Actor Allusion: The Coco episode repeatedly references a connection between New Zealand and Lord of the Rings. On top of the fact that the movies were filmed in New Zealand, Bret had a bit part as an elf in one of them.
Affectionate Parody: "Bowie" is an over-the-top, yet still somehow spot-on parody of David Bowie; "Inner City Pressure" takes on the Pet Shop Boys; "Fashion" - the entire New Romantic genre; "You Don't Have to be a Prostitute" - "Roxanne" by The Police; "I'm not Crying" - "I'm not in Love" by 10CC; "Hurt Feelings (Reprise)" is a dead-on take of the "Wise Up" Aimee Mann montage in Magnolia...
Alien Lunch: Bret's bag of found food in "Bret Gives Up the Dream." Jemaine first goes to spit it out, then decides that he'll just eat it.
American Accents / British Accents: Depending on the genre being pastiched, such as in "Hurt Feelings", "Inner City Pressure", and many others.
Damn You, Muscle Memory: Bret leaves Murray's car thinking he put the parking brake on without realizing that the shift is on the other side in American cars.
Did Not Do The Bloody Research: Played for laughs in-universe. Bret and Jemaine are completely unfamiliar with American swearing and Dave has to teach them how to flip someone off.
Discriminate And Switch: In "Drive-By", Bret and Jemaine are harassed by a racist greengrocer. The situation is resolved when they explain that he's confusing New Zealand with Australia.
Downer Ending: The Season 1 finale could apply. "The Crazy Dogggz", a band formed by Todd and Demetri (two musicians who quit the Conchords), has hit the big time with a song Bret and Jemaine refused to play. Their manager, who also manages the Dogggz, has almost totally stopped managing them. And, possibly worst of all, their former Loony Fan, Mel, has lost all interest in them. However, as this is the Conchords we're talking about, it's all played for laughs.
Of course, this is all reversed in literally the first ten minutes of Episode One of Season Two, as The Crazy Dogggz are found to have plagiarized a Polish band fifteen years before them, leaving Murray literally homeless. Mel is also back, seen lighting a Crazy Dogggz bonfire.
The Season 2 ending is a possible subversion: Murray, Bret and Jemaine are all deported and resume their careers as shepherds. However, they seem just as happy to play their music in the fields as in their apartment or in empty clubs.
Epic Rocking: Often parodied. For example, when the duo tries writing a jingle for a thirty second commercial for Femident Toothpaste, they come up with an eighteen minute long song. Another notable example is when Bret initially writes "Song For Coco" (which Jemaine helps him rewrite to "If You're Into It"), the song is two hours long.
Friends Rent Control: Dealt with in "Evicted", when the landlord realizes that he's been receiving checks in New Zealand dollars, not US dollars.
Funny Background Event: The New Zealand tourism poster in Murray's office changes every episode, usually saying something along the lines of "New Zealand: It's not Australia," or "New Zealand: Worth a visit."
This article argues the entire series is a big gender flip [1]
Gratuitous French: Foux de Fa Fa, which is basically the fragments of French that they remember from school shoehorned into song form to try to impress women.
Humans Are Bastards - Mocked in "The Humans are Dead," in which robots kill all the humans for making them work unreasonable hours. However, one line suggests that, by killing the humans, the robots are becoming like the humans.
"Captain, do you not see the irony that by destroying the humans for their destructive capabilities, we have become more like them... do you... see what we've done."
Murry, who's misconceptions about the music business are largely responsible for the Conchords lack of success.
Lampshade Hanging: An amazing number of first season episodes involved Bret quitting the band, and in a later season 1 episode Murray quits the band, prompting Jemaine to tell him "you can't quit the band, Bret normally quits the band!"
Let's Get Dangerous: Bret is a very shy and sensitive guy who usually feels uncomfortable around women, and if he gets laid is mainly because Abuse Is Okay When It Is Female on Male. However, BEWARE if you are his fancy and he gets freak-ay: you may end bodypainted to match the wall, photographed with a goat on a boat, dressed as a squirrel in order to steal his nuts or performing foreplay with cardboard silhouettes of yourselves...
Mistaken for Gay: In one way or another, this happens throughout the entire series. Did someone say Ho Yay? Why yes.
Specifically in the Season Two episode "Love Is A Weapon Of Choice" in which Brahbrah admits she had remained oblivious to both Bret and Jemaine's advances because she thought they were a gay couple.
Also "Bret, you've got it going on"...
"But how can that be gay, if you're pretending he's a woman?"
Mushroom Samba: "I'm the pretty Prince of Parties, you're a tasty piece of pastry!"
Musical World Hypotheses: One of those musicals that are not Alternate Universe. Some of the songs are diegetic, such as Robots, If You're Into It and Albi the Racist Dragon; some of the songs are All In Their Heads like Business Time and Prince of Parties, and some of the songs are musical adaptations of events that really do happen, such as Foux da Fa Fa, Most Beautiful Girl in the Room, I Told You I Was Freekie and Hurt Feelings.
It looks like they actually perform "Fashion" in-universe, but are only confident enough to do so because of the hair gel.
Sometimes, it's not really clear what happened. After the two spend a few minutes doing a ridiculous performance of Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros in front of 2 muggers, the only response they get is,
"Were you guys dancing a little bit?"
My Nayme Is: "Her name is Barbara!" "No, it's Brahbrah" "There's no such name as Brahbrah!" - yeah, turns out her name really is Brahbrah.
