Garfunkel & Oats Are Music To Comedy Fans’ Ears
The music video begins rather innocently: two pretty girls, a tall blonde with a guitar and a petite brunette with a ukulele, smile sweetly and sing an ode to blossoming romance. “And like can lead to like-like/And like-like can lead to looove,” they coo. “Sure as the stars above/I’d really like to fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.” Oh! But that’s as raunchy as it gets; the comedy folk duo, who go by the name Garfunkel & Oates, drop F-bombs and bon mots about life and love without shedding so much as a sweat- er vest. In their sardonic songs, Riki Lindhome (Garfunkel, left, 30) and Kate Micucci (Oates, 29) often poke fun at the pitfalls of dating, like one-night stands, “douche-bag- gy guys,” and third wheels (“It’s fi nally you and me and me and you/Just us…and your friend Steve”). “We get a lot of material from crazy dates,” admits Micucci. Both L.A.-based actors, the pair often spotted each other at auditions. They didn’t offi cially meet, however, until 2006, when they struck up a conversation at a com- edy club and developed mutual “talent crushes” on each other. Lindhome wrote a short fi lm for the two of them to act in, they decided to turn it into a musical, “and that’s how we started writing music,” she says.
Since the duo formed in September 2008, Garfunkel & Oates’ videos have been viewed—and even covered— on YouTube by thousands of fans. They’ve attracted the ire of pregnant women (for their song “Pregnant Women Are Smug”), caught the attention of CNN (for their satiric pro-gay-marriage video, “Sex With Ducks”), and have be- come the darlings of the L.A. comedy scene as the only women making waves in a genre currently dominated by Flight of the Conchords and the Lonely Island boys. Lind- home says that their original goal for the band was simply to play at the legendary Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in L.A., “and that happened weeks later,” she says. “Then we were like, ‘Now what?’” “Now what?” turned out to be a lot. This past summer, in addition to what became monthly gigs at UCB, they played in Montreal and Seattle, produced an EP, and in July, the real John Oates invited them to perform with him—so they rocked the house with their cover of “Maneater.” Micucci says she wanted to include in their rendition of that song “a puppet who eats guys with gi- ant jaws, but between Riki’s [mock] striptease and my trombone solo, well, the song isn’t that long!” G&O plan to join Oates again on stage soon and also want to take their act on the road. Until then, you can laugh along to their music at www.garfunkelandoates.com.
Photographed by Verity Smith; Stylist: Jazzi McGilbert
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