In his dressing room backstage after a sold-out show here, Mark McKinney of the Kids in the Hall took off his jeans and then, once his robe was secured, his pantyhose. Kevin Mazur The Kids in the Hall, from left, Kevin McDonald, Scott Thompson, Dave Foley, Mark McKinney and Bruce McCulloch.

The Kids' sense of humor has always been layered, often with women's clothing. Five years after their sketch-comedy television show, "The Kids in the Hall," went off the air, Mr. McKinney, Dave Foley, Scott Thompson, Bruce McCulloch and Kevin McDonald have reunited for an 18-city tour of the United States and their native Canada. During those years a strange thing has happened: these cult comedians seem to have become quasi-rock stars, with enough fans to fill a 2,800-seat Toronto theater for three nights, a 4,000-seater in Chicago and seven sold-out shows at Town Hall in New York from Wednesday through next Sunday.

Like the original "Star Trek," the Kids are more popular now than they ever were in their heyday, thanks perhaps to daily reruns of their show on Comedy Central. And like "Monty Python's Flying Circus," they have obsessive fans who can recite entire sketches by heart and happily preempt punchlines during the live show with shouts of "Chicken Lady!," "Head Crusher!" or simply, "Yeah!" Teenagers, many of them female, have been loitering outside the stage door every night here, as if the Kids were the next Backstreet Boys.

 For five middle-aged guys who are, as the euphemism goes, between projects, this must be about as good as it gets. "It's a whole new generation of kids in their dorm rooms watching us," Mr. Foley said in the green room of Massey Hall after the show. The group's cherubic, sort of straight man, Mr. Foley is also its most commercially successful member, having gone on to star in the NBC sitcom "NewsRadio." When they departed CBS's late-night lineup in 1995, the Kids went their own ways. Scott Thompson, who came out long before Ellen DeGeneres, played Hank's openly gay assistant on "The Larry Sanders Show." Bruce McCulloch, the musically inclined one, recorded an album called "Shame-Based Man" and directed two movies: "Superstar" and "Dog Park." Mr. McKinney, after a stint on "Saturday Night Live," has become a well-reviewed New York stage actor. And Kevin McDonald, well, more on him later.

The Kids are pushing 40, or past it, now. "South Park" on Comedy Central and "The Tom Green Show" on MTV have eclipsed these darkly mischievous Canadians on the outrageousness front. But outrage was never really their goal. They were "shocked that people were shocked" by them, Mr. Thompson said. Besides, they still have a few tricks up their sleeveless dresses. Cross-dressing is hardly all they do, but it became their trademark transgression. Maybe it was because no one since Uncle Milty had really made it a regular shtick on American television. True to form, at the Toronto show, they arrived on stage in drag -- after a HAL-style voice-over warning the already overheated audience of the "burning sensuality" to come. Then five giddy women skipped from the wings greeting each other with vapid excitement and exchanging unpleasantries. The crowd went nuts, laughing a little harder than was absolutely necessary.

The show is a greatest-hits affair, giving the fans the "classic" routines and characters they came to see, with some new material to keep the Kids themselves interested. They wrote "Jesus 2000," an infomercial for a "self-worshipping" God who requires no actual prayer or church attendance, by e-mail before the tour. And some of the old characters have new dialogue. But the targets of their strange, goofy satire are their familiar ones: paternal authority figures, suburbia and, pace Python, men in suits with silly walks. A few videotaped bits ran on the projection-screen triptych behind them.

Toronto bar-band rock played over the sound system between skits. The music, like some of the material, had a nostalgic twang -- another reminder that these jokes were not quite as fresh as they once were. 

Lorne Michaels, the Flo Ziegfeld of sketch comedy, discovered the Kids, or one of his local scouts did, performing in a downtown Toronto bar in 1986. He gave them their shot, bringing them to New York and eventually taping the pilot that landed them their own show on HBO, then CBS. What comic gold did Mr. Michaels see in them? "They were fresh and original, and all those other words that don't mean anything," he said, on the phone from his Los Angeles office. "Python is the obvious comparison, but they were less laugh-driven." The Kids' way of going deep into character reminded him of Lily Tomlin, whose television shows he had written for in the 70's.

"The Kids in the Hall," huge in Canada, never quite translated into boffo viewership for CBS. Too weird, or subtle, or gay. It wasn't always funny -- what is? -- and didn't fall back on American cultural references the way "SCTV," an earlier Canadian export, did. The reviews tended to be better than the ratings.

"I think the same subsection of the culture watched us in the States as here," Mr. Foley said. As did younger, so-called alternative comics, like the defiantly unfunny Janeane Garofalo and the hipster meta-humorists of the HBO sketch series, "Mr. Show." The difference is that the Kids were never self-conscious about their subversiveness. They did not wear black leather or huge geek glasses. (Mr. Foley's recent flirtation with bottle-blond hair and a goatee suggests that he may have spent too much time in Los Angeles.) These were just nice-looking Canadian boys with a slightly demented worldview. As Andrew Clark, the author of "Stand and Deliver: Inside Canadian Comedy," said, "In Canada, alternative comedy is just comedy." B UT it was a tad too alternative for Paramount, the studio that released "Brain Candy," the Kids' 1996 movie about the awful societal side effects of a pill that makes everybody frighteningly happy. At issue was Cancer Boy, played by Mr. McCulloch. The wheelchair-bound youth wore a baseball cap with the letter C on it, and when he met new people, he would say things like "Hi, my marrow's low." Some studio executives found this tasteless and wanted the character cut. The Kids refused. After a minimal marketing campaign, the movie bombed.

"They sunk it," Mr. McCulloch said. Mr. Foley added that the movie has enjoyed a cultish afterlife on video. Sitting around the green room in one of their hometown's oldest and most prestigious concert halls, the Kids affect a rec-room bonhomie that belies the vicious in-fighting noted in every article about them over the last decade. "We always fought leading up to a performance," Mr. Foley said. Mr. Thompson corroborated: "We acted like the entire universe hinged on our every decision." Now there is less at stake. They can afford to get along, with one another at least.

Interviewing comedians is never a picnic. They are invariably too serious or too funny or every comment comes with ironic "air quotes" around it. The Kids run the gamut, from Mr. McCulloch, who in his trademark scarf makes a sincere effort to answer questions, to the chatty Mr. Thompson to Mr. Foley, who radiates smug boredom. Mr. McDonald, upon being introduced, placed his hands together in mock prayer and excused himself to spend time with his family at the afterparty downstairs. The talented Mr. McDonald's refreshing indifference to publicity may also explain why he is the group's least well-known alumnus. Blink and you'll miss his bit part in "Galaxy Quest." The affable Mr. McKinney is arguably the star of the reunion. His Chicken Lady and Head Crusher -- both of which must be seen for their hilarity to be believed -- are its most requested characters. They are also broad enough to play in a venue that occasionally feels too big for the material.

The son of a diplomat, Mr. McKinney concisely summarized the reunion's slightly nostalgic, Eagles-concert feel. "God we're fat!" he exclaimed. "We used to look like European models!" So they're not kids anymore. The kids in the audience don't seem to care. Rick Marin, a style reporter for The New York Times, is a lapsed Canadian.