As a collective, Canadian sketch troupe The Kids In The Hall 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 isn't being billed as a reunion tour, though—Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, and Scott Thompson are emphasizing that they're performing almost exclusively new material, in hopes of eventually creating a TV-show follow-up to their offbeat, eponymous 1988-1995 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 The A.V. Club backstage after the opening night of the tour. In a chaotic, affable five-man interview (during which Thompson iced a muscle he'd pulled in his calf during the performance), they discussed the new material, the pitfalls of Saturday Night Live, and why they're working together again.
The A.V. Club: How did you think the show went tonight?
Scott Thompson: Great.
Dave Foley: Not great.
ST: No, it was terrible.
Kevin McDonald: I personally thought it went very well. Some bumpy patches, but it could have gone a lot worse. I give it a seven out of 10.
Mark McKinney: The show was funny three days ago, and then people put tape on the floor and started saying "You have to stand in this light, and do this, and don't forget this wig."
DF: Apparently that's how rehearsal works.
Bruce McCulloch: We're like blues musicians who can't play guitar. We're about the spirit, and I thought the spirit was pretty good tonight.
KM: The spirit was willing.
AVC: Scott referred to the rehearsal as a fiasco.
KM: It was a bad rehearsal.
ST: I thought it was one of the worst dresses ever.
BM: You know those lights that just turn and change colors? That's Scott. He goes through a range of emotions from "This is the greatest fucking thing we ever did! Fucking look out, America!" to "Oh my God! I have nothing but a clock radio! Who am I, mommy?" That will be within four seconds, and then he'll be back to "It's the greatest thing ever!" So you just caught him at the color dark purple, not to be confused with Deep Purple.
MM: No, this is the way Scott likes to end the show. Scott feared the show went well, the crowd was hot, and now he has an injury.
BM: "Ice! Ice! I work so hard!"
MM: "I have an injury! An injury!"
ST: I have an injury fetish. There's no getting around it.
DF: Doesn't this bring back memories of watching Bruce ice his calves in his office all the time?
ST: Mine's real. Mine really hurts. [Laughs.] You were really an icing maniac.
BM: Yeah, I was running a lot in those days, Scott.
MM: Then he switched from doing marathons to writing marathon Gavin scenes. [All laugh.] Ooh, take that. I'm burning you up, I burned you down, I made you into my little clown. Oh yeah!
AVC: How did you put the new material together?
KM: We started two years ago. We got together in Los Angeles. Every six months or a year, we would get a week together.
DF: 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.
MM: Actually, that was the premise of the whole thing. We said, "Let's get together and write a show like we did."
BM: 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, [Adopts dejected tone.] "Okay, we'll go on tour." We really loved it, but it was a simple artistic impulse when we began.
AVC: 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.
ST: 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.
I brought in a whole bunch of scenes I thought I wasn't even going to read. I mean, it changes tremendously with these geniuses. We wrote a ton of shit that didn't get done. But Dave was right, because it's not exactly like the TV show. As the show grew, we had other writers to use to hide from each other, and as it went along, we kind of got more uncomfortable with each other.
BM: It did become more about the cult of the read-through as the show progressed, and I think we tried to go back, too. The easiest thing to do as you go on is to not deal with each other, and the reason to do this is to deal with each other.
KM: But also, the cult of the read-through was about surprising you guys. I didn't want to write with you guys, I wanted to surprise you and make you laugh on Friday.
DF: 'Cause then you'd have a better chance of getting it in the show.
KM: Yes. But also I enjoyed that as a performance thing.
ST: The other thing about the read-through is that no matter what you bring in, you know it's going to improve with the other group members. As you get along, you want to do it on your own, but with these guys, you can't really hide from the truth.
AVC: What is that truth?
ST: That not everything I write is gold. That, or it's fool's gold.
AVC: 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 weren't believable as the old businessmen, and now we're not believable as teenagers.
AVC: It's that circle again.
DF: Yeah, and soon we won't be believable as people that are alive.
AVC: Is there material you're glad to be rid of?
BM: Well, there's shit we'd never do again. We had thought about doing "Salty Ham," and then we didn't do "Salty Ham."
ST: Even the old ones we do are very obscure scenes, and they're not remotely—it's not that they're not good, they're not classics. They're not ones people can recite word for word.
AVC: How do you differentiate between an obscure scene in the show and one that isn't as obscure?
DF: I guess you know what's not obscure because people tell you.
ST: We just assume that the original "Chicken Lady" is a classic. We assume the first "Simon And Hecubus" is a classic. Maybe we're wrong.
KM: Aren't they all obscure?
MM: We're The Kids In The Hall.
DF: Pretty much our most popular sketch is still obscure. [Laughs.]
ST: Basically, we're an obscure group.
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