords is a typical fiction, for it portrays a world that none of us will ever inhabit, a world in which one can afford to remain oblivious to the Dostoevskian intrigues that make social interaction so complex. Yet Conchords is no escapist fantasy, for it reveals something about the workings of our own world.
In every corner of Ivy League society, one can find a pathological fear of being lied to. Ivy Leaguers pride themselves on being clever, witty, and sarcastic—they pride themselves, in other words, on being hard to deceive. Among Columbians, few things are more shameful—more intolerably embarrassing—than being a sucker. Just look at how many Columbians shy away from dating because they’re terrified of being made a fool of by the opposite sex. This, by the way, is why we work so hard to cultivate a veneer of intellectualism. By pretending that we’re innovative thinkers, by doing our best to appear cynical and sophisticated, we try to show those around us that we’re too clever to be lied to. “Don’t try to fool me, for I’ve read Karl Marx and Paul Auster.”—this is the message that Ivy Leaguers hope to convey to their peers. We don’t pursue education for its own sake—we pursue it in order to protect ourselves against being duped, deceived, and betrayed. What? Our hunger for knowledge stems from a fear of humiliation? Intellectualism is a pathology? This is too horrifying to be true!
In the end, Conchords reminds us that—even if we have no choice but to inhabit a world of deceit and mendacity—we can nonetheless lead calm and joyful lives. It’s okay to be fooled by false appearances, and there’s nothing shameful about being deceived every once in a while. This is the remarkably simple message of Flight of the Conchords.
Philip Petrov is a Columbia College senior majoring in political science. He is the Literary and Arts Editor of The Current. Illuminated Manuscripts runs alternate Mondays. opinion@columbiaspectator.com
