I recently saw a hippo and rhino go head to head in the heart of Washington, D.C.

To be more precise, I saw a band called Flight of the Conchords perform their rap-folk crossover hit "Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros."

If you choose to proceed
You will indeed concede
Cause I hit you with my flow,
the wild rhino stampede ….

They call me the Hiphopopotamus,
with flows that glow like phosphorous
popping off the top of this
esophagus
rockin' this metropolis …

I've been a diehard fan of this two-man folk novelty band from New Zealand since I first saw their HBO series, also called Flight of the Conchords, last June. The show chronicles their hilarious efforts to break into the New York City music scene. These brilliantly awkward everymen are gifted musical satirists, with a Grammy to show for it, and a newly released eponymous CD.

Meanwhile, it turns out that the two big-boned vegetarians, by which I mean the rhino and the hippo, have a long history in the Big Apple. Scott Sendrow, a park historian for New York City, helped me uncover the early years.

It seems a hippo was the first of the two to mark the city's turf. In the 1800's the zoo was more or less a parking lot for circuses. The big top kept ownership of their animals but conveniently lent them out for display (and feeding) during the off-season. A hippo was the first zoo animal to belong to the city; in 1892 a new director bartered off the hippo's calves to build a city-owned menagerie. The exchange rate at the time: one young hippo was worth a lioness, a Siberian tiger, two leopards, two Indian antelope, two pelicans, and, showing some prescient fashion sense, a pair of pumas.

Then came the rhinos. A team sent from New York to nab one from eastern Africa in 1911 described their task as the equivalent of  "lassoing a locomotive." A few years later a double horned rhino with the handle "Old Smiles" retired to the zoo from a country circus but still had enough grit to menace a group of keepers trying to dress him with a crown made from parsley. A rhino named Bessie, in residence in the Bronx Zoo in the 1930s, caught the eye of renowned animal sculptor Katherine Lane Weems, who was commissioned by Harvard University to immortalize her in bronze – twice.

The Conchords ultimately don't settle the rhino-hippo showdown, but it's fair to say both animals end up better off than the elephant, who gets a shoutout in the track "Robots"—a good news/bad news glimpse into a robot-dominated world where there is no more unethical treatment of the elephants, because, well, there are no more elephants.

-Brad Scriber

Photo by Amelia Handscomb

Comments