What Ben Folds found in William Shatner is a man with a genuine gift for lyrical interpretation, if not a gift for singing. Certainly Shatner's record from the sixties, The Transformed Man, has mockable elements, but only because you are stacking his interpretations up against the Beatles, Sinatra, and others. Taking a song sung by a real singer and then reassembling it as a staged reading is a process doomed to failure (although Shatner pulled it off pretty well with his "Common People" cover of a few years back).
Here Folds creates a character for Shatner to play, writes out a monologue, then sets that monologue to a rhythm and a floating, keening melody. Shatner sinks his teeth into the performance to such a degree that the "character" he creates in this Conan clip is far different from the one he created on the record--more swagger, more cocksure, and in his way, more pathetic. Shatner feeds off the crowd, almost unable to keep from laughing, that same brilliant look on his face as always--like he's in on a joke you could never understand.
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