"Is anybody rolling? I've got a sock on my hand and a bit I want to try." Mark McKinney is crammed into a corner booth at Fez Uptown to tape Comedy Central promos with the gour other Kids in the Hall - Kevin McDonald, Bruce McCulloch, Dave Foley, and Scott Thompson - and he is clearly on The Canadian sketch comedy troupe has been apart for four years, but that doesn't seem to gave affected any of the guys' ability to pull a damn funny improv riff out of a plain white sock. For the moment, McKinney has named the puppet Himelfarbie ("Host of the popular kids' program Tortes and Treaties"), after David Himelfarb, the Kids' attorney and the man responsible for getting their "Same Guys, New Dresses" reunion tour on the road. For the next seven days, the show touches down at Town Hall. The Kids are back in the house. And their zanieness is in full effect.
Later that night, the group reassembles at the Luna Lounge. There for a tour-promoting webcast, they laze in comfy chairs on the club's small stage as fans interrogate them abvout old sketches and new projects. When asked what the hell they've been doing for the past four years, McCulloch feighns drunkennes and jokes that he's been going from rock bar to rock bar singing his old sketch song "These Are the Daves I know." Actually he - like the rest of the guys - has been quite busy, directing two comedy films, Superstar and Dog Park (which he also wrote and starred in). McKinney appeared in both of McCulloch's films, returned to Saturday Night Live for a short stint and appeared in the Off Broadway play Fuddy Mears. McDonald took a quick gig writing for the Martin Short Show before moving on to a part in Galexy Quest. Thompson had a spot on The Larry Sanders Show and published a fictional memoir under the name of his kids character, the martini-sipping queen Buddy Cole. Foley, whose role on the now-defunct Newsradio earned him sceleb status, just finished a movie called Monkeybone and is developing a sitcom for NBC. Now hitting their forties, the Kids look a little more like grownups than they did when their offbeat TV pilot first aried in the U.S. in 1988. But they still finish one another's silly jokes, rescue(or groan at) one another's flops and intuit one another's riffs as if they'd never done their separate ways.
The Kids in the Hall - named after the hopeful young writers who waited outside Jack Benny's radio studio to pitch jokes as he walked by - got their start in 1984 when McKinney and McCulloch (then of a Calgary comedy group called the Audience) joined forces with McDonald and Foley's troup which they'd already named the Kids in the Hall. Thompson, an out-of-work actor, approached and then joined them later that year, and their weekly gig at Rivoli, a Toronto club, took off. The shtick: five guys, one gay, all frequently playing female characters and frothing with weird, wicked humou.
From the beginning, the five shared an inclination for strange comedy. Their sketches, based loosely on middle-class life, led gossipy secretaries and nagging housewives to some very unnerving places. Take one skit from the show, where Thompson and McCulloch play Kathie and Cathy, middle-aged secretaries at the AT&Love company who are fitted with odometer-like counters in the back of their heads (to tall the number of words each has typed). As Cathy passes by, she sees that Kathie has reached 99,999 and is about to "turn over"; the office girls father round and cheer her through the big moment. Explaining how the cross-dressing and such eccentric female characters found their way into the Kids' act, McDonald says: "We had common obsessions with our families and relationships. and since we were writing about women, we had to play them."
But the Kids don't just make fun of the ladies - their overboard (some would say offensive) sketches have spoofed everything from health care to homophobia. At a 1987 performance at New York's West Bank Cafe, their infamous "AIDS Fairy" sketch left the audience hissing. In it, McCulloch plays a father who finds out his son is gay, then drifts into a nightmareish fantasy in which the boy and his lover prance about throwing confetti from a bucket marked AIDS.
For all their envelope pushing, most of the Kids claim no political motives. "We didn't have any agenda other than to make each other laugh" says Foley. But Thompson disagrees: "Idid. I came out in '84, and I was a Kid in the Hall a year later. My goal was to make being gay something that would make kids go, 'Hey, it's cool.'" As Buddy Cole, he delivered monologues about gay sex and culture ("Really, such a fuss over a few extra s-es"). Guided by his up-front style, the Kids demilitarized the homosexual comedy zone - though to this day, Thompson gripes about being known as "the gay one."
