The Kids in the Hall Article


Courtesy of Raygun magazine
September 1993
by Joe Clark


You can't begin a story on the KIDS IN THE HALL, kray-zee Kanuck komedy troupe, without a roll call. So here we go, alphabetically: David Foley is the square one but square in personable way. Dave's most famous character: The Guy With a Good Attitude Towards Menstruation. Bruce McCulloch is the shortest and the cutest, the moodiest, the most reclusive; he's also the most prolific outside the Kids in the Hall, writing and acting in plays and indie films. Bruce's most famous character, Cabbagehead. Kevin McDonald, the slim, agreeable fellow with the fuzzy hair, would eat the competition for breakfast in a most-expressive-eye eyebrow forehead contest. He doesn't yet have a famous character, and more's the pity. Mark McKinney, the tall, boyish son-o'-a-diplomat, is Mr. Charm. Mark's most famous characters: Chicken Lady. Darrill stress on the latter syllable, natch, the Headcrusher. Scott Thompson is "the gay one." Scott's signature character, of course, is sibilating barstool habitu Buddy Cole.

Something else I can't omit in a KiTH story is an element of background. The five first gigged at the still-influential Rivoli club in Toronto back in 1984. Actually, Mark and Bruce had already met doing comedy in Calgary; Scott joined after he saw some Rivoli gigs. Lorne "Please Don't Hold the Last Five Years of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE Against Me" Michaels got them on TV initially on the publicly funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation - CBC, where thy still rule, then on HBO and the Comedy Channel and more recently in a Friday-night slot, CBS.

A few factoids: Staff writers Norm Hiscock, Paul Bellini and Brian Hart also contribute material. The snappy KIDS IN THE HALL theme song is "Having an Average Weekend" by Toronto surf instrumentalists Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, which functions as a sort of house band on the set. A couple of the Kids live in my nighborhood, and I run into various combinations of them on the street, at the Y and at bars. But since we're in blase, superpolite Toronto, this is barely worth mentioning.

The Kids' stocks in trade are the polar opposites of (a) characters of almost photorealistic accuracy and (b) surreal situations. To watch a Kid portray a mom, a secretary or a businessman is to wonder if maybe the day-to-day lives of moms, secretaries and businessmen have been secretly filmed over the last 40 years, with the resulting images force-fed to the Kids as kids by something like the Ludovico techinque in _A Clockwork Orange_. Characters, particularly women, are not parodic in themselves, and apart from Scott's inevitable portrayal of Queen Elizabeth, the Kids have entirely avoided celebrity impersonation. ("We're not good enough," says Dave. "SCTV was so great at it.") Becoming as one with the character is a point of some pride. Listen to them talk about drag:

"I like doing it. I think I play women really well," Mark says.

"Everyone thinks that," I point out.

"I know," Mark replies evenly (he is Mr. Charm, right?), "but it's something that I was surprised by when we did it. And I liked the way we approached it when we first started doing it, which was, if we're going to play women in relationship sceces or whatever, we're going to do it and try to make a real person. And that appealed to my sense of being an actor."

Later, Bruce adds, "I like doing it. You guys all seem to think about it more than I do. It just seems like it gives you a whole other range of characters. It's sort of like, for me, 'What's it like playing someone who's much older?' in a sense."

"Which I can't do," Mark says. "My only worry about playing drag is that one day I'll skip over to that side, and I'll just be doing it because I can do it as opposed to really caring about it."

And as for those surreal situations: Two trappers, jauntily singing "Alouette," paddle a canoe on wheels through an office building, hunting businessmen for their pelts (Armani, Hugo Boss, etc.). A grey-haired Bruce lies in a hospital bed awaiting an operation; Mark, his guilt-feeling executive son, phones hime to express his affection, but even with Kevin holding a gigantic cue card screaming I LOVE YOU, DAD, he can't spit out the words. Or consider the "Wild Weekend" sketch, in which an unsuspectin secretary (Scott, the skit's writer) walks into a bar populated by dazzling black urbanites, discos the night away and ends up in bed with a hunk. Forget Capt. Kirk and Lt. Uhura; Scott's televised interracial gay drag kiss hit panic buttons in everyone from the jittery on-set crew to the echt-hetero studio audience whose reactions were recorded as a laugh (or groan) track.

At least the "Wild Weekend" sketch ran. In February, CBS refused to air "Surf Cops," in which Scott portrays an actor named Tony Baldwin (oddly, here Scott actually resembles the acting Baldwin brothers), a tough guy who talks himself up as straight, picks up a rent boy and eventually dies.

"I heard he died of cancer," says a mourner.

"Well, I heard he died of AIDS," whispers another.

"Cancer!" corrects the still-closeted Baldwin from the casket. "It was cancer!"

While CBC ran the skit without ruckus, CBS freaked, insisting that AIDS wasn't a laughing matter. Of course, it's Hollywood homophobia that was being lampooned, but try telling that ot the Tiffany network. "They've caved on an ongoing number of things," says Mark, "and I do hope they run the Tony Baldwin sketch, because it really is a good one."

The Kids range from largely satisfied Kevin, Dave, Mark to immensely dissatisfied Scott with their U.S. success. Virtually every English-speaking Canadian under 40 can impersonate at least one character with the Headcrusher's trademark "I'm crushing your head!" particularly popular, though such ubiquity has so far eluded the Kids in America. Something like 104 CBS affiliates are running the show, but 85 aren't, and while les Kids are shown in prime time in Canada, being exiled to the gulag of American late-night TV hasn't helped any.

"And it's not just U.S.," Scott says. "My feelings go much deeper than that." Cross-dressing has never been more prominent in pop culture Rupaul, _The Crying Game_, and U2, Duran Duran and Faith No More videos, inter alia, but Scott is bitter that the Kids don't get no respect for their own pioneering drag work, now clearly a decade old. And while Kevin complains about articles on "gay straight people" that omit the Kids, he's less irate than the bilious Scott. "When he talks to me about it, I agree with him, and then I go back to sleep."

Sweet dreams, Kevin. Maybe it's America that needs waking up. To paraphrase Denis Leary, I think you hear the Kids knocking, and I think they're coming in.

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