Sure, it took us all a few more years to get email addresses and wireless access and, finally, for YouTube to arrive. But once it did, with its blizzard of video ephemera, YouTube made sketch comedy suddenly seem not only obsolete but faintly musty, endearingly quaint, like forming a barbershop quartet. Maybe people still do it, but it’s not where the action is.
This is no disrespect to the sketch groups out there. Trust me, I am your biggest fan. But I have to think that a lot of that energy — energy that was once centred on a black-box theatre in a back room on Queen Street — is now dispersed online in a thousand digital shorts. (If our group had come along five years later, that’s what we would have been doing.) It’s for this same reason that I doubt we’ll ever see another Spy magazine, that other ’80s-born comedic touchstone. Because you can no longer gather thirty people to make one funny thing anymore — they’re all busy making their own funny things, online and alone. The Internet changed music because it gave us new ways to acquire it, but the songs and the bands remained more or less the same. The Internet changed sketch comedy because it exploded it into a million downloadable shards.
This represents a uniquely Canadian impoverishment, because — with apologies to Monty Python — the sketch group is a Canadian contraption. Maybe we didn’t invent it, but we own it. We do it best. The writers’ room, on the other hand, is an American concoction. In the States, TV comedy is typically crafted by a bunch of overworked, wisecracking, sleep-deprived shlumps spitballing ideas in an airless room. That’s SNL. That’s The Daily Show. That’s every sitcom since Sid Caesar corralled Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and Neil Simon to toil on Your Show of Shows. As Canadians, we’ve never had many writers’ rooms to aspire to — hell, we hardly had any sitcoms. But we could always form sketch comedy troupes. We could get four or five people together in a rec room, pick the perfect name (Funny Ha-Ha? The Wackadoodles? Temporary Insanity?), and try to craft gemlike, hallucinatory, revelatory, hilarious four-minute sketches. We could be the next Kids in the Hall, or aspire to be.
But now who needs a troupe, or a name, or a stage? All you need is a digital camera and a firewire. You need a joke that’s better than the one uploaded two minutes ago. Within twenty-four hours of Christian Bale’s famous on-set audio blow-up (to pick one of a billion examples), there were dozens of funny mash-ups and parodies online, each playing off and one-upping the others. No sooner had Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards than someone had set up immaletyoufinish.tumblr.com, a repository of Kanye West “I’mma let you finish” gags. The Balloon Boy was still rocketing through the Colorado sky, and people were already tweeting jokes about it. (Never mind what happened when the balloon turned out to be empty. Still ricocheting across Twitter: “Yo Balloon Boy, I’mma let you finish, but Anne Frank had the best attic hideout spot of all time.”)
Don’t get me wrong: this is not bad for comedy, but it is bad for sketch comedy. Why start a comedy troupe when the whole world is now one big comedy troupe? The whole world is spitballing ideas. The whole world is a writers’ room now.
It is at this point in the story I bring you the happy news that the Kids in the Hall are reuniting. The Kids are, as we speak, putting the final touches on a new eight-part CBC series, Death Comes to Town, which will premiere in January. With typical macabre glee, the show will chronicle a killing spree in a rural town, followed by a sensational trial. The series opens, reportedly, with Death (played by McKinney) arriving on a Greyhound bus.
So when we last left the Kids, they were being buried in a grave of their own making. Now they’re returning, with Death, on a bus.
Greyhound buses. Rural towns. Killing sprees. It all echoes Robert Pickton and his nightmare pig farm, or that insane story about the guy getting his head hacked off and body parts eaten on the bus out of Edmonton, or any number of similar calamitous absurdities that have happened in the post-KITH world. Dare we say: the Kids in the Hall, lurching fresh from the grave, are returning, reborn, just in time.
As for the rest of us, all those Queen Street sketch rats, well, the Kids had shown us what was possible, but also what was impossible: that is, surpassing the Kids. Of all the “next Kids in the Hall,” none of us were. Over the years, I saw a number of great comedians take the stage at the world-famous Rivoli, from Seán Cullen to Shaun Majumder to Janeane Garafalo to Will Ferrell, but it remains world famous for the same reason it was fifteen years ago: as the birthplace of the Kids in the Hall.
As for Joke Boy, we performed for three more years, then split up. My partner David Haydn-Jones moved to LA to act, and, later, I moved to New York to write. Dave’s been a working actor ever since, and a few years ago he starred in the CBC sitcom Rumours. Another of our original members, Colin Ferguson, now appears on Eureka, a show on Syfy. Seán Cullen left Corky and the Juice Pigs and became Seán Cullen. Jason Jones, who was in the sketch group the Bobroom, and who occasionally filled in roles for us, has since joined his wife, Samantha Bee (ex of the sketch group the Atomic Fireballs) as a correspondent on The Daily Show. Jennifer Irwin, of the short-lived troupe Team Unitard and, later, Second City, now stars on HBO’s Eastbound & Down. Two exiles from Skippy’s Rangers, Bob Martin and Lisa Lambert, turned a bachelor party skit into a hit Broadway show, The Drowsy Chaperone, which later won a Tony. Last summer, when I brought my girlfriend to Toronto, I gave her a downtown tour with one stop: the musty black-box stage at the Rivoli.
