A hysterical Dilbert look-alike flies by College Park, clutching the side of a taxi in pursuit of a misplaced pen. The flashing Silver Dollar Room sign cues the start of the next Buddy Cole monologue. Two lackadaisical cops talk nonsense by the Leuty Lifeguard Station. The Kids in the Hall have a cult following that spans continents, but Torontonians have the distinct pleasure of seeing their neighbourhoods used as a backdrop on one of the funniest, most original and daring shows to ever air on mainstream television. In a way, the setting was the most shocking part of the routine—people that funny rarely stay here. Perhaps they shouldn’t have.
You could argue that the Kids in the Hall show existed in a bubble—the Kids would have sooner performed a sketch about sausages than made fun of Brian Mulroney’s jaw. The first Canadian show to utter the word ‘fuck’ on television, they were bizarre, unscrupulous and sexually uninhibited, inspiring American and British imitators like Mr. Show and Chris Morris’s next-level Jam. Here in Canada, staid issues like equalization still provide the inspiration for many a prime-time joke.
“The Kids in the Hall was kind of a flukey show in a sense,” says Mark McKinney, the Kid behind some of the show’s most beloved characters (the Chicken Lady, the Headcrusher.) McKinney is on a smoke break from his latest show, Less than Kind, on which he’s producing, not performing. Even in a sweatshirt and shorts, he’s a living myth to me. I had talked to him years before, when I approached him outside the Labyrinth Lounge to say that his show had “played a big role in shaping my psyche.” He backed away slightly, arched an eyebrow and told me that he hoped I was healthy. “We really got— and this is unheard of —kind of a playground to do whatever kind of sketch comedy we wanted for five years. It’s sort of irreproducible,” he says. McKinney has worked extensively in both Canada and the United States since KitH ended. Some of his projects have been great (Slings and Arrows, the Saddest Music in the World), others just big (Saturday Night Live, Spice World.) His fellow Kids Dave Foley, Kevin McDonald, Bruce McCulloch and Scott Thompson have charted similar career paths, performing, writing, character acting and occasionally nabbing starring roles. But unlike the cast of SCTV before them, none of the five have become superstars. Their work doesn’t seem to have impacted mainstream TV the same way it’s affected their rabid fan base and the hoards of alternative comics who venerate them.
Toronto is a funny city, but it rarely retains its talent. Comedians like Norm Macdonald and Harland Williams take their dirty jokes south, and the ones who stay behind build their careers on a secure base of Canadian political satire. Things were no different in the 1980s, despite the high volume of local talent. “There was a time at Yuk Yuk’s when you had Jim Carrey, Howie Mandel, Norm Macdonald and more, performing at the downtown club. And, in fact, the CBC’s casting office was across the street, and they never went and saw them,” says Andrew Clark, former EYE WEEKLY comedy columnist and author of Stand and Deliver: Inside Canadian Comedy.
Clark is also the Director of the Comedy Writing and Performance program at Humber College, the only such program in North America (and possibly the only field of study where using the word ‘cocksucker’ is part of the learning process). It says something about Toronto’s comedic aptitude, but more about how the city has finally come to embrace its character. Clark was the first comedy columnist in Canada; when he started writing in 1991, “comedy wasn’t really taken seriously as something that was worthy of comment or criticism,” he says. Yuk Yuk’s had been well-established as a haven for “edgy” stand-up comedy, but improv and alternative sketch had only recently emerged as viable genres, largely due to The Kids in the Hall show itself.
When the Kids in the Hall came together officially in 1984, Toronto comedy was a professional game; independent troupes like the Frantics were few and far between. “I remember the NOW Magazine comedy listings would be tiny, maybe five or six little events… now it can be half a page,” says Jane Luk, an actress and improv teacher with the Bad Dog Theatre Company. Like the Kids (and many others), Luk got her start at Theatresports Toronto in the early ‘80s. Held at Harbourfront and the Toronto Free Theatre, Theatresports was a game night in which improv teams competed for humour points. “Stand-up people didn’t associate with anyone in the improv community. Certainly the only game in town, as far as improv, was Theatresports,” says Luk.
In Calgary, where the events began, Theatresports’ star attractions were the Audience, a troupe featuring Mark McKinney, Bruce McCulloch, and future KitH writers Garry Campbell and Frank Van Keeken. The troupe moved to Toronto to pursue acting careers and joined their big-city equivalents, the Kids in the Hall, a teenaged troupe featuring Kevin McDonald, Dave Foley and Luciano Casimiri. Foley, an alternative school dropout and aspiring stand-up, met McDonald, a Humber Theatre School dropout, at a Second City workshop. The two were paired at random for an exercise; by the end of the workshop, they had decided to form a troupe. The Audience subsumed the nascent Kids, and the supergroup became crowd favourites at Theatresports nights. “Back then, when you heard the Audience were playing, you wanted to be there on that night,” Luk says. “This was before they were doing anything else—you just knew they were a good team.”
