Kristen Schaal of 'Flight of the Conchords' costar Kristen Schaal is ready for takeoff

"People seem to think they're the only ones who have seen the show," Schaal says. "One time I was out to dinner with one of my friends in New York, and when I got up to go to the bathroom, the guy at the table next to us leaned in and said, 'Do you know she's on an HBO show?' "

She may have reached the most eyeballs as Mel, the stalker with the wonderfully awkward bathroom encounters and gloriously dorky dance moves. But recently, Schaal also spent a month writing on "South Park" and, beginning this past spring, has logged three appearances as the "Daily Show's" new "senior women's issues commentator," where she's already stripped for feminism. She's scheduled to get another dig in tonight.

Next summer, she has small roles in three major studio flicks, starring the likes of Will Ferrell, Anjelica Huston and John C. Reilly. For the moment, she's biding her time working on a book of short stories for HarperCollins, whipping up a few movie scripts with her comedy partner Kurt Braunohler, and peddling her loopy brand of stand-up to live audiences now measured in the thousands, and for which she's already been lauded from Melbourne to Edinburgh.

Schaal's forte is her absurdist wit, which pays off in a delicious avalanche of surprises. Her character-driven stage shows turn on plot twists, such as her and Braunohler's rendition of a Colonial-era telephone conversation, during which Pocahontas and John Smith abruptly jump from small talk to phone sex. "I think it's really just finding something unexpected," she says. "Our favorite form of comedy is the unlikeliness of things. . . . What I want to keep doing is just have the audience not be able to predict it at all."

On this hot, smoggy afternoon, however, she's content to lounge barefoot in a lawn chair, decked out in a red and white candy-striper-esque dress and sipping a Power C-flavored VitaminWater, in her aunt and uncle's leafy backyard in the Burbank hills.