Foxy Foley
Courtesy of Naked Eye
Ten years after the TV debut of the Kids in the Hall, Dave Foley talks about his rise as a Canuck comic, the demise of NewsRadio, and life as a Hollywood Wrong Guy
By Matthew C. Duersten Naked Eye
Dave Foley’s body floats barefoot in his Hollywood Hills pool, cellphone in one hand and pint of Sam Adams in the other. With his auburn hair dyed lemon blonde and his schoolboy’s chin sprouting a sprig of dark whiskers, he looks more like an errant Canuck gone horribly Hollywood than Dave Nelson, the even-keeled Wisconsinite he played for five years on the NBC sitcom NewsRadio. He’s taken only a few mementos from the set: a couple of "WNYX" coffee mugs and a T-shirt with a photo of the cast, given out on the last day of filming.
1999 should have been a lot of things for Dave Foley. While fellow Canadian Mike Myers is globalizing his Austin Powers franchise, Foley’s much funnier Hitchcock parody, 'The Wrong Guy', which he co-wrote, co-produced and starred in, wasn’t even released in the US. And, after lingering high on critic’s lists but low on ratings, NewsRadio was finally cancelled last May after 97 episodes. It was the sitcom’s final hobbling: the previous May, Phil Hartman, who played anchorman Bill McNeil, was shot dead by his wife Brynn, who then turned the gun on herself. It was also ten years ago this month that Foley and fellow Canucks Mark McKinney, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, and Scott Thompson (or as Foley puts it: "four poor working class kids and Mark") debuted on the CBC as the Kids in the Hall. Equal parts Monty Python, Firesign Theatre (the surrealistic 60’s and 70’s comedy troupe), the Marx Brothers, absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco, and Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, the Kids fashioned an aggressive, distinctive, and thoroughly ridiculous brand of sketch-based humour that never rose above cult status but was undeniably influential: 'Mr. Show', 'South Park', 'Twitch City' (which briefly featured Bruce McCulloch), 'Tenacious D', 'The Tom Green Show', 'the Upright Citizens Brigade', 'the State', 'The Ben Stiller Show', and 'Mad TV' all owe props to their dark, absurdist vision. Yet the closest thing to a Kids in the Hall reunion this year was Andrew Fleming’s political farce 'Dick', which featured Foley and Bruce McCulloch (as hilariously vain Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein) on opposing sides in the Watergate scandal. "We didn’t see each other," Foley says. "We weren’t even on set the same days."
Dave Foley is not Hollywood. Most celebrities enter a photo shoot ten minutes before their bodies - he sort of slips in 10 minutes after. It’s the voice that draws: a lo-fi hum, like a particularly easygoing hornet. Preternaturally Canadian, he is polite and engaging ("That’s why Canadians make great peace-keepers") but also somewhat inscrutable. He blends into any background. He is - in his 36th year of his life - shtickless.
With the Kids, his persona was the smarmy office wiseass who smirked while insulting your shoes - the cutest boy on Death Row. Yet his love of ensemble comedy has left him, as he puts it, "a cult figure after being on TV for ten years." Like fellow techno-geek Tom Hanks, for whom he worked in 1998’s NASA epic "From the Earth to the Moon", Foley started his career in women’s clothing and wound up Everyman. Witness his many memorable roles in suits: on KITH he was the "Girl-Drink Drunk," a corporate lackey who becomes insatiably addicted to Tiki- style cocktails; in "Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy," he was the mousy lick-spittle to Mark McKinney’s thinly veiled caricature of Lorne Michaels; and in "The Wrong Guy," he played another office drone who believes - erroneously - that he’s murdered his boss. In "Dick" he is almost unrecognizable in a crew cut and fake teeth as bullet-headed Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman, but he delivers the film’s best line: "Liddy says prison is juts like Club Med!"
The photo shoot starts and, sure enough, Foley emerges in an Italian- cut turquoise number. With his cheapo Panama hat he resembles Bruno Puntz Jones, the inept smoothie with the impossible-to-place accent that Foley played so memorably on KITH. Like Dan Aykroyd and Phil Hartman before him, Foley seems at his best behind one of his vaguely recognizable characters: Jones, Mr. Heavyfoot, Hecubus, Cyril St. John. But his chameleon qualities have haunted him somewhat: many of the films he has appeared in are either forgettable ("High Stakes"), released straight-to-video ("It’s Pat") or pop up in different countries under a different title - "The Wrong Guy" was released in Japan as "Mr. Dave" despite the fact that is character was named Nelson Hibbert; "Hacks", in which Foley and John Ritter make a hilarious pair of scuzzball TV writers, showed up on HBO as "Sink or Swim". Ironically, his most successful commercial ventures - 1998’s "A Bug’s Life", where he played an ant named Flik, and 1999’s "South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut," where he voiced all four of the Baldwin Brothers - are ones in which he doesn’t even physically appear. He tells those wishing to hire him: "Put me in your film if you must, but just know that it probably won’t be released."
