(KITH) A Little Treat
SpookyOne
Thought I'd share this with y'all. It's a chapter from a newish book
called "Mondo Canuck". Go out and buy it today!
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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 U.S. 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
McCullouch, 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, distained 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 that 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 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 current _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
hordes 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, McCullouch and McKinney, and three Torontonians -- Foley,
McDonald and Thompson -- the Kids practiced a form of high-concept,
mind-bending sketch comedy which Michaels would later liken to "the
Monty Python of the eighties." Like that of the Pythons, the Kids'
comedy was as cerebral as it was surreal: it hit the solar plexux 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
new 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 U.S. to draw up a
development deal for a 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 the air weekly across North America. In 1992, the show
was scooped from HBO by CBS, where its 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," McCullouch once
deadpanned to a reporter who'd asked the dread "C.C.T." question. "While
I guess I admire the people from _Saturday Night Live_ and Second City,
I don't really feel that much affinity with them. I probably feel closer
to The Tragically Hip."
For the fact was, while there were certain aspects of the group
which seemed unmistakably Canadian -- like the Kids' hoser-deluxe,
WASPier-than-thou names, for instance -- ther were others that were
pretty well unprecedented in 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 David 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 pretending to pop
people's heads between his thumb and 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 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. It did not come to you: you went to it. And if you
couldn't ride the wavelengh, tough -- the Kids surfed on anyway.
_______________________________________________________________________
TO BE CONTINUED
.. getting Carpal Tunnel Syndrome...
SpookyBridget
KdsInThHal
>>"While
I guess I admire the people from _Saturday Night Live_ and Second City,
I don't really feel that much affinity with them. I probably feel closer
to The Tragically Hip."
<<
ROTFLMAO!!! This one's going on my quote-notepad for future sigs.;)
Thanks for posting this, 'pooky!:)
sarah
* * * *
-----> http://lava.home.ml.org
"If you get a computer and subscribe to AOL you can also receive
irritating offers for products you don't want each and every time you log
on." ~John Linnell of They Might Be Giants
Corso5129
>Getting the Kids' comedy therefore didn't
>depend 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. It did not come to you: you went to it. And if you
>couldn't ride the wavelengh, tough -- the Kids surfed on anyway.
that is a damn cool way to put it. thank you for risking carpal tunnel to
let us bathe in this wordy kith pool, spooky!!!! : )
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
--christina >:D
You can't concentrate w/ ice cream in your crotch-Eric Smith(my best friend)
Never buy cheese from a fair!-Mr. Compton
I've got a spike through my head!-Kevin McDonald(isn't he cute?)
SpookyOne
SpookyOne wrote:
_______________________________________________________________________
>
> TO BE CONTINUED
> .. getting Carpal Tunnel Syndrome...
>
> SpookyBridget
Okay! Here's installment 2 of the article. Enjoy...
________________________________________________________________________
Dave Foley once spoke proudly 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, 'There'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 between 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 college
campuses, older people, even those merely old enough to have been raised
on _SCTV_ or _SNL_, were far less likely to find the show funny than
those whose sense of humour had been forged even a few years later.
In this sense, the comedy of Kids in the Hall may belong somewhat
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 in attitude to Coupland than to anything
else in Canadian comedy. And, in the same way that Coupland's languidly
solipistic fiction short-circuited any sensxe of its national or
regional affiliation, so the Kids' comedy seemed to come from a place
defined less by things like 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 is both good and
necessary. Frankly, if there' one Canadian comic tradition that we might
well be 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 of _Shame Based Man_. In
spring 1996, the first Kids' movie -- a pharmaceutical farce called
_Brain Candy_ -- was released to lukewarm public and critical response,
leaving it highly unlikely that 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.
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Pretty good, eh?
SpookyBridget
SpookyOne
Corso5129 wrote:
>
> >Getting the Kids' comedy therefore didn't
> >depend 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. It did not come to you: you went to it. And if you
> >couldn't ride the wavelengh, tough -- the Kids surfed on anyway.
>
> let us bathe in this wordy kith pool, spooky!!!! : )
That's one of my favorite parts too. ;) Glad you liked it!
SpookyBridget.
Leann Freer
Please, oh please, could somebody print me a copy of this wonderful
article that Spooky so graciously shared with us? I save KITHy stories
and articles but I don't have a computer to be able to print it myself.
PLEEEAASSSE!!! Okay, I'm done begging now. <g>
Leann