These Are Not Your Garden Variety Comics


Courtesy of Dirt Magazine
The Kids in the Hall are ushering a new era of laughter
by Andy Jenkins
1992


Imagine a man sitting at a table in a room full of men at a business seminar. The man starts rubbing his eyes and complaining that his contacts hurt. Soon he is in complete agony, rubbing his eyes and trying to remember what the hell it was his mother told him: "Was it never put salt in your eyes, or put salt in your eyes?" His trauma unbearable, he grabs the salt and shakes it into his face then proceeds to fall to the floor screaming.

Get it?

I didn't. And that was after watching two current 30- minute episodes of The Kids in the Hall in preparation for writing this story. Mostly I just sat dumbfounded. I might have chuckled once. I'd been hurled into a surreal world created by five male Canadians and was feeling left out. Then, during hour number two...

Imagine a man with a slick pompadour and a crushed-velvet smoking jacket sitting behind a desk in a dimly lit basement night club. "Good evening, and welcome once again to...'The Pit of Ultimate Darkness.' I'm your host, Simon Milligan, and tonight we enter the dimly lit regions of the human mind." On his desk is a skull, and Simon proceeds to pull off the top and reveal its brain,"...who knows what secrets are stored inside this organ--oh look, a quarter! Finders keepers."

I laugh out loud.

Simon continues, "And now, I will introduce my most beloved assistant--Manservant Heckubus!" Out pops a guy in a black Spandex bodysuit, his hair also shiny black and plastered against his head. "Good evening master, I am here to serve you---aaaand, Satan!"
Another laugh.
"Heckubus, do you know why I was late to the show this evening?"

"No, master."

"Because there was a parked car blocking my car in the driveway. Heckubus, do you own a dark blue Valiant?"

"Yes I do, master..."

"EEEVIL!" shouts Simon with glee, and they chuckle, obviously pleased with themselves. "Still evil after all these years, Heckubus the evil one."

Again, laughter. The Kids in the Hall were starting to seep into the dimly lit regions of my mind...

An hour after we land in Toronto on a Friday, Spike and I are in a packed car learning a few things about Canada from our born-and-raised-in friends, Rob, Susan and Chris. First off, it's not ToronTOE--it's Torahknow. Canadians know everything about the United States and Americans know little to nothing about Canada--Rob, Chris and Sue prove this by telling us the capital of every state in the union and then asking us how many provinces there are in Canada, only to have us stare back blankly. They also confide in us their plan to invade Vermont, making it an addition to their beloved country.

I'm beginning to wonder if Canadian humor isn't inherently bent.

We also learn that comedy troupes are to Torahknow what rock bands are to New York--in other words, there are tons. The crew largely responsible for this fact; The Kids in the Hall, singularly known as Bruce McCulloch, Mark McKinney, David Foley, Kevin McDonald and Scott Thompson. As a troupe they bum-rushed the Canadian laughter scene in 1984 and things haven't been the same for comedy since.

In the pre-Kids days, McCulloch and McKinney, both from Calgary, worked together as a duo called the Audience, where they partook of a strange Canadian comedy ritual called Theater Sports. "It's competitive improvisation," explains Mark. "You have teams of actors who get up in front of an audience that shouts out where the scene takes place, with what, while doing what and the individual troupes must improvise on the spot. There's a panel of three judges who score them from zero (if a judge raises a zero during your sketch, get off the stage, you're boring) to five. It's compelling theater," continues Mark. "When it works, it's amazing because there's no plot. It was the only way I could have ever gotten into this--I wouldn't have done stand-up. I would have tried acting but I would have been one of those actors who got too serious too soon and done Beckett (laughs)."

In 1984 Bruce and Mark moved to Toronto, where they merged with the already existing Kids in the Hall troupe, which included Foley and McDonald. Thompson joined the Kids after seeing them live and being "blown away. [I] saw my destiny in sketch comedy." By 1986 the cast had whittled itself down to the five you see now, plus three original Kids who still write with the troupe but basically stay behind the scenes: Norm Hiscock, Garry Campbell and Frank Van Keekan.