“I think everyone in the troupe had a different thing they were drawing on,” McKinney says. “Me, I’ve always been a fan of really good actors and Scorsese movies and stuff. Bruce probably draws a lot of his inspiration from punk music and Iggy Pop, and Dave and Kevin were comedy historians, steeped in [tradition] all the way back to 1930s movies. But the ultimate influence is whether you can make the other four people laugh, and that determined what got into the show and what didn’t. Synergistic style, I guess.” Everyone I spoke to insisted that McDonald was always the funniest. “Everybody always wanted to work with Kevin, because you’d know it would be funny,” says Casimiri, who, along with Van Keeken and Campbell, left the troupe in the early days.
Just as the group was dwindling down to a foursome, a young gay punk named Scott Thompson began vying for the troupe’s attention. Fresh out of theatre school and up for anything, Thompson had been performing sketch and playing in a punk band called Mouth Congress. “Scott kind of bullied his way in,” says Paul Bellini, a former writer for the show and Thompson’s former band and dorm mate at York University. Thompson’s brash personality was precisely the troupe’s missing element, and the five men began to provide each other with fierce competition to be funnier than everyone else. “Scott and Mark used to fight over wigs to the point where things would be thrown across the room,” Bellini says. “I’ll never forget, one time Scott kicked in a filing cabinet. I said why, and he goes, ‘Mark’s stealing my wig for that character!’ [I said], ‘Well, you know, you kicked in a filing cabinet.’ ‘Well it means a lot to me!’ I thought, wow, he’s crazy, but he’s sincere.”
After a while, Theatresports became a little too amateurish; the troupe developed a reputation for showing up audience participants who shouldn’t have bothered to take part. “Theatresports became like community theatre,” Casimiri tells me. “There weren’t a lot of rooms to play in like there is now.” By 1985, the troupe had begun performing weekly shows at the Rivoli, then the centre of the Queen West art scene. At the time, the notion of an alternative comedy scene was vague at best. A connection with the band Shadowy Men On A Shadowy Planet, old friends of McCulloch’s, made the Kids honorary members of the city’s alternative music community. “We did shows where Scott [Thompson] as Buddy Cole, long before they had a TV show, was a guest vocalist for us. Kevin McDonald did a magic show,” says Don Pyle, former drummer for Shadowy Men and a long-time veteran of the Toronto indie-rock scene. “I think for a lot of people, it was a very natural thing. Partly because the Kids in the Hall were very much acting like an independent rock band—I think they were accepted by a lot of people within the music scene.”
Shadowy Men, who were releasing records and playing alongside the likes of Fifth Column and Beat Happening, had a steady following. At the very beginning, the Kids did not. The alliance helped draw neighbourhood scenesters to the Kids’ performances, although they struggled to build an audience. “I think that we drew on whatever the Queen Street scene was back then. I mean, we did play, for years, to nobody—we had audiences of nine, 17,” says McKinney. “We tried lowering our price from three to two dollars—didn’t work. And then it just kind of caught on, we became the thing.” The Kids’ earliest superfan was Bellini, who made posters and worked the door every week. “When it came time to do the TV show, it was like, ‘Why don’t we take Bellini with us?’ It was like—you take the dog on a family trip. You just do!”
Whatever the door count, the Rivoli performances began to draw the right people. Word channelled back to Lorne Michaels, who had been looking for a Gen X-oriented show to follow up Saturday Night Live. Out of all the off-beat comedy troupes in North America, he chose five guys from Canada to fill the role. “You can’t underestimate the degree to which what the Kids in the Hall were doing was really new, and kind of edgy,” Clark says. Michaels whisked off McCulloch and McKinney to serve as apprentice writers on Saturday Night Live. When the Kids reunited in 1986, they played a sold-out run at the Factory Theatre. Michaels himself was in attendance, and he was impressed. He flew the Kids down for a year of comedy training in New York. “I remember when Kevin left, he was overweight. And when he came back, I didn’t recognize him,” Luk says. “He said to me, ‘Basically, I didn’t have any money to eat!’” When the Kids returned to Toronto, Michaels sent up talent from SNL to help the troupe make a pilot. Using his connections with Ivan Fecan, a former NBC executive and then Director of Television Programming at the CBC, Michaels secured the pilot a slot on Canadian television. Using his many connections in the States, he did the same with HBO. “When it aired on HBO, John J. O’Connor of the New York Times wrote a four-star review. And that four-star review bought us our first season,” Bellini says.
