The Kids in the Hall (1988-2010)

Tagline: I’m crushing your heads!

Curiosity: Five grown Canadian men tell weird jokes while wearing dresses.

Plot: While they began as a live comedy troupe, to those of us outside the Toronto area, the Kids in the Hall can be broken up into three sections: 1) a sketch show that ran for five seasons, 2) a dark comedy called Brain Candy, and 3) a recent mini-series called Death Comes to Town. All three are noted for a sense of humor that’s off the wall – its closest American counterpart would be Mr. Show – but not as crude. The group rarely goes for obvious gross out laughs, and even when they do, they twist them with a dark edge.

The most revered of the three is the original Kids in the Hall show. It ran for five seasons and built up a considerable audience in Canada and the U.S. I grew up on the show thanks to re-runs after school on Comedy Central, and finally got around to collecting all of the seasons on DVD. Overall, the show holds up. Each season peters out near the end, but I mean, c’mon, you try coming up with 20 episodes of sketch comedy. Despite some dated ’90s token references, the show holds up remarkably. If anything, it’s gotten better with age. Thanks to stuff like Adult Swim, Kids is no longer the weirdest thing on TV, but it walks such a fine line between crass and cute. Consider these two sketches starring cast member Bruce McCulloch:





They’re both funny, but for different, perhaps uncomfortable reasons. The show works because it throws so many different ideas out at once. Its closest companions would be Mr. Show and Monty Python’s Flying Circus, but Kids also slips in more mainstream humor a la Saturday Night Live. For me, it’s kind of like a fulcrum for judging all other comedy. Everything else is either safer or more dangerous than the Kids, but few are as funny. Sure, it takes a while for the group to consistently hit big laughs – season three is when they really hit their stride, just like Mr. Show – but they get there. And as dependent as they were on recurring characters, the writers tried to find new situations for those old wells. If an idea stopped being funny, then it stopped getting used (Although I could have done with fewer Chicken Lady sketches, and even Buddy Cole got a little overused… Also, I never understood the appeal behind Terry and Jerry). Imagine if SNL applied that logic this season.

Speaking of SNL, it’s amazing how many cheap laughs Kids didn’t go for. In true Shakespearian fashion, the men dressed up as women, and while they occasionally kissed, it was rarely done for laughs. If these were SNL sketches, that alone would have been the premise. Same for gay characters. Kids posits gays as real people and then moves on to an actual scene. As stereotypical as Buddy got at times, his sketches still had jokes beyond “BUTTSEX HA HA.” Man, those Canadians are so levelheaded.

Five seasons was a good run for the show. While part of me wishes there was more, the show never dipped in quality. The same cannot be said for Brain Candy, the team’s ill-fated attempt at a motion picture. Brain Candy suffers from a lot of problems. Freed from censorship, the guys tried out some of their most offensive ideas yet, like Cancer Boy, whose source of humor comes from having fucking cancer. It didn’t help that the guys had script issues. Their arguments eventually got so bad that Dave Foley quit the Kids. If you go back and check the credits, his name is missing from the writers list, and he even gets knocked down to a “featuring” listing.

But Brain Candy is no longer the terrible coda to the Kids’ legacy. After a few successful tours, the guys got back into the TV game with Death Comes to Town, an eight-part murder/mystery with some of the group’s darkest humor yet. For a taste, my favorite joke revolves around Foley playing the kindly old town abortionist. While the series occasionally gets too bogged down in cartoonish behavior and plot to tell good jokes, Death is still a solid viewing experience. The Kids still got it.



Also, for the record, my favorite member is Kevin McDonald. He provides the best support and came up with some great characters (THE PIT OF ULTIMATE DARKNESS!). While his monologues weren’t as consistent as McCulloch’s or Scott Thompson’s, he still gave us the “I’m Buddy fucking Holly” sketch:



Reflection: The weirdest part about Death is admitting to myself that Dave Foley STILL looks hot in a dress.