Jemainia: Breadlines to punchlines

Superstar funnyman Jemaine Clement turned years of family life on a Masterton breadline into punchlines his mother never saw coming, she says.
Merianne McArdell, Ngati Kahungunu and Rangitaane, said from her Wellington home yesterday she is just as surprised now at the international success her son is capturing as the day she first saw him perform more than 20 years ago in a musical comedy at Makoura College, where the eldest of her three boys originally walked into the spotlight.
"When he was at Makoura he was involved with a lot of the productions they put on every year and I was really surprised going to see the first one. It was like watching somebody else's child. I didn't recognise him.
"I saw then that he had a stage presence, you know, he had a loud booming voice and he wasn't shy at all and yet he is such a very shy person."
The 34-year-old international celebrity is today "tired but happy" to be writing new material in Los Angeles alongside fellow Kiwi luminary Bret McKenzie for their second US television season of Flight of the Conchords.
The show, which last week won three Emmy nominations, is centred on the life and rhymes of a Kiwi musical duo trying to make it in New York and has already spawned a Grammy Award-winning album.
Ms McArdell speaks with her son most weekends and he returns home for Christmas when able since his storming of America and almost constant international travel alongside McKenzie.
"When they're writing it's bloody hard work and not a lot of laughter but he still tries to keep in touch weekly. For someone who wouldn't clean his room when asked, he really is disciplined and super industrious now."
Ms McArdell moved to Masterton from Greytown with Jemaine, Zed and Te Maia in about 1980, shifting into a state house in Johnstone Street, which she eventually bought, with Clement attending East School and Hiona Intermediate before enrolling at Makoura.
Her youngest child, Te Maia, had just been born, Clement was 7, and she was raising her sons alone on a domestic purposes benefit.
Life was a constant struggle after their shift to the pink house on the dump road "that we were quite lucky to get lucky because otherwise we would have been homeless", she said.
Ms McArdell said their family years in Masterton "were really hard" and became more difficult with the closure of the Waingawa freezing works in 1988.
"Everybody was poor after that, especially on the eastside, and you know things are bad when you get to the end of a week and all there is to feed your kids is poached eggs.
"It was like that for almost everybody I knew and all of our neighbours so there was no shame. It was something we all went through. It was just life as we knew it. I believe now that those struggles still affect what Jemaine writes today you know 'you gotta laugh or you'll just cry' sort of thing."
In the early 90s, Ms McArdell joined a group fighting welfare payment cuts and covered her front fence in graffiti as a public sign of personal opposition.
Her eldest son was also drawn into the fray, she said, though more out of a sense of proper English than protest.
"The artist who painted the fence was dyslexic and there were spelling errors. Jemaine was so embarrassed he snuck out under cover of darkness and corrected the mistakes."
Clement, despite sharing a family trait of shyness, marked himself early as the father figure in their household and still performs the role today.
His need for privacy and freedom helped hide from her his offstage theatrics during his college years alongside friends of a similar thespian bent, she said.
"But then mothers never truly know their sons I reckon, so I didn't always know what he was up to. Because he's my eldest I relied on him too, so he had a lot of authority even though I was tougher on him than my other boys," she said.
"When he was at college he didn't bring girlfriends home to me and I know there were girlfriends because his friends told me. But he really wasn't any trouble outside of home, so there was no need to pry into what he was doing.
"His friends knew him in a different way than I did, of course, and he had a good group of friends at Makoura. I'm just glad it was drama he was into and not drugs."
Was he too busy building a legend?
"Yeah, but I didn't know that."
She said he avoided traps common to teenage sons "who are kind of left rudderless" without a father and instead developed an enduring self-determination that in the past sparked with her own.
"He had his own bedroom but I had this really bad habit of letting people move in who had nowhere else to live.
"He had to constantly give up his room and go and sleep with his brothers in one room.
"When he was about 10 he told me he'd had enough and was going to live with his grandma (Maikara McArdell). He walked all the way to Greytown. After that I thought 'this is really bad', so I had to kick out my cousin and her two babies.
"Once they were gone, he come home again and got his own room back," she said.
Ms McArdell said her eldest son has been musical since he was an infant and would often as a baby "dance in his high chair to The Carpenters on the radio".
"He was never formally educated in music and I'm kicking myself now that I wasn't watching out for that kind of thing, for a talent.
"My brothers are all musical, they all play instruments, but I didn't have many records Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell so my boys really just listened to the radio at home and they all appreciate music."
After her sons each left to seek their fortunes beyond the Masterton family hearth, she sold the Johnstone Street home and shifted to England for several years.
"It was Jemaine that made sure everyone back here was OK. He called them and checked on them and kept everyone together.
"Another good thing about living in England was that Jemaine stayed with me whenever he performed in Britain with either Taika (Waititi) or Bret.
"The first time Taika and Jemaine went as Humourbeasts to the Edinburgh Festival they both came back home (to New Zealand) as skinny as sticks they were really on the bones of their arse over there. Jemaine was happy though even if he was a skeleton.
"All three of them came from families raised by their mums alone Jemaine, Bret and Taika and that common experience has probably affected what they create together as well as their career decisions," she said.
"They know how to place themselves at the right time I think, and even though I know they don't want to be the Conchords forever, they make the most of the opportunities they make for themselves.
"And they're so hard-working. It's not much fun writing comedy into the wee hours of the morning at those times there's not that much laughter," she said.
Ms McArdell has seen glimpses of his grandmother and her sense of humour in several works created by her son with the Untold Tales of Maui production alongside Waititi featuring an elderly woman based on Maikara.
In the Waititi-directed film Eagle vs Shark featuring Clement in the lead role, Ms McArdell again spied snatches of a past shared with him in Masterton.
"The family situation in that film the big messy family is definitely recognisable an extended family with all these issues living in the same house. But that was forced on him, he had to go through it and couldn't wait to get out.
"He doesn't live unless he likes himself," she said.
"He is famous now and obviously worked very hard for it and yet he resents the fame at the same time. He likes to walk down the street and be anonymous.
"To me his humour is best when he's being himself, when he's being the Jemaine I know. But it's still astounding to see him on television or at the movies. It's like you think you know someone, especially your own child, and then they surprise you, again."