article transcribed from TIME OUT NEW YORK.

      KIDS INCORPORATED

   After a four-year cooling-off
    period, the cross-dressing,
    chicken-squawking, Kids in
    the Hall are back in business
        
          By Billie Cohen

"Is anybody rolling? I've got a sock on my hand and a bit I want to try." Mark McKinney is crammed into a corner booth at Fez Uptown to tape Comedy Central promos with the four other Kids in the Hall-Kevin Mcdonald, Bruce McCulloch, Dave Foley, and Scott Thompson-and he is clearly on. The Canadian sketch-comedy troupe has been apart for for years, but that doesn't seem to have affected any of the guys' ability to pull a damn funny improv riff out of a plain white sock. For the moment, McKinney has named the puppet Himelfarbie ("host of popular kids' program Tortes and Treaties"), after Dave Himelfarb, the Kids' attorney and the man responsible for getting their "Same Guys, New Dresses" reunion tour on the road. For the next seven days, the show touches down at Town Hall. The Kids are back in the house.
   Later that night, the group reassembles at the Luna Lounge. There for tour-promoting webcast, they laze in comfy chairs on the club's small stage as fans interrogate them about old sketches and new projects. When asked what the hell they've been doing for the past four years, McCulloch feigns drunken-ness and jokes that he's been going from rock bar to rock bar, getting wasted and singing his old sketch song, "These Are the Daves I Know". Actually, he-like the rest of the guys-has been quite busy, directing two comedy films, Superstar and Dog Park (which he also wrote and starred in). McKinney appeared in both of McCulloch's films, returned to Saturday Night Live for a short stint and appeared in the Off Broadway play Fuddy Meers. McDonald took a quick gig writing for the Martin Short Show before moving on to a part in Galaxy Quest. Thompson had a spot on The Larry Sanders Show and published a fictional memoir under the name of his Kids character, the martini-sipping queen Buddy Cole. Foley, whose role on the now-defunct Newsradio earned him celeb status, just finished a movie called Monkeybone and is developing a sitcom for NBC. Now hitting their forties, the Kids look a little more like grownups than they did when their offbeat TV pilot first aired in the U.S. in 1988. But they still finish one another's silly jokes, rescue (or groan at) one another's flops and intuit one another's riffs as if they'd never gone their seperate ways.
  The Kids in the Hall-named after the hopeful young writers who waited outside Jack Benny's radio studio to pitch jokes as he walked by-got their start in 1984 when McKinney and McCulloch (then of a Calgary group called the Audience) joined forces with Mcdonald and Foley's troupe,  which they'd already named the Kids in the Hall.  Thompson, an out-of-work actor, approached and then joined them later that year, and their weekly gig at Rivoli, a Toronto club, took off.  The schtick: five guys, one gay, all frequently playing female characters and fronting with weird, wicked humor.
  From the beginning, the five shared an inclination for strange comedy. Their sketches, based loosely on middle-class life, led gossipy secretaries and nagging housewives to some very unnerving places. Take one skit from the show, where Thompson and McCulloch play Kathie and Cathy, middle-aged secretaries at the AT&Love company who are fitted with odometer-like counters in the backs of their heads (to tally the number of words each has typed). As Cathy passes by, she sees that Kathie has reached 99,999 and is about to "turn over"; the office girls gather round and cheer her through the big moment. Explaining how the cross-dressing Kids' act, Mcdonald says: "We had common obsessions with our families and relationships. And since we were writing about women, we had to play them."
  But the Kids don't just make fun of the ladies-their overboard (some would say offensive) sketches have spoofed everything from health care to homophobia. At a 1987 performance at New York's West Bank Cafe, their infamous "AIDS Fairy" sketch left the audience hissing. In it, McCulloch plays a father who finds out his son is gay, then drifts into a nightmarish fantasy in which the boy and his lover prance abouth throwing confetti from a bucket marked AIDS.

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