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Six
weeks is not long enough to tour.
So
says Mark McKinney of the Canadian comedy troupe Kids in the Hall’s 2000
schedule.
“It
felt incomplete,” he said from his mother’s
home in Ottawa. “But this
time we’re going to be out for a longer tour, and we’ve put a lot of work
into the material. We might be
comedians, but we’re serious.”
Some
of the Kids characters will be reprised, such as the Sales Guys and Buddy Cole,
but the bits the Kids deliver are fresh.
“We’ve
been doing a lot of experimenting,” McKinney said.
“The other night, we did more than two hours in Buffalo.
Our comedy shows have been of Bruce Springsteen-esque proportions.
We’re just glad to be out what we did so many years ago.”
The
Kids in the Hall – a term borrowed from Jack Benny, referring to the writers
who would pass him jokes during his show (“Here’s another from the kids in
the hall”) – first made waves in America in 1989.
That’s when their show initially aired in this country.
It sometimes ran simultaneously on HBO, Comedy Central, CBS, and the CBC.
The shows are in reruns on Comedy Central and the Comedy Network.
“We were thrilled at the level of success we attained,” McKinney
said. “We didn’t take any of it for granted. We came up with some really great material and it went over
well. What’s interesting is that,
since we’re not political comedians, a lot of the social stuff we did a decade
ago still holds up.”
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However,
their material didn’t fare as well in theaters.
“Brain Candy”, released in 1996, suffered from lack of promotion and
left a bitter taste in the act’s collective mouth.
But the Kids, who also include Dave Foley, Scott Thompson, Bruce
McCulloch, and Kevin McDonald, have done well individually.
Foley was one of the stars of the sitcom “Newsradio.”
Thompson was part of “The Larry Sanders Show.” McCulloch directed the film “Superstar.”
McDonald was part of the short-lived “Martin Short Show.”
McKinney did a stint on “Saturday Night Live” and is working in
theater. Each has projects in the works.
“It takes a year and a half to do a movie.
A tour is much easier. It
would be tough, but not impossible to do another film.
We would need the time to write and film it. … But I don’t want to
think ahead. I just want to live in
the present and enjoy each other’s company playing all of these great old
theaters.
“The
best thing about this, though, is performing with each other again since we
lived in each other’s pockets for 10 years.
We still love working together. The
way this industry is, its amazing we’ve been able to keep this together in
some form or other all this time.”
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