The Kids In The Hall
Legendary sketch-comedy troupe reunites to tour
Dan Dion
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Canadian sketch troupe The Kids In The Hall, as a collective, seemingly disappeared after some scattered reunion dates and compilation DVDs earlier this decade, but that’s about to change: They’re embarking on a 30-city, two-month tour. The “Live As We’ll Ever Be” outing, however, isn’t a reunion tour—Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, and Scott Thompson are placing an emphasis performing almost exclusively new material, in hopes of eventually creating a TV show follow-up to 1988-1995’s offbeat, eponymous sketch show, and a movie follow-up to 1996’s Brain Candy. Armed with new sketches about hateful babies, imaginary girlfriends, and drunken superheroes, The Kids In The Hall talked to Decider backstage after the opening night of the tour about the new material, the pitfalls of Saturday Night Live, and why they’re working together again.
Decider: How did you put the new material together?
Kevin McDonald: We started two years ago. We got together in Los Angeles every six months or a year. We would get a week together.
Dave Foley: We gave ourselves three days to write 90 minutes of material, and we put the show up that weekend. And in three days, we actually came up with about three hours of material and 90 minutes of it wasn’t bad.
KM: [Laughs.] It’s what we used to do in the old days when we were a club act.
Mark McKinney: Actually, that was the premise of the whole thing. We said, “Let’s get together and write a show like we did.”
Bruce McCulloch: It was just to go back to the old impulse. If we’re going to do it again, there’s no reason to do it other than we want to. Now, our careers don’t depend on each other and we’re only doing it because we want to. I think other times it was like, [dejected] “Okay, we’ll go on tour.” We really loved it, but it was a simple artistic impulse when we began.
D: If the process is similar, is the experience different now?
KM: It’s a circle. We’ve sort of gone back to the old days, before the TV show.
DF: The stuff in this show is much more written where even scenes you’re not in—everybody contributed to everything. More than anything we were excited about how much fun it was to write together again. We hadn’t really written together since Brain Candy.
Scott Thompson: Writing is a difficult thing. You’ve really got to be open to the people. We’re in a stage now in our lives where we’re willing to be open with each other again. That’s what obscurity will do to you. It’ll open you up.
D: Are there characters you’ll no longer attempt to play?
ST: I won’t play a teenager.
DF: Or anyone in their 20s. [Laughs.]It used to be we were believable as the old businessmen and now we’re not believable as teenagers.
D: It’s that circle again.
DF: Yeah,and soon we won’t be believable as people that are alive.
D: It seems like what’s contributed to your troupe’s longevity is the emphasis on character-driven sketches over pop-culture references. Was that intentional?
ST: Absolutely.
DF: We didn’t want to do current events. We figured that’s Saturday Night Live’s thing.
ST: And we’d have to read the paper.
DF: We didn’t want to do parody because we were allbig fans of SCTV.
BM: And some of us thought parody was a weak art form.
DF: Actually, a lot of people at SCTV thought that, too.
D: Considering your opinion of parody, was it difficult for those of you who worked for Saturday Night Live?
MM: Yeah. But I didn’t work on Saturday Night Live, it turns out.
BM: The thing I found discombobulating about Saturday Night Live is—we’re an impulsive troupe, and I remember they would talk about everything forever, the Harvard guys. It was all so heady and there wasn’t so much performance in it. The thing about having our own show was that we kind of have to sell to each other, but if someone said, “I’m just going to go up to a beatbox and I’m going to dance,” we’d get to try it. We didn’t have to have intellectual conversations about comedy. We all hate having intellectual conversations about comedy, yet we’ll all do it when we feel we need the floor.
D: Was it difficult to get your collaborative muscles working together again?
DF: Oddly, it wasn’t at all.
D: Did that surprise you?
KM: Yes. We talked about it.
DF: We were fairly nervous going in. I think everyone was a little nervous the first time we did that. When we did the first writers’ meeting I thought, “Alright, if this doesn’t go well, this is the last time we’re going to work together.” And it went really well.
ST: And then you took your dark glasses off. Yeah, we were scared.
DF: Yeah, especially when I saw the pile of scripts Scott had. It was this tall.
Kevin McDonald: We started two years ago. We got together in Los Angeles every six months or a year. We would get a week together.
Dave Foley: We gave ourselves three days to write 90 minutes of material, and we put the show up that weekend. And in three days, we actually came up with about three hours of material and 90 minutes of it wasn’t bad.
KM: [Laughs.] It’s what we used to do in the old days when we were a club act.
Mark McKinney: Actually, that was the premise of the whole thing. We said, “Let’s get together and write a show like we did.”
Bruce McCulloch: It was just to go back to the old impulse. If we’re going to do it again, there’s no reason to do it other than we want to. Now, our careers don’t depend on each other and we’re only doing it because we want to. I think other times it was like, [dejected] “Okay, we’ll go on tour.” We really loved it, but it was a simple artistic impulse when we began.
D: If the process is similar, is the experience different now?
KM: It’s a circle. We’ve sort of gone back to the old days, before the TV show.
DF: The stuff in this show is much more written where even scenes you’re not in—everybody contributed to everything. More than anything we were excited about how much fun it was to write together again. We hadn’t really written together since Brain Candy.
Scott Thompson: Writing is a difficult thing. You’ve really got to be open to the people. We’re in a stage now in our lives where we’re willing to be open with each other again. That’s what obscurity will do to you. It’ll open you up.
D: Are there characters you’ll no longer attempt to play?
ST: I won’t play a teenager.
DF: Or anyone in their 20s. [Laughs.]It used to be we were believable as the old businessmen and now we’re not believable as teenagers.
D: It’s that circle again.
DF: Yeah,and soon we won’t be believable as people that are alive.
D: It seems like what’s contributed to your troupe’s longevity is the emphasis on character-driven sketches over pop-culture references. Was that intentional?
ST: Absolutely.
DF: We didn’t want to do current events. We figured that’s Saturday Night Live’s thing.
ST: And we’d have to read the paper.
DF: We didn’t want to do parody because we were allbig fans of SCTV.
BM: And some of us thought parody was a weak art form.
DF: Actually, a lot of people at SCTV thought that, too.
D: Considering your opinion of parody, was it difficult for those of you who worked for Saturday Night Live?
MM: Yeah. But I didn’t work on Saturday Night Live, it turns out.
BM: The thing I found discombobulating about Saturday Night Live is—we’re an impulsive troupe, and I remember they would talk about everything forever, the Harvard guys. It was all so heady and there wasn’t so much performance in it. The thing about having our own show was that we kind of have to sell to each other, but if someone said, “I’m just going to go up to a beatbox and I’m going to dance,” we’d get to try it. We didn’t have to have intellectual conversations about comedy. We all hate having intellectual conversations about comedy, yet we’ll all do it when we feel we need the floor.
D: Was it difficult to get your collaborative muscles working together again?
DF: Oddly, it wasn’t at all.
D: Did that surprise you?
KM: Yes. We talked about it.
DF: We were fairly nervous going in. I think everyone was a little nervous the first time we did that. When we did the first writers’ meeting I thought, “Alright, if this doesn’t go well, this is the last time we’re going to work together.” And it went really well.
ST: And then you took your dark glasses off. Yeah, we were scared.
DF: Yeah, especially when I saw the pile of scripts Scott had. It was this tall.
