Kids Are Back to Kidding Around


By Jin Beckerman
April 12, 2000


KIDS IN THE HALL: 8 p.m. Thursday. Beacon Theater, 21-24 Broadway at 74th Street, Manhattan. $37.50 to $47.50. TicketMaster (201) 507-8900.

After nearly five years, The Kids in the Hall are coming out to play.

It's been that long since the famed quintet of quirky, edgy, cross-dressing comedians took their marbles and went home, amid rumors of interpersonal battles and general burnout.

Now that funnymen Dave Foley, Scott Thompson, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, and Mark McKinney are back, they're as happy as, well, clowns.

"It felt pretty good -- we started right in making one another laugh," says Foley, known for such characters as Vietnam vet Jerry Sizzler, Jocelyn the prostitute, and Hecubus, Spawn of Satan.

"The thing that got us through, even when we would fight all the time, was the fact that we could make one another other laugh."

They've also made quite a few other people laugh in the 15-plus years since they made their debut in Toronto comedy clubs, got their own HBO special in 1988, were brought to Comedy Central by "Saturday Night Live's" Lorne Michaels in 1991, and became a cult phenomenon.

In fact, their 25-city reunion tour, "The Kids in the Hall 2000 Tour: Same Guys...New Dresses," coming to the Beacon Theater on Thursday has been dogged by a group of hard-core fans that follow the troupe from city to city, scarfing up the best seats and shouting out such KITH catchphrases as "party!" and "I'm crushing your head" to the guys who coined them.

"It's a way that people can indicate that they know who you are and about the show," Foley says.

(A show scheduled for Newark Symphony Hall tonight was canceled because of illness, according to management. Refunds are available at place of purchase, or by calling TicketMaster at (201) 507-8900.)

It was in the aftermath of a failed movie debut, a satire of the Prozac Nation called "Brain Candy," that the fab five went their separate ways in 1996.

Most of them have been busy in the years since: Thompson has a featured role in HBO's "Larry Sanders Show"; others have appeared in movies ranging from "Spice World" to "Galaxy Quest." Foley has perhaps done the best of all, supplying the voice of Flik in "A Bug's Life," working six seasons as Dave on "NewsRadio," and recently cutting a six-figure deal with NBC.

But meanwhile, the Kids in the Hall have developed a second -- even larger -- life on syndication (on Comedy Central at 2 p.m and 1 a.m.). Friction or not, a reunion may have been inevitable.

"The number of people who know the show now is much greater than when we were doing it," Foley says.

It's not merely great characters like Buddy Cole the gay barfly, Dave the Bad Doctor, Chicken Lady, and middle-aged secretaries Kathie and Cathie that hook fans. It's also the troupe's relentless attack on suburbia, conformity, and general good taste.

One way this comes out -- so to speak -- is in the strong element of gay humor that underlies much of the Kids' comedy. The fact that guys this hip could be this gay-friendly may have been a revelation to many young people for whom "gay," among other things, is a synonym for "corny."

"Definitely for kids living in small towns, isolated kids who might think they were gay, it was definitely a chance to see some people on TV who didn't think that it was horrible," Foley says.

Though only one of the troupe members, Scott Thompson, is openly gay, the other four are happy cross-dressing and camping it up.

"I think we are all guys who are pretty comfortable with our feminine sides," Foley says.

"Definitely none of us was afraid of playing gay characters or playing women, but we really only played women because we couldn't get any women to stay in our troupe originally. Every time there was a woman in our troupe, she was usually hired by Second City."

Now that Kids in the Hall is out of cold storage, will it stay that way? Just maybe, Foley says.

"We're definitely talking about what we should do from now on," he reports. "Should we plan to do more stuff, write together, go on [another] tour? It's something we haven't talked about for the last four years. Back then, it would have been remarkable that we were talking at all."

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