And yet, Foley from a cold Northern place has spent the last five years playing Dave from a cold Midwestern place. "Dave [Nelson] is complicated," wrote one reviewer of his NewsRadio character. "Yes, he’s enthusiastic and idealistic, but he’s no naïf, he’s fully aware of how he is perceived, and uses that knowledge to his advantage."
Dave Foley was born in Toronto on January 4, 1963 to a "very liberal steamfitter" and his English wife. He grew up 90 minutes north of Toronto in the town of Creemore and attended an alternative "School of Experiential Education," where he began writing comedy monologues for credit - his first was about losing his virginity. At 18 he heard Frank Zappa’s "Absolutely Free" ("Brown shoes don’t make it/Quit school; why fake it?") and dropped out to pursue comedy full-time, gravitating towards ensemble workshops because they allowed him to explore varying roles. Meanwhile he took what parts he could: a banquet waiter for the Lambton Golf & Country Club, where he began his legendary coffee obsession, an usher at the Carlton Cinemas in downtown Toronto, where in 1982 he hooked up with a kid from Montreal named Kevin McDonald. Together with friend Luc Casimiri, they formed an embryonic version of the Kids in the Hall. The first sketch they ever wrote was called "One-Armed Usher": "Luc was this patron in this movie theater, and Kevin played an extremely rude usher with one arm. After enduring all this abuse, Luc complains to the manager - played by me - and I take Kevin offstage and we hear the sound of a chainsaw and screaming. When we come back, Kevin has no arms and Luc is, of course, horrified: ‘My god, that’s uncalled for!’ I tell him: ‘No no, he was rude to you. He’s been warned once before.’"
They stated performing in the back room of a Toronto restaurant on Queen Street west called the Rivoli. "At first everybody hated us," he recalls. "Queen Street was pretty serious back in the early ‘80s. All these artsy bands with strong political agendas - we just came in as this little punky comedy group." By 1984, they had expanded to include Bruce McCulloch and Mark McKinney from a Calgary improve (sic) unit called The Audience (Scott Thompson was introduced later by McKinney). What united the five was a "healthy contempt" for all that had come before. "Most of the comedy in Toronto at that time was sort of ripping off Second City," says Foley, "or singing song parodies about the mayor of Toronto." When Foley, McDonald and Thompson joined the touring company of Toronto’s Second City in 1985 they clashed with the venerable comedy prep school. "[Second City] got mad at us all the time," Foley says. "Our comedy evolved just out of us trying to make each other laugh [and] we just used a different language."
When the Kids reformed after a year, however, they developed a devoted club following for their distinctive use of the stage (multiple performance spots set up within the club to be cut to in abrupt blackouts), provocatively weird characters (Cancer Boy, Idiot Boy, the Chicken Lady), savaging of taboo subjects (AIDS, religion, sexual perversions, gays, cross-dressing, alien anal probing) and dedication to writing new material for every week’s 10pm curtain call. This led to a radio program in Canada and later to a cult hit TV show under the tutelage of a fellow from Forest Hill named Lorne Michaels. McCulloch and McKinney had previously written for Saturday Night Live, but it was Michaels’ idea to provide the Kids with their own showcase. Besides the memorable cowboy-surf instrumental that became their theme song ("Having an Average Weekend" by Toronto’s Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet), the Kids’ HBO debut contained sketches like "Here’s to Reg," where five guys stand around drinking beer and fondly remembering an absent friend - who, as it slowly becomes apparent - they have just sacrificed in a ritual killing.
If Monty Python was the Beatles of comedy, the Kids were the Beastie Boys. Like Python, they wrote in specific groups with specific styles: "I’d write stuff with Scott and Kevin mostly," says Foley. "Bruce would work from some weird image he liked. Mark and Scott would usually base their sketches on characters. With Kevin and I, our thing was always The Premise. The stuff we wrote was much goofier: Simon and Hecubus, the Sizzler Sisters, the fur trappers Jacques and François." Like Python, they also turned gender on its ear - many an audience to a Kids show would have to contend with the fact that the boys looked damn fetching in women’s clothing (An Internet debate still rages on who looked sexier: Foley, often compared to actress/model Isabella Rosselini, or McCulloch). Much more that Python, though, their often crude and boorish characters were oddly sensitive, complex and three- dimensional. Their shows were also less freeform, their sketches were tightly crafted and constructed with their own skewed kind of logic that managed to emulate forerunners like SCTV and Python while being nothing like them. "Their send-ups go where humour has never gone before," wrote a bemusedly fascinated Vanity Fair after their American debut. "Their subjects outpace the tepid laugh cues of American shows."
