’The X-Files’ Meets ‘Flight of the Conchords’ in 1 of the Greatest Comedy Series Ever

If Salvador Dalí lived during the golden age of television, The Mighty Boosh is the show he’d have made. Swapping paint and canvas for papier-mâché and a Moog, it rejects the conventional rules of television comedy. Manifesting a fully realized and internally consistent universe of unadulterated surrealist whimsy, and never once stopping to explain the dream logic it’s so confidently built upon, it remains timeless because it didn’t chase trends; it wrote its own playbook for a brand of humor that never goes out of style.

The Mighty Boosh is the brainchild of Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding, the former better known as the ultra-pompous, pseudo-intellectual, jazz-loving textbook pedant Howard Moon, and the latter the ultra-vain, glamorously chaotic, self-proclaimed King of the Mods, Vince Noir. The duo first appeared as a stage show at the 1998 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, evolving their act over two additional live shows and a radio series before reaching final form as a half-hour BBC Three comedy in 2004. Combining live-action sketches with zany animation and musical elements, it centered on the bizarre, magical misadventures of Howard and Vince.

‘The Mighty Boosh’ Delivers Utterly Original Visual and Musical Comedy

Image via BBC

Using DIY psychedelic getups, lo-fi handmade sets, and found-material character accessories, The Mighty Boosh brings to life a visual world unlike any you’ve ever seen. Its two leads embody different aspects of the 70s; Vince is a walking glam-mod icon in jumpsuits and teased-up hair, while Howard’s pencil mustache is perfectly matched with a parade of patterns, corduroy, and tweed. The rotating cast of characters and routine antagonists are decked out in garb made of everything from cleaning rags, like Mr. Susan, to sandpaper, like Sandstorm, to shaving cream slathered on Fielding’s face to create his singing, monologuing Moon.

The visual aesthetic is only part – albeit a fairly significant part – of the show’s unmatched and eternal vibe. The other equally important aspect was its music, an addition only a handful of comedy series have successfully pulled off. Instead of stopping the plot in its tracks, the music advances it; whether through “crimping,” the fast-paced a cappella nonsense rhymes frequently employed throughout the series, full-on thematic pieces like “Tundra Rap” and “Call of the Yeti,” storyline-based tracks like “Electro Boy” or character interludes like “Eels” and internet-favorite Old Gregg masterpiece, “Love Games.” It added a sense of unpredictability and later, virality.

Relying on the Humor of Illusion, ‘The Mighty Boosh’ Remains Rooted in Reality

Image via BBC

As The Mighty Boosh was ending, Flight of the Conchords began, following a near-identical trajectory – Fringe, radio, television – and owning a spot as one of the very few shows that have made musical interludes an integral part of its core identity. But whereas Flight of the Conchords has a hard-set storyline following two mumblecore-adjacent New Zealanders (Bret Mackenzie and Jemaine Clement) trying to make it as musicians in America, it really only embraced surrealism when a song needed to overtake the plot. The entirety of The Mighty Boosh​​​​​​’s storytelling exists in a state of suspended reality, making it a truly one-of-a-kind thing to behold.

Each season of The Mighty Boosh unfolded in a different location; the first took place in the Zooniverse, a dilapidated, oddity-plagued zoo owned by villainous adventurer Dixon Bainbridge (Matt Berry) and run by his bizarrely incompetent and incredibly loud right-hand man, Bob Fossil (Rich Fulcher), where the core duo worked as zookeepers and spent most of their free time. For the second, the action moved to a retro-style London apartment shared with former coworkers Naboo the Enigma (Michael Fielding), a 406-year-old alien and freelance shaman, and his anthropomorphic ape familiar Bollo (Dave Brown). The final season took place in the Nabootique, a second-hand curio store below the apartment owned by Naboo, where Vince and Howard worked as caretakers when the owner was out of town.

‘The Mighty Boosh’ Adds a New Twist to a Familiar Framework

Image via Baby Cow Productions

While these locations served as loose wrappers for each season, what truly drove each episode was one of the show’s few concessions to conventionalism: a surrealist interpretation of a monster-of-the-week framework. Introducing a new antagonist – usually a villain, sometimes a formerly inanimate object, but often a spirit, creature, or phenomenon – enabled the storytelling to flow naturally around a character, and inhabit a format best suited to the character in hand. Procedurals use this framework to evoke familiarity, but The Mighty Boosh used it to create a unique entry point to its comedy, making no two episodes the same.

A comedy deeply rooted in absurdity might appear to have little in common with major mainstream dramas, yet The Mighty Boosh and The X-Files overlap well beyond their shared sci-fi roots. The X-Files is the quintessential monster-of-the-week series, and while it may focus on investigating aliens and the supernatural, The Mighty Boosh sees just as many bizarre encounters but uses them as fodder for multi-level jokes. The characters share a lineage, too: Vince is the Fox Mulder (David Duchovny), an open-minded and imaginative believer who actively seeks out the fantastical and strange; Howard is the Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), a self-serious, cynical skeptic who relies on rigid rationalization and wants to get to the bottom of any so-called supernatural they might stumble on.

Ultimately, The Mighty Boosh picks up where Monty Python left off in the 1970s, airing at the height of surrealist cable TV glory days. But it’s a tradition still found in some of the best television in recent memory, whether through How To With John Wilson finding the strange in the mundane, Atlanta infusing hyperrealism with jarring surrealism to make you truly feel a lived reality, or the Kafkaesque corporate-existential psychological labyrinth of Severance. But it’s the greatest comedy ever created, one that deserves to be experienced by every human on the planet at least once, so if you haven’t spent time with the Boosh previously, or even just lately, – well, this right here is your cue.