Reunion

Courtesy of the Boston Pheonix
February 17, 2000
The Kids in the Hall
By Nick A. Zaino III

The Kids in the Hall never broke up. They just decided to see other people for a while.

The group had been performing together in one form or another for 11 years when they released Brain Candy in 1996. The film, which capped six years of groundbreaking sketch comedy on TV, is now a cult classic but didn't break commercially the way the group had hoped. After the film, everyone just drifted apart. David Foley had NewsRadio and film projects. Scott Thompson had Scottland.com and stand-up. Bruce McCulloch directed Dog Park and Superstar and had a one-man show. Mark McKinney was on Saturday Night Live and in Fuddy Mears off-Broadway. Kevin McDonald had movie and TV projects. It seemed for a while that the Kids had all grown up and moved on.

Then, about a year and a half ago, the Kids were contacted by a comedy festival in Montreal to see if they might perform. "We were all into the idea, but we couldn't make those dates work," says McKinney during a phone interview. "That started the dialogue, basically."

As fate would have it, all five members found blank spots in their schedules and decided to tour and discuss new ideas before committing themselves to a larger project. Though nothing aside from the current tour is definite yet, the Kids are enjoying being together on-stage again. "We know that we each have our own lives outside of the group, so I think we can enjoy being in the group more," Foley says, in a separate interview.

McKinney doesn't think the Kids have changed much since their days performing in clubs around Toronto in the mid '80s: "I mean, we were younger, maybe slightly more brutal with each other, but we're still pretty much just five comedy obsessives with our own little quirks." And, McKinney adds, touring is fun. "It's pure reward. We never really got a chance to go out and do it for the new fans."

And the fans are showing their appreciation. The Kids sold out six shows at the Town Hall Theatre in New York City earlier this month, and extra shows were added in Los Angeles, Toronto, and Washington. "The audiences are, if anything, more enthusiastic than the last time we toured, five years ago," McKinney says. "And I think it's partly because there's a whole new generation that's been watching us in reruns."

Daily reruns on Comedy Central (the show had a brief run on CBS from 1993 to '94 and, before that, on HBO) remind the public why this group was so special in the first place. The Kids in the Hall was never overtly political, with the exception of Scott Thompson's occasional provocative monologues as Buddy Cole. Even so, the group was fearless when dealing with hot topics such as religion, AIDS, and homosexuality. Never before or since has a show been so willing to take a chance on something like lampooning a man's gay-biker fantasy; the Kids were unusual in even showing more than one gay character on-screen at the same time. And those characters were lampooned as people, not as stereotypes, which is why it wasn't so much shocking as it was, simply, hysterically funny.

Fortunately for the Kids, laughter has always been king. They're smart enough to be socially aware, and good enough comedians to know that satire has to be funny to be effective. "We never set out to blow the lid off of anything," says Foley. "If an idea occurs to us that something's funny, then we'll follow it. Certainly we were never trying to enlighten anybody. Maybe embarrass some people. I think, if you focus on what's funny, and you're intelligent and sensitive, you're probably going to wind up doing material that's a little controversial."

Moving from TV to film proved a difficult experience for the troupe. Though Brain Candy stands up laugh for laugh with the TV show, it scored only average numbers at the box office. "It was hard. It was our first film, and it wasn't like the TV show in a lot of ways," McKinney says. "It was a new sort of world."

Still, the Kids aren't complaining. "I'm fine with the Kids in the Hall in general being a cult hit," Foley says. "It gives you a lot of freedom. We're extremely well liked by a small group of people. But we were well enough liked that we were allowed to keep doing it for five years. Which was great. That's the best of all possible worlds."

As for the future, the group is still discussing it. But don't count on seeing another regular TV show from the Kids. "I think we did our show," Foley says. "You know, when we started doing that show, we promised each other we'd quit if it ran five years. I think it'd be silly for us to do another one. We wanted to make sure we stopped doing that before it got tired."

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