At this point in time the Kids were on a quest for a regular venue to perform in. Bruce explains, "The struggle was to find a place to perform that's right for what you're doing-- bands go through this all the time. We weren't exactly stand- up, we weren't exactly theater, we weren't exactly performance art..." They eventually found a home in the hip Queen Street club called the Rivoli. But the struggle continued--the early days were bleak..."Image," whispers Mark in a dream-like narrator's voice. "The great jazz saxophonist leaves the stage, a thick cloud of marijuana smoke hangs in the Rivoli."

"The audience leaves," laughs Kevin.

"Then...'Ladies and gentlemen, the Kids in the Hall!" finishes Mark.
They stuck it out and eventually the audience came, packing the Rivoli even during a raging snowstorm that shut down the rest of Toronto in December of 1985.

Over the weekend we observed the Kids in the Hall at work. Rehearsing their show in costume, being filmed before a live studio audience, performing a live stage show for a local AIDS benefit and operating their offices in downtown Toronto-- which is where we end up surrounded by them. We sit in a circle of comfortably worn couches and chairs while Spike hovers, shooting photos and interjecting questions. The five routinely finish one another's sentences and constantly try to one-up each other--always with laughter as the goal. Like individual gears working the same machine, they create an atmosphere. Their stated influences are from the obvious Monty Python and SCTV to the more obscure; Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Maude and Jim Backus (the voice of Mr. McGoo and Gilligan's Island's Thursten Howell III). This eclectic mix of inspirations partially accounts for what we end up seeing on TV: A comedic reality that's darkly bent under the surface, and laced with a sprinkling of loony. Sort of.

They talk openly about themselves and the troupe in general--but balk when it comes to describing each other.

Mark: "Uuuuh..."

Kevin: "Let's not do that."

And they dislike being reduced to quick offhand descriptions. I ask Scott if a recent article on the Kids in the Hall that described him as "the gay one" bugged him.

Scott: "Yes. Thank you. That drives me crazy. I don't get a description besides being gay."

Mark: "What was I?"

Scott: "Oh you were a chameleon, and you played dozens of characters and you had the best voice..."

Kevin: "What was I?"

Scott: "You were rubber-faced and slim..."

Dave: "I'd rather be 'the gay one' than 'the straight one.'"

Kevin, almost to himself: "Rubber-faced? Jim Carrey (In Living Color) is rubber-faced."

Mark: "Wait until we get our collagen injections, then we'll all be rubber-faced."

Soon after the Kids packed the Rivoli they were "discovered" by Saturday Night Live creator (and fellow Canadian) Lorne Michaels. Lorne brought Mark and Bruce stateside to write for SNL. Eventually Lorne invited the rest of the troupe to follow and work was begun on an hour-long pilot for the CBC (Canadian Broadcast Corp.) and HBO. When the pilot aired, television took a hard hit to the head by progressive and fearless comedy, but not without some punching back. Some of the more risque sketches caused confusion among the masses, some of whom were offended.

"The CBC would get letters like, 'It makes me sick to be Canadian,'" chuckles Dave. Mark fills in some specifics. "We did a sketch called Dr. Seuss' Bible, which was basically the crucifixion of Christ put to a rhyming Seussian style. A lot of Scott's Buddy Cole monologues (Buddy is an outspoken lisping homosexual). In one sketch I did, Screw You Taxpayer, we basically did a really shitty sketch and I sort of deconstructed how the viewers were paying for us to do a really shitty sketch." They all laugh. Does this add fuel to the Kids fire?

"You mean, do we get off on doing it?" asks Mark. "Naw."

"I do," retorts Scott to laughter.

Mark continues, "I think when you write something, you don't even know that it's..."

"Shocking," Dave finishes. "The only time I ever thought consciously that something we wrote was shocking was Sex with Children." As though this were a cue they all start singing; "Sex with children, it's all right. Sex with children, we do it all night. Se, se, se sex with children!"

Dave explains: "It's supposed to be a rock band that had just gotten it's big break on network television."

Kevin: "It was called Career Ending Moments in Showbiz. [Afterwards] the band is standing around going, 'What? What do you mean our career is over?'"

Mark: "Another is an actress who is thanking everyone after winning her Oscar and she thanks Hitler."

So they've been censored. They fight to keep sketches alive but claim never to consider censorship while writing. I ask them if they ever target anyone or anything consciously.

