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Kid vs. Kid: duelling interviews with Mark McKinney and Bruce McCulloch
By Robert ParkerSo we played shows at the Rivoli restaurant, on the black-box stage in the back room — all the downtown sketch groups, the duos and trios and quartets and quintets, the Bobroom and the Riot Act and Fast & Dirty and Brock & John and Joe’s Convenience and Skippy’s Rangers and Shy One Horse and Pale By Comparison and the Komic-Kazes and the Vacant Lot and Joke Boy — that last one, that was us. We started out as a quartet, all college friends, later whittled to a trio, and on January 23, 1995, we played our first show at the world-famous Rivoli. We called it that — “the world-famous Rivoli” — half in jest and half in awe, because the Rivoli was where the Kids had started out. We played midnight gigs on weekends, during which someone would invariably whisper the rumour that Lorne Michaels was either coming, or was there, or had just left. We jockeyed for spots on CBC’s Comics! and SketchCom and at the Just for Laughs festival. The phrase “the next Kids in the Hall” became a coveted crown, to be passed briefly to, and worn awkwardly by, each hot new group with a sold-out show. Sketch comedy in Toronto in 1994 was like grunge music in Seattle in 1991 — and the Rivoli was our Crocodile Café, and the Kids in the Hall were our Nirvana.
A few months before Joke Boy’s first Rivoli show, I started dreaming about the Kids. I dreamt they came to see us and we stank. They came backstage and told us it was okay. For some reason, they were all splashed with talcum powder. Their faces were white, like ghosts.
Nineteen ninety-four was also the final year that the Kids appeared on Canadian television, ending their fabled five-season run on CBC (and, in the States, on CBS and HBO). They signed off with a series finale in which dirt was dumped on their open grave. (Then Paul Bellini danced on it, in a towel.) It was a fitting image, though back then we didn’t know how fitting. The Kids weren’t just burying themselves. They were burying sketch comedy as well.
I read recently that last year the Kids in the Hall were added to Canada’s Walk of Fame in Toronto. This immediately raised the question Who the hell have they been putting on the Walk of Fame before now? If it had been up to me, the Kids would have had their star in the sidewalk before the concrete dried. The Kids were our premium export, a perfectly functioning comedy machine, a Trojan Horse of antic weirdness that we sent trundling south of the border. It arrived disguised as five polite Canadians, but then the Chicken Lady popped out.
Yet even after they achieved success in America, the Kids remained stridently, even self-parodically, Canadian. (Foley, Thompson, McDonald, McKinney, and McCulloch sounds like the starting five for a shinny hockey team, or the partners in a hoser law firm.) They were funny, fearless, and cool — not comedian cool, but rock band cool, street gang cool, with their perfect name (stolen from Sid Caesar, who’d blame bad jokes on the aspiring writers who gathered outside his office to toss him one-liners: “the kids in the hall”) and their iconic theme song, not some wacky here-comes-comedy collection of bloops, bleeps, and horn honks, but a jangly hipster instrumental by Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet.
The Kids were a quintet of cross-dressing, genre-trampling pranksters who shied away from sketch clichés: the game show parody, the fake commercial, the spoof talk show. Instead, their sketches were about real people (all five were great actors) in absurd situations, or absurd people in real situations. And in a heartening reversal of the usual comedic calculus, their weirdest bits were also their most popular, from the head-crushing guy (“I crush your head!”), to the sexually insatiable Chicken Lady, to the poignant monologues of gay flâneur Buddy Cole. If you pop in a best-of DVD from any of their five American TV seasons (all released in 2006 in an aptly titled “megaset”), these nearly twenty-year-old sketches still seem fresher and more daring than anything on last weekend’s Saturday Night Live. So why then did the Kids never produce their own comedic offspring? How come the Kids never spawned, well, their own famous kids?
For starters, even the Kids couldn’t be the Kids forever. The individual members were never assimilated into the greater comedy culture in the same way that the SCTV alumni had been. Kevin McDonald never made Uncle Buck; Bruce McCulloch never shrunk the kids, honey; Mark McKinney endured a few short years of being misunderstood and underused on SNL; Scott Thompson waved a dildo in Anne Michaels’ face. And while Dave Foley landed as a lead on NewsRadio, he was cast, improbably, tragically, as the straight man, the comic foil. The Kids made one ill-fated movie, Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy, in 1996, but it bore all the marks of the rumoured tensions that had strained the group for years, coming off like the final album by a band that’s already broken up.
But more than that, when the Kids went down they took sketch comedy with them. I likened them to Nirvana, but that’s not quite right; Nirvana changed rock, but they didn’t end it. Other worthy sketch groups followed the Kids — HBO’s Mr. Show, the NYU-birthed group the State, the Upright Citizens Brigade, which fostered Amy Poehler — but sketch comedy, as a form, is now largely irrelevant. Because in 1994, that year of Queen Street dreams and open graves, something else was happening. The Internet was being born.