Thompson isn't the only one who's been singled out. After seeing the group at the Rivioli 1984, Lorne Michaels was so impressed that he asked McKinney and McCulloch to come to New York to write for Saturday Night Live. "We though maybe the group was going to split up, which was kind of scary," remembers McDonald. But the Kids didn't disband. McDonald, Foley and Thompson got jobs with SCTV's touring company, and whenever they had a week off McCulloch and McKinney flew back to Toronto to do shows with the guys.
After the 1985-86 SNL season ended, Michaels returned to Canada to see the Kids perform again. He had thoughts of giving them their own show. The guys endured a couple years of Michaels's television "boot camp" (honing their performance skills, rewriting skits) and The Kids in the Hall premiered on HBO in 1989. After a three season run, the show moved to CBS, where it occupied a late - Saturday night slot until 1995. Thanks to characters like McKinney's Head Crusher and half-breed Chicken Lady, McColloch's lecherous Cabbage Head, the Kids in the Hall soon became a cult hit.
For the guys, the transition from stage to small screen wasn't difficult, but it did change the way they wrote sketches. In their days at the Rivoli, they had created scenes as a team. The Lorne Michaels method - which more often split them up to write in separate rooms - fostered the troupe's best comedy yet. But since a limited number of skit made it onto each show, it also fostered intense competition, As McKinney recalls, "We still wrote collaboratively. And what's the opposite of collaborative, when you want the other person to die? We wrote that way too."
Stores of the group's fractious work style started to show up as magazine gossip. "People used to say 'Oh my God, they're breaking up!" because they'd read about some dressing room fight over the ending of a sketch," McKinney explains. "But to us it was just buisness as usual." Each Kid tells the same tale: Tey fought fiercely, but appreciated each other like family. "We were mean. But no one really mined," says Foley. Still, it was his departure from the group to star in NewsRadio and his subsquent lack of involvement in writing their feature film Brain Candy that prefaced stories about bad blood and an imminent breakup.
Maybe it was time to split anyway. In the beginning, recalls Foley, the guys had made a bargain: If the TV show ran five years they'd quit. And the trusth is, the writing and filming of Brain Candy (which ultamately tanked) was fraught with infighting. "It wasn't just Dave leaving," confides Thompson, whose brother committed suicide days before filming started. "We decided to write that movie right after we put the show to bed. We were exhauested; our relationships were coming to a boiling point. Dave was being swept away to be a sitcom star, and everything just started falling apart. Maybe everyone isn't as dramatic as I am - and there's no maybe there - but that's how I see it." The guys were tired, and they needed a rest. At that point no one knew how long the rest - from each other - would be.
Four years proved long enough. Late last summer, the Kids met to dicuss reuniting for a tour (but don't call it a comeback, instructs McKinney). "We had a few meetings before we all said yes," McDonald recalls. Over Laber Day weekend they started writing new sketches and selecting old ones to revive. "It was great to look into the heart of these guys," gushes Himelfarb. "They were happy, they were into it, they were laughing. That's all they did for three days - they laguhed." Luckiy their time working indiviually hadn't interfered with the group vibe. Foley deadpans, "It hasn't affected our dynamic at all - at least that I'm aware of. I know my backstabbing is the same as it always was. I can only guess about the other guys."
Whatever madness goes on behind the scenes, the Kids' method has producded nearly two decades of groundbreaking comedy. And with this long-awaited tour, fans are wondering: Might the Kids be back for good? as one of the group's best creations, Billy Dreamer, might say: Be happy about the little things. Apart from a television-airing of one pf their performances, a possible tour documentaryand a pledge to at least think about another movie, the guys don't have a lot to promise. Embarking on this tour is like being onstage at the beginning of an in-the-hHall improv bit - they know it'll be full of laughs, but it's anyone's guess where the thing is going to lead.