Bret McKenzie

With but a handful of TV and radio shows under his belt, Bret McKenzie became one of New Zealand's highest-profile exports since "Lord of the Rings" film visionary Peter Jackson, starring as the pretty, ill-shaven, romantic half of the musical comedy duo Flight of the Conchords. The "band," which McKenzie and partner Jemaine Clement described as "New Zealand's fourth most popular digi-folk parodists," became an unassuming comedy phenomenon for their R&B and hip-hop-infused songs about the mundane superfluities of love and robots taking over the world, and for their bone-dry, self-satirizing eponymous HBO series. Playing themselves as frumpy, barely functional losers doomed by their own naiveté to musical obscurity in New York City, McKenzie and Clement not only carved out a niche as actors, comedians, musicians, writers and producers of their own show, but as unofficial - and self-consciously inept - kiwi spokesmen as well.