The Kids were on TV, but Los Angeles remained a different universe. They stayed in their ratty downtown apartments, drank beer on the Queen Street strip, and continued to make fun of its denizens. Despite the high-profile professionals backing the show, the Kids chose a low-key, sketch-centered approach to television, ensuring that their combined talents remained the show’s primary appeal. “The Kids in the Hall were very strong people, and very uncompromising little bastards,” Bellini says. “Even in their early 20’s, they thought they were the cat’s pajamas. And they had a very unshakeable vision. They went into that show—and would have done this with any producer—[with] certain things in mind…you had to accept their terms. And that’s probably one thing that makes them great, but it also prevented them from becoming more than successful cult comedians.” Plenty of characters were simply lifted from the stage show, including the Headcrusher and the mincing, smart-assed Buddy Cole, who had sprung from Thompson and Bellini’s handheld camera improvisations years before. Other characters, like the Chicken Lady, were hatched out of the show’s unusually high budget—at the Rivoli, the only costumes had been “a sweater and a wig,” Bellini says.
Toronto was, in many ways, a kind of sixth Kid in the Hall. Bumper videos showed the Kids goofing around downtown. Toronto sports teams were namedropped (“took me to a Leafs game” became a euphemism for gay sex), and one of Thompson’s characters read a magazine called Xcrete (an embittered take-off on Xtra). Even Bellini’s trademark character was borne out of a Toronto landmark: the Romans II Health and Recreation Spa, a police target during the 1981 Toronto bathhouse raids. Bellini had described his bathhouse routine to McKinney, who “laughed for about 20 minutes.” When the show organized its first contest, he suggested Bellini in a towel as the prize. “The Kids fought to stay in Toronto,” Bellini says. “The stardom never got to you, because there were no limos, there were no groupies, there were no parties with cocaine on the table.” Once, Thompson demanded Madonna tickets; an assistant bought them and pretended they were free. McKinney agrees that the show’s location was a blessing. “I think if we’d been in Los Angeles, by year three, somebody would have got an offer and split… I personally came out of Kids in the Hall incredibly naïve about how the business ran, and I probably paid the price. Because I just thought, well, you do whatever you want, right? And people give you money? No. I mean, that’s kind of what was unique about the show—we were allowed to stay business naïve for a long, long time.”
Michaels took a laissez-faire approach to the show, but his name (and the support of American networks) made all the difference. The show had “so little censorship it’s ridiculous,” McKinney says. There were coke binges, cold-blooded murders, naked asses galore and sex scenes complete with very believable sex faces. A scene in which Thompson (after declaring himself “not gay”) received a blowjob from Casimiri was cut —but only in the States, Casimiri says. The hardest jokes to get past the censors were questionable due to social taboo—abortion, religious jokes—ironic, considering the Kids’ steadfast rejection of topical material. Canadian content was also deemed inappropriate for American audiences. In one skit, McDonald and Foley make reference to Canadian cities—“Regina, Saskatoon, just really goony Canadian names. Medicine Hat! And they said we couldn’t do that—there has to be an American version,” Bellini reports. A sketch called “Screw You Taxpayer,” a riff on the CBC’s public funding, was cut in the States for being “too Canadian” —but not due to either McCulloch’s risqué portrayal of a Chinese rickshaw driver or the skit’s allusions to necrophilia.
As Bellini points out, the show’s ending was far from glorious. The movie Brain Candy was meant to be a grand exit; it was a belly flop instead. Foley was offered a starring role on News Radio right before production started, and several of his parts had to be re-shot. The script was rewritten multiple times, McDonald’s wife left him, and almost every member longed to desert the project. McKinney was the only one who wanted to soldier on. He had reason to; Kids in the Hall quickly proved to have been one-of-a-kind. “We had a vote at the end of the fifth season, who wants to do another year, and I was the only one with my hand up because I really liked doing sketch comedy. So I went on to SNL, but I found that sort of a different experience—it was harder to do my stuff there.”
You might compare the Kids in the Hall to the Velvet Underground—as the old adage goes, not many bought their records, but everyone who did started a band. The Kids’ ingenuity meant that they were nowhere near as big as they could have been. But everyone who watched the show was inspired by it—from the fans riffing on its lines to the alternative comics, in Toronto and elsewhere, who have sprung up in its wake. “Someone said our audience is narrow but deep. In other words, our fans are real fans, but there’s not tens of millions of them,” McKinney says. The troupe’s latest tour (and the two tours that preceded it) provided ample proof that the show still has a steady base of admirers, not to mention posthumous momentum thanks to syndication and DVD. “They all thought they’d go to the next level and become big stars, and it never really happened. No one hit that Adam Sandler level, like a hundred million dollar opening for a comedy. It just didn’t happen, and it’s kind of sad, but what are you going to do?” Bellini says. “They’re still together, they can still perform, they can still write. You’re still interested. It’s been 20 years, you know? So it worked out okay. I just wish we were all richer.”