The Kids in the Hall received an Emmy nomination in 1993 for Outstanding Writing in a comedy program (they lost to "The Ben Stiller Show"). In 1996 they made their motion picture debut in "Brain Candy", which Paramount Pictures only released in a limited run. It flopped, and the Kids were never heard from again. They didn’t break up; it was part of their five-year plan to, as Foley puts it, "just wander away from each other."
Dave Foley and the cast of NewsRadio gathered in early July at comedienne Kathy Griffin’s L.A. home: Maura Tierney, Joe Rogan, Stephen Root, Vicki Lewis, and Jon Lovitz, who replaced Phil Hartman in NewsRadio’s last season (Lately Andy Dick, who played twitchy reporter Matthew, has been cutting his peculiar swath of self-destruction through the tabloid headlines). It had been a long, strange trip - the near-death experience of being moved to nine time slots in five years led to a kamikaze mentality. "The show definitely got weirder towards the end," Foley says now. "We never had that much support at NBC, even before Phil died. We felt we could be cancelled at any moment so every episode got more surreal. The last show of the ‘97-’98 season was a parody of James Cameron’s "Titanic" where the entire cast was killed off. "We hung around and had an mpromptu party on the set," Foley recalls. "We were all drunk. I hugged Phil and told him, ‘Have a great summer; see you next August.’ That’s the last time I saw him."
Dave Foley gave a lot to NewsRadio. He barely wrote or appeared in "Brain Candy" and couldn’t direct "The Wrong Guy" - something he had been itching to do - because of the commitment to the Little Sitcom That Tried. Just before NewsRadio got it’s walking papers, Foley told New York magazine that he was nostalgic about the Kids. "Strangely, I get more questions from Americans on the possibility of a Kids reunion," he laughs now. "Toronto’s probably the place where people care the least about us. I think it’s the nature of Toronto as a city - and I think Canada in general. If you’re from there, they usually sour on you pretty quickly." Nevertheless, rumours began circulating that the five would reunite at Montreal’s Just For Laughs Comedy Festival last July. "Unfortunately, we could organize a schedule," Foley shrugs. "Scott’s gone off to the Middle East with his boyfriend [who’s] doing a documentary on Saddam Hussein. We’re all hoping they come back alive."
Hence the conference call he had with the four of them a few days ago. "It was good to talk to them," he says, slipping out of his suit and into a shirt from Toronto’s Bovine Sex Club. "I definitely miss performing live together." He also misses Toronto, which he visits one week out of the month; he likes to visit the Chapters bookstore near his house in Yorkville and takes his boys - Ned, 6 and Basil, 4 - to go to the Royal Ontario Museum (he is separated from their mother, Tabitha Southey). Foley and his other Kids are close to agreeing to do a live tour starting in January or February of the year 2000, which might kick off in Canada and then go to the U.S., eventually winding up at Colorado’s Aspen Comedy Festival in Colorado next March. Always the craftsmen, their repertoire will consist of "old sketches with some new material to tie things together."
But in the meantime, Dave Foley is plenty busy. His blonde ‘do and new whiskers are for his upcoming role - in a suit, as a Hollywood agent, no less - in Fox’s live-action/stop-motion "Monkey Bone," which marks his third collaboration with friend and Upper Canada College graduate Brendan Fraser. (the two appeared together in "Blast From The Past" and Fraser had a cameo in "Brain Candy"). "From the Earth to the Moon" was just release on video, which can allow those who missed it on HBO to catch a (space)suited Foley in his critically acclaimed role as Texas astronaut Al Bean.
He’s trying to get back to writing, which he - known as the "comedy encyclopedia" of the Kids - hates. "I’m not a big enough fan of my own ideas to want to spend any time with them," he kvetches. He’s developing - slowly - an upcoming show for Fox. "It’s a comedy version of those Discovery Channel documentaries," says Foley. "Basically my excuse to watch tons and tons of science stuff and write comedy based on it. You know, sketches based on nanotechnology." He coughs and flashes his trademark evil-squirrel grin. "Should be a big hit."
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