Rhys Darby: Two Cornish rappers and a Casiotone to go

Sleep helps unlock mystery chambers in the brain. Photo / Getty Images

Come and see this gloriously weird and funny musical parody.

My Cornish rappers have arrived. I'm really happy that I could start this week's column with that sentence. Hedluv and Passman as they're called have been flown across the globe by my wife to perform in the New Zealand Comedy Festival.

In a chance occurrence backed by some weird desire I'm now caught in a beautiful situation of life imitating art. With the risk of telling you a story that will no doubt be repeated in countless interviews from this point on, I should like to let you all know, my avid readers, how I came across these boys and why they're here ...

It all began in the sunny meadows of Edinburgh last year. My wife Rosie and I were walking through the fields when suddenly we were approached by a young man offering us a flyer to his show. Yes, it was Fringe Festival time. Hedluv was the man with the flyer and as fate would have it he was having a lucky day. He was lucky that he was the first person to flyer us on the first day of the festival. We actually stopped and listened to what he had to say ...

"We're serious rappers but we've been put into this comedy festival by mistake." he said as he showed us his flyer. At which point he was lucky again. His flyer was terrible. The photos of the two chaps were like criminal mug shots. I mean they weren't even in a photo together. It was like they had given the print shop their spare passport photos and said "Do what you can with those."

I had to laugh. It struck a chord with me somehow. The bad art work on the flyer seemed to match his story. Was this guy telling the truth?

Rosie and I decided to go and see the show. After all it was called Hedluv and Passman - Two Cornish Rappers and a Casiotone. It seemed so wrong it must be right. And boy oh boy it was. I've seen a lot of comedy over the years. Plenty of stand up, sketch and of course musical parody. But this was different. It didn't fit into any of those boxes. It was gloriously weird. It was as if one dimension had opened up and swallowed another one leaving a tiny worm hole for two pasty white men to escape using only the power of dance fuelled by a red woollen hat, a flying microphone and a keyboard from Cash Converters.

We ended up seeing these guys perform half a dozen times throughout the month of the festival and by the end we'd made a decision. We had to get them to New Zealand.

So they're here for you all, enjoy, have a ball. I feel like their manager, like the man who said YES. There was never a question but if there was it would be "Are these guys for real?" Oh yes they are ... They are indeed.

Visit www.comedyfestival.co.nz