He co-piloted the Millennium Falcon into the core of the second Death Star and flew it back out through a collapsing superstructure. He is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most accomplished pilots in the Rebel Alliance.

He is remembered for a laugh.

The résumé

Nien Nunb is a Sullustan. In Return of the Jedi he sits in the seat Han Solo usually occupies, next to Lando, during the single most dangerous flight operation in the entire original trilogy. Threading a corvette-class freighter through a battle station’s internal tunnels at speed is not a job you hand to a background character.

Except that is exactly what happened, narratively speaking. He does the flying and the film gives him roughly four lines, none of them in a language the audience understands.

The language thing

His dialogue is Sullustese, performed by a Kenyan speaker of Haya. The story goes that audiences in Tanzania understood him perfectly and found the scene considerably funnier than everyone else did, which is a wonderful fact and also slightly beside the point.

The point is that a competent professional does his job flawlessly under fire and the takeaway, for forty years, is the noise he makes.

Why this is the whole band, actually

This is the exact spot where most of our songs come from. Star Wars is full of people who did something extraordinary in the third act of somebody else’s story and got a costume credit for it.

Admiral Ackbar commanded a fleet and is remembered for a warning. Figrin D’an held a forty-year residency and is remembered as “the cantina band.” Nien Nunb flew the shot that ended the Empire and is remembered as the guy who laughs.

Somebody should write songs about those people. We checked, and nobody was, so it fell to us.

In his defense

It is a great laugh. If you had just flown a freighter out of an exploding moon and lived, you would make that noise too.

Read the lyrics to every song we’ve written about people like this →