When The Kids In The Hall first premièred on HBO in 1989, it carried with it the pedigree—and the onus—of Saturday Night Live’s Lorne Michaels. His executive-producer stamp on the Canadian comedy troupe’s introduction to America, combined with the sense of lawlessness granted by ad-free cable, set the expectation that Kids would be SNL’s more rambunctious cousin, the Toronto farm team that played a bit rougher than the broadcast big leagues. But audiences who tuned in expecting a slightly dirtier SNL—a skewering of the zeitgeist with more swears and nudity—were probably baffled to find a surrealist sketch series unlike anything U.S. viewers were then used to, particularly if they’d never caught Monty Python’s Flying Circus reruns on PBS.
Like Monty Python, Kids In The Hall inhabited a self-contained world built around original characters and absurdist setups, linked by wraparound sketches and short films that occasionally valued weirdness over funniness. Also like Python, the show’s comedic sweet spot was in the mundanity of the outrageous (the mass murderers and anal-probing aliens bored with their jobs), or the bizarre hidden within the normal (the hired whores and Satanic rituals lurking just behind every business meeting). And while it often tapped into the “slacker” zeitgeist with parodies of lazy, flannel-clad teens, and touched lightly on edgy topics such as homosexuality and AIDS, Kids all but eschewed contemporary references. Outside of, say, the occasional argument over Shelley Long, or the anomalous gag about Vanilla Ice, the show wisely stayed away from the pop culture of its era. As a result, just like Monty Python—and unlike other sketch shows such as SNL or SCTV—The Kids In The Hall’s comedy feels remarkably timeless.
Most obviously, the Kids also shared Python’s penchant for drag—though the Kids played female without a wink to the audience, unlike some of Python’s screechy caricatures. (Young male fans who found themselves sexually confused whenever Dave Foley donned a dress will surely agree.) This was true no matter how extreme their characters got: The Kids clung to the idea that comedy is funnier when it feels real. As a result, The Kids In The Hall boasts some of the most convincing acting, both in and out of drag, of any sketch series ever. Time and again it pulled off the unusual feat of making the audience feel genuine emotional connection to its men with cabbages for heads and its horny chicken ladies.
It’s somewhat ironic that another unique aspect of The Kids In The Hall was its zeal for exposing its own artificiality. From the very early episodes, the cast members reveled in acknowledging themselves as a sketch-comedy troupe putting on a TV show, and breaking the fourth wall to mock all the implied obligatory conventions. The second episode featured Foley listlessly explaining the basic formula for successful sketch comedy. That same season saw Kevin McDonald fretting that he might be booted from the troupe after coming up with just the nonsensical middle of a sketch. The very next episode saw both of them commenting on the obviously manufactured aspect of it all—as well as their newfound grind of making weekly TV—on “Premise Beach,” gleefully lobbing a bunch of wacky “what if?” setups to nowhere.
Whether it was a means of playing the upstart punks, or being preemptively defensive about their imagined audience reaction, this sort of self-effacement fell away as seasons wore on and Kids established its own conventions. Very quickly, the show grew a stable of recurring characters whose quirky idiosyncrasies became recognizable formulas. By the time the series wrapped in 1995, most of these characters had become surprisingly fleshed out; by then, even the Chicken Lady had an origin story. This had its own effect behind the scenes, as the troupe members became increasingly exhausted with their own show and longed for something else—the Brain Candy movie, most immediately, but also newer projects that would allow the Kids to more clearly define themselves as individual performers.
As anyone who’s watched even one episode of The Kids In The Hall knows, however, their individual identities were always well-established, to the point of the Kids practically being characters themselves. In addition to being the show’s de facto gay mouthpiece, Scott Thompson was the preening narcissist, both qualities coming together to form the flamboyantly dishy Buddy Cole, or his only slightly tongue-in-cheek proposals for a Scott Thompson Show spin-off. On the opposite end, McDonald was the neurotic, using his monologues to delve into his troubled family history, and presenting himself to the audience with intros like “or, as you might know me at home, the Kid In The Hall we don’t like.” McDonald was a performer so flop-sweat-desperate for the audience’s affection, one time he even filmed himself sleeping to seem more relatable.
His equally vaudevillian companion, Foley, was the affable everyman, using his natural, college-pal likability to complain about the tedium of being a mass murderer, or chuckle about his being such a dangerously bad doctor. Bruce McCulloch, the indignant rebel, had a chip on his shoulder about everything—jazz music, his small size, the sad way people eat their sandwiches—and, as the token flannel-clad rock ’n’ roller, he was the guy who did songs like “Daves I Know” and “Terriers.” And Mark McKinney—well, who knows who that guy is? He was the troupe’s go-to for weird accents and makeup, and even his monologues buried his true self under uglifying guises, like a cat on a prowl or a loser fascinated by his own festering leg wound.
With barely anyone else filling out the stage, the thrill of Kids was in the endless ways all these distinct personalities could be combined. McKinney and McCulloch excelled at putting satiric spins on manhood, taking on immature cops, fast-talking motivational seminar speakers, or businessmen whose important jobs amounted to little more than playacting. McCulloch and Thompson were just as excellent at being shifty dirtbags as they were gossipy secretaries. Thompson and Foley were as well matched playing glamorous Italian movie stars as they were playing sympathetic street hookers. And time and again, Foley was McDonald’s perfect foil and vice versa: Many of the show’s best sketches take place as simple conversations between the two, whether it’s McDonald chastising Foley for refusing to admit he’s right about Citizen Kane or for blowing up yet another planet during an undercover alien mission. Or it’s one of several party scenes where Foley meets McDonald and sarcastically chats him up, or deviously tells their boss that McDonald just confessed to being a bedwetter.
Naturally, it’s difficult for a list like this to delineate so many of these perfectly tuned moments (to reference just one fan-favorite sketch that unfortunately didn’t make the cut). Indeed, in a show where even the supposed filler—“Thirty Helens Agree” or “It’s A Fact,” for instance—has its own devoted following, little from The Kids In The Hall’s run seems dispensable. (Though there are certainly some diminishing returns in the sluggish fourth and fifth seasons.) This is also, regrettably, not a “Best Sketches” list: As they appear in the midst of less memorable material, several “all-time classics” have been sadly orphaned. Some are referenced in the “And if you like those…” section; many are not. There’s simply too much here to avoid leaving out someone’s favorites.