Kids in the Hall performs in its 40th anniversary show at The Rivoli in Toronto, on Nov. 26. From the left: Kevin McDonald, Scott Thompson, Mark McKinney and Bruce McCulloch.Jordan Romani/Supplied
At Toronto’s Rivoli club late last month, the comedy troupe the Kids in the Hall celebrated its 40th anniversary of performing at the Queen Street West fixture. For the occasion, the group stood on the stage but not on ceremony.
“The dressing room is exactly the same,” Bruce McCulloch told the audience. “They still have the couch the Parachute Club had orgies on.”
Things did not get any daintier from there – the night was devoted to an unrehearsed read-through of Kids in the Hall sketches that had been banned from their eponymous television show that ran from 1989 to 1995 on CBC (and HBO and Comedy Central) and an eight-episode revival season in 2022 on Amazon Prime Video.
Among the topics covered: Hitler, orifice comparisons and the birthday of AIDS.
Before it all began, though, Scott Thompson interrupted the first sketch, for which he and the three other Kids – the fifth, Dave Foley, was sick, we were told – wore white wedding veils. Thompson marched off the stage into the audience toward a small sign on the wall.
The anniversary show was devoted to an unrehearsed read-through of Kids in the Hall sketches that had been banned from their television show.Jordan Romani/Supplied
It was a plaque, like the ones Heritage Toronto puts on historic buildings or in front of the place where Babe Ruth hit a home run in 1914. The one at the Rivoli had the names of the Kids: Thompson, Foley, McCulloch, Kevin McDonald and Mark McKinney.
“We’re not dead yet,” protested Thompson, a senior citizen, placing his veil over the memorial plaque.
It’s obviously a sore point. The opening sketch of the Kids in the Hall reboot in 2022 had the members being excavated from a mass grave, a reference to the burial scene in the original show’s final episode. Indeed, a 2001 article in The Globe and Mail referred to the Kids as an “extinct comedy troupe.”
The Kids are often compared to Britain’s brainy surrealists Monty Python. After the troupe’s BBC television series Monty Python’s Flying Circus finished in 1974, the Pythons made three films: 1975′s Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 1979′s Life of Brian and 1983′s The Meaning of Life. They regrouped for tours and concerts as well.
The Kids had planned to follow the Python model. It just didn’t quite work out as intended.
“The blueprint was Monty Python,” the Kids’ McDonald says from his home in Winnipeg. “We all thought that after the TV show we’d do a movie and it would be a hit and we’d get to do movies every three or four years, with each of us doing our solo stuff in between.”
What went wrong? The Kids in Hall film, 1996′s surreal, underappreciated satire Brain Candy, was a stinker at the box office. There would be no more feature films.
Brain Candy’s balance-sheet performance was referenced in the first scene of the 2022 Amazon Prime series. The gist of the joke was that after the sale of a video cassette of the film for $1 at a yard sale 26 years after it was made, Brain Candy had finally broken even, thus greenlighting Amazon’s revival of the original series.
McDonald had literally and figuratively banked on the success of Brain Candy. In the mid-1990s he moved to California.
“Just my bad instincts, to go to Los Angeles to start a solo career after Brain Comedy bombed,” he says in retrospect.
Kevin McDonald performs at the Kids in the Hall anniversary show.Jordan Romani/Supplied
It wasn’t all that bad, actually. For one thing, he learned to drive. “My agent was driving me around for a while and he said, you know, ‘you should get your driver’s licence,’” McDonald recalls. “It was a life of auditioning and occasionally getting TV things.”
Fans of Seinfeld will remember him as the “denim vest” guy in a 1997 episode. McDonald recalls his experience with the hit show fondly.
“Jerry Seinfeld was very busy, but he was nice. I mean, he didn’t talk about the weather or sports or anything, it was all about the show. I guess he was familiar with Kids in the Hall. The NBC series NewsRadio, with Dave Foley, was on the air at the time. Jerry kept calling me Dave all week, which I let him.”
When he wasn’t landing guest roles, he was paid to write scripts to films that never ended up getting made. “Turns out you can make a living out of failing,” he says.
The Montreal-born McDonald remained in Los Angeles for years – “I was happy, I mean, it was kind of lonely kind of happy, but I was happy” – before moving to Winnipeg in the 2010s. He had a met a woman at the city’s annual comedy festival.
On Dec. 20 and 21, McDonald performs at Edmonton’s Grindstone Theatre in a stand-up show that features stories from the Kids in the Hall. In terms of legacy, he compares the Kids to the American alt-rock band the Pixies, whose success he believes led to the bigger fame of Nirvana. In this equation, the cult-favourite Pixies are to the mainstream Nirvana, as Kids in the Hall is to the animated Comedy Central series South Park.
“A small portion of the world loves us,” he says. “We’re weird, I guess.”
