Fantastic KITH article (really, really long)
Leah
I got this out of a book called "Mondo Canuck". It's about famous Canadians and their contribution
to pop culture. This was the author's take on KITH:
NEW DISORDER: KIDS IN THE HALL
When Kids In The Hall, the Toronto based, Lorne Michaels-produced sketch show that had been seen in
the US and Canada for five years finally went off the air for good in January 1995, the sound of
head-scratching could still be heard at the funeral: just what was that, anyway? Even the final
program's last image- Kids Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney and Scott
Thompson being dumped and buried in a mass grave- seemed engineered to promote this legacy of
confusion. Funny? Tasteless? Horrific? Stupid? All of the above?
Loved, disdained and puzzled over with equal intensity, Kids In The Hall might have left behind only
one certainty about which there was unequivocal agreement: no matter what you thought of it, whether
it struck you as funny, infuriating, obtuse or offensive, there had never been anything in the
history of Canadian comedy quite like it. Which, considering the sheer free-wheeling richness of the
national comic tradition- from Wayne and Shuster to Martin Short- is no small certainty to bear:
it's like everyone agreeing there's never been another hockey player quite like that one, or that
this landscape painting is absolutely distinct in the history of Canadian landscape painting. To be
noticed as a unique experiment in Canadian comedy, Kids In The Hall really had to stick out.
Of course, it really helped that Lorne Michaels was holding the stick. One night, in the
mid-eighties, during his constant scan for new Canadian comedy talent, the former comedian and
Saturday Night Live executive producer caught the Kids act at the Rivoli, the downtown Toronto
bistro at which the comedy troupe was the unofficial house act. (The group name, incidentally, comes
from Jack Benny's term for the hoards of comics who used to wait in the hall outside his office,
hoping to sell jokes to him.) Consisting of two ex-members of a Calgary improv troupe, McCulloch and
McKinney, and three Torontonians- Foley, McDonald and Thompson- the Kids practiced a form of
high-concept, mind-bending sketches, which Michaels would later liken to "the Monty Python of the
eighties." Like that of the Pythons, The Kids comedy was cerebral as it was surreal: it hit the
solar plexus only after rebounding off your brain. A particularly popular Rivoli-era sketch, which
Michaels most likely saw, was typical of the Kids' conceptual approach: a group of guys sit around a
campfire, tearfully guzzling brews while mourning a dead friend. Gradually, the realization hits us:
these guys aren't just the dead man's best friends, they killed him. Struck immediately by their
daring and originality- sex and gender anxiety being an almost obsessive object of the Kids' comic
scrutiny- Michaels took the group under his wing. "I think they're the next wave," Michaels told the
Globe and Mail in 1990. "Like all things that are new and interesting, it takes looking at to adjust
your eye to it, to realize it's not going to be what you're used to.
Under the umbrella of his Broadway Video organization, Michaels managed to get Home Box Office (HBO)
in the US to draw up a development deal for the Kids' special, which, in turn convinced the
otherwise innovation-shy CBC to hop in, as well. Thereafter, everything clicked: the special was
sufficiently successful to convince HBO and CBC to coproduce a series, and by 1989, the
made-in-Toronto Kids In The Hall show was on air weekly across North America. In 1992, the show was
scooped From HBO to CBS, where it's Friday night ratings occasionally even outdrew NBC's Late Night
With David Letterman: this corresponded with positively effusive displays of approval in such
prominent publications as Newsweek, The New York Times, GQ, The Village Voice and Rolling Stone.
So how is it, that three years later, the Kids were no longer and their legacy is one of confusion?
Part of the reason undoubtedly has to do with the group's ambivalent position vis-a-vis the
so-called "Canadian comic tradition," a tradition the Kids themselves never seemed to put much stock
in: "It's a popular question," McCulloch once deadpanned to a reporter who'd asked the dreaded
"C.C.T." question. "While I guess I admire the people from Saturday Night Live and Second City, I
don't really feel much affinity with them. I probably feel closer to The Tragically Hip."
For the fact was, while there were certain aspects of the group that were unmistakably Canadian-
like the Kids' hoser-deluxe, WASPier-than-thou names, for instance- there were others that were
pretty well unprecedented in the popular home-grown comedy. While the backbone of our "tradition"
has always been sketch comedy, it has equally always been sketch comedy directed at some readily
identifiable target outside itself, like politics (Royal Canadian Air Farce) or pop culture (SCTV).