Mark: "No, that would be deadly. You would become sooo pretentious. (In snotty tone) 'Oh this time we're going after the Roman Catholic church.' I don't think you need to go in and say, 'Oh here's something wrong with society, and here's my answer.' You have to laugh at it first--that's the rule of thumb."
Bruce: "I think we write about stuff that really interests us and that we care about. Some of that being loopy, weird ideas and some of it being sexuality and how fucked up jobs or relationships can be."
Dave: "It's just lucky that in our daily lives we fall down a lot (laughter) and get hit by various food items (more laughter), so we can write about them legitimately."

Women. Just before leaving for Toronto I was asked by a female friend to question our heros on why there are none of them in the troupe. It turns out there were in the early days. One. And she left for a paying gig. "There's nothing attractive about hanging out with five obnoxious, comedy- obsessed guys for $5 a night after a lot of rehearsals," says Mark.

Although there are no women in the troupe, there are female roles to be tackled. Real ones. So they decided early on they wouldn't dress as women strictly for laughs. These are five comics who've been called "post-feminist funny guys"--no huge breasts, bad wigs or hairy legs. Their female characters can be so authentic, you have to take a closer look to be sure- -they're that good.

Dave: "We didn't want the fact that it was men playing women to distract form the scenes. We had talks with makeup and wardrobe [early on] where we told them, 'We don't want to get a laugh off being in drag. Dress us the way you would dress us if we were women playing these parts. And do the makeup as if we were really women."

Kevin: "It's not about wearing fake breasts. In the old days we never had the makeup and stuff, we just had this big red sweater and it was understood by our audience that when you were wearing the big red sweater, you were playing a woman."

"So you guys do feel a responsibility for how you portray people in comedy?" I ask.

Dave: "well, we're intentionally trying not to make our characterizations of women offensive."

Scott: "Unless they are offensive women."

Mark: "Wait, this is a key point because sometimes we get attacked by people asking, 'Why are all your women unsympathetic?' The thing is, the nature of comedy is that you portray and underline unsympathetic, aggressive, stupid behavior in some way. It's the same [with] men or women--they have to be the butt of the joke."

Scott: "In comedy, you're usually not illuminating the more golden aspects of humanity, you're usually illuminating the darker side."

And sometimes people don't get it. Mark goes on to describe one of their first live stage shows in New York City in 1986 which left the audience hissing. "Scott was playing his mother the day after he'd told her that he was gay. In this case, Dave was the son, Bruce was the father and I was Dave's boyfriend. And so the father is sitting there daydreaming--or having nightmares--about what it means. In one dream he's thinking of the two of them together and Dave's character says, 'You know, you remind me of my father.' And that really turns my character on so I kiss him. The father is like...(Mark puts on grossed-out expression). The next dream is even more surreal: The two of them have a bucket marked AIDS filled with confetti and the AIDS fairy (played by Kevin) is just throwing the confetti around."

Kevin's face twists as he imitates the crowds reaction: "SSSSSSS!"

The crowd had misunderstood--the sketch wasn't about AIDS at all, nor was it poking fun at it. "We were simply telling the truth [about how] most men of that generation view homosexuals," says Scott. The Kids were breaking down the nightmares of a stereotypical homophobic.

But the same sketch had gone over great in their hometown of Toronto. "The audience here had grown up with us--they knew how far we would go and they trusted us," Scott explains. "the new Yorkers did not. They just saw foreigners making fun of AIDS." "Now I think if people know Kids in the Hall, they know what context to take our sketches in," Mark concludes.

Bingo. The Kids are an acquired taste.

After three years on CBC and HBO, the Kids in the Hall made their debut on American network TV last year on CBS and the Comedy Network. So far? Year number two with CBS is in full swing and they remain rulers of their time slot--midnight every Friday. Busier than ever in 1993, they're writing and filming 20 new shows for CBS before June and talking about a movie deal.

Dave: "We're doing pretty good, really. We had some executives from CBS up and, ah, we got cheese platters while they were here."

Mark: "That's a good sign isn't it--cheese platters?"

Scott: "No cheese on them, but the platters were nice."

Dave: "But you could really imagine what the cheese would have looked like on them."

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