Negative Continuity: The second season, where for instance the Conchords lose all their furniture in episode five and have it back without any mention of how in episode six, Bret dates an admittedly rather loony woman at the end of episode six who has vanished without a trace in episode seven, and Bret and Jemaine fall down to "strangers" on Murray's friendship graph in episode four with him even remarking that the next band meeting will be awkward because "you're strangers!", but in episode five communications between them and Murray are back to exactly how they were before. The first season at least had a couple of developing subplots and included Snap Backs to restore the status quo before the end of each episode.
Nice Hat: In episode one, Bret is working on a helmet that looks like his hair. Later in the series, he wears it while biking.
Overly Narrow Superlative: As noted above, the band often introduces themselves in live performances as "formerly New Zealand's fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo acapella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo". (The third-most-popular is claimed to be "Like of the Conchords," a Fot C tribute band.)
Additionally, the song Most Beautiful Girl in the Room revolves around this:
Looking 'round the room I can tell that you Are the most beautiful girl in the Room...
Poor Man's Substitute: In-Universe. at one point, Bret and Jemaine got a gig as replacement Simon & Garfunkel lookalikes. They look nothing like Simon and Garfunkel, but Murray claims they're practically identical to the Simon and Garfunkel lookalikes they were sitting in for.
Precision F-Strike: "Go fuck yourself, Bret." From Murray, whose usual version of this is "Stuff you" or "Stuff you twice" if he's particularly mad. It makes you go "Whoa, he's serious."
"It's not a fucking school play production. It's the bird."
I call my friends, say let's go into town, But they're all too busy, to go into town, So I go by myself, I go into town, Then I see all my friends, they're all in town.
There's just a little bit of dust in my eye Dust from the path that you made when you said your goodbye I'm not weeping 'cause you won't be here to hold my hand For your information there's an inflammation in my tear gland
Although the Aesop delivered there ("racism is bad") is a perfectly good one, they just deliberately delivered it in the most ridiculous way possible.
More precisely, the protest song "Think About It". Again, the Aesops themselves are perfectly reasonable ("sweatshops are bad ...") but the song misses the point completely ("... because they don't actually make their products cheaper").
Status Quo is God: Used straight and.... not. While the basic premise is always restored by the episode's end, some subplots (such as Bret and Coco's relationship) develop from episode to episode. The season 1 finale leaves some minor loose ends, most notably the fact that Mel, their one fan, has moved on and become obsessed with another band. This leads to a very quick Snap Back in season 2.
The Stinger: In the "Bowie" episode, the second half of the credits run alongside Bret and Jemaine performing an arrangement of the song based on Bowie's Let's Dance period, complete with matching pastel suits and funky dance moves.
Stylistic Suck: If you can't understand how Bret and Jemaine are so unknown in-universe, just listen to the songs they actually perform.
And arguably the songs they sing during the interludes. The Conchords mentioned in an interview that they think comedy songs only work if it sounds like the singer really believes it, so we get them really seriously singing a protest song that includes the line "man's lyin' in the street/some punk's chopped off his head/I'm the only one who stops to see if he's dead."
Ted Baxter: Dave thinks that he's a cool ladies man, but really he's a pawn shop owner who lives with his parents.
That Reminds Me of a Song: Used off and on in the TV show since it uses songs written years before. Some episodes were written specifically to avert the trope, like making epileptics dogs a major plot point just so that the song about them would fit. Other times they don't even try, like the Mermaid song. Other times, the songs coming from nowhere and not making any sense any sense actually works, like "Prince of Parties" (played when Bret takes drugs for the first time) and "Petrov, Yelyena, and Me" (played when Bret has a bad dream).
Timey Wimey Ball: This introduction to Bowie, they claimed to have gone back in time and taught David Bowie his own songs, using an Easy-to-Play Bowie songbook.
Gonna Fly Now Montage: In "Drive By", when Dave attempts to train Bret and Jemaine in the art of extremely rude gestures. It takes a while.
Not to mention "mutha'uckas" and "mother-flipping."
What Could Have Been: Considering both the tour guide from the unfeatured "Bus Driver's Song" and the Prime Minister of New Zealand harbour an unrequited crush on a girl named Paula, and the Prime Minister at one point acts as a tour guide on a bus, you can't help but think there was originally meant to be a connection there.
At the end of that episode, the melody from the Bus Drivers Song plays, but the song was probably not included as the lyrics refer to the town in which the Bus Driver grew up in, rather than the ten-meter strech of road that has been turned into New Zealand-town.
What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome?: Reading the lyrics to the songs, or just hearing them described, you'd think they'd be terrible. But Bret and Jemaine put an awful lot of talent and brilliant homage into them, even their most ridiculous songs are great.
Yoko Oh No: Parodied and lampshaded when Bret dates Coco.
(coughs) Yoko.
Did you just say Yoko?
Ohno, I was just coughing.
Zeerust: Their vision of a future in which robots become all-purpose laborers, achieve sentience, rebel against their masters and eventually exterminate the human race so that they can party. It's in the distant future of the year 2000.
For reference, they wrote the song back in the nineties. But they didn't change it for the 2000's TV show, thus expertly turning a parody of Exty Years From Now into an even better parody of I Want My Jetpack.
Some of their instruments look pretty technoriffic... for the eighties. Among them a Casio 1983 digital guitar, an Omnidrum and some old school synthezisers. They also are fond for those VHS Murrays gets back home though, granted, all that DVD craze seems still a little bit afar from New Zealand.
Those robot outfits would have been dissed as zeerusty even by Fritz Lang!
Who wanna rock the party?! Who wanna rock the party?!
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