The Kids' approach to sketch, on the other hand, was so purely conceptual as to verge on
solipsistic: while Rick Moranis might do an uncanny Davis Brinkley or Woody Allen, McCulloch's
specialty were people like "Cabbagehead," a cigar-smoking sleazeball with a large legume for a
scalp. One of Scott Thompson's most popular characters, the ridiculously effete "philosopher queen,"
Buddy Cole, was, while less purely gonzo than Cabbagehead, another completely self-contained comic
creation. Indeed, Mark McKinney's "Headcrusher," the deranged urban nutcase who rages incessantly to
himself while pretend to pop people's heads between his thumb and his forefinger, might aptly
symbolize the entire comic universe of the Kids: insular, twisted and utterly unaccountable to
reason. Getting the Kids' comedy therefore didn't depend entirely on one's familiarity with the
pop-culture object satirized: it depended entirely on one's ability to find the Kids' wavelength and
hang on for dear life. And if you couldn't ride the wavelength, tough- the Kids surfed on anyway.
Dave Foley once spoke profoundly of the program's utter disregard for anything outside its own
obsessive sphere of inspiration: "Some of the greatest events of the past several decades have taken
place recently and we're proud to say they have had absolutely no bearing on the show,: he said in
the globally unsettled year of 1991. "Like, we don't do a lot of Gorbachev material.: A couple of
years later, McCulloch offered this unsurprising insight into the Kids' comedic methodology: "We're
not very big on theory," said the man who created Cabbagehead. "We just do it. Most of our ideas
begin like, 禅here's this guy...'"
When pondering the Kids' apparently wilful rejection of the parodic strain in Canadian comedy, the
issue of age- or specifically, the relationship of what you find funny and when you were born-
becomes unavoidable. The Kids tended to split response along generational lines. While their show
was massively popular on collage campuses, older people, even those merely old enough to be raised
on SCTV or SNL, were far less likely to find the show funny than those whose sense of humor had been
forged even a few years later.
In this sense, the comedy of the Kids In The Hall may belong closer to Doug Coupland than Doug
McKenzie in the great Canadian cultural archives. The first genuinely popular Canadian expression of
post-boomer, Gen-X comedy, it exhibited precisely the same insouciant disdain for the issue-driven
comedy of previous generations that Coupland's equally self-insulated characters reserved for the
boomer world. Even the Kids' relentless gender-bending and office bashing seems, in retrospect,
closer to Coupland than anything else in Canadian comedy. And, in the same way that Coupland's
languidly solipsistic fiction short-circuited any sense of national or religious affiliation, so the
Kids' comedy seemed to come from a place less defined by borders and birthright than by matters of
age and sensibility.
That so many people didn't get what the Kids were doing simply confirms the troupe's validity as
something legitimately innovative and subversive. Just as the task of erecting something like a
"Canadian comedy tradition" was within our grasp, the Kids In The Hall came along and knocked the
foundation out from beneath the very assumptions that made that tradition possible. Which in the
long run in both good and necessary. Frankly, if there's one Canadian comic tradition that we might
be well advised to endorse, it's the kind that believes comic traditions are so much freeze-dried
moose dung in the first place.
Since folding the show, the Kids haven't disappeared, but, in the post-SCTV manner, they haven't
(with the exception of NewsRadio's Dave Foley) exactly flourished, either: Thompson (The Larry
Sanders Show) and McKinney (Saturday Night Live) were both visible in American programs less than a
year after Kids shut down, and McCulloch released an album with the deliciously Canadian title Shame
Based Man. In spring 1996, the first Kids' movie- a pharmaceutical farce called Brain Candy- was
released to a lukewarm public and critical response, leaving it highly unlikely the boys would
bother to regroup for another. No matter, by that time, they'd already made their point loud and
clear. Which is: there is no point.
If you've read this far, you are truely a dedicated KITH fan. Congratulations.
Leah
who can't believe she actually typed out the whole thing
Djinifer
Leah wrote:
>>If you've read this far, you are truely a dedicated KITH fan.
>>Congratulations.
Guess I'm a dedicated fan...! Who knew??? <g> Thanks for posting! It's
always great to see new KITH articles.
Djinifer
Djin's Kids in the Hall Audio Page
http://pages.prodigy.com/djinifer/
"OK! That does it!! Now listen!! Why is it that everthing today has involved
things either going in or coming out of my ass?!"-Eric Cartman, South Park
KdsInThHal
I love the picture with this article. (thank you miranda, btw, did I ever thank
you? <g>)
_...._...._...._
sarah.
* http:/lava.home.ml.org *
"I'm promoting me."~Dave Foley
"If you're born a lion, don't go tryin' - to act tame."~Ani DiFranco
"Wish that I had the answer to the questions, then I would write a
book that'd really sell."~Laura Love
Kitana Ananda
Leah wrote:
> I got this out of a book called "Mondo Canuck". It's about famous Canadians
and their contribution
> to pop culture. This was the author's take on KITH:
::sigh:: I saw that book in a bookstore once... alas, I didn't have the money
for it at the moment. Its a cute book.
> If you've read this far, you are truely a dedicated KITH fan.
Congratulations.
I guess I am then.<g> Thanks for taking the time to type the whole thing
out.:)
Kitana:)
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