“We’ve always felt like a band with no music,” says Bruce McCulloch. “Or if we were a band, we always joke that we’d be five bass players.”
It’s the summer of 2013, and the Kids in the Hall are slouched on leather couches and wing chairs lining the set of Dave Lyons’s lavish office, lazing through the downtime of their rehearsals for a taping of Dave Foley’s sitcom, Spun Out. Save for Foley, they’re all in goth getups, fiddling with their cell phones. Foley’s disappointed that he doesn’t get to join his long-time friends in full-on goth regalia; the first conversation the young comedian ever had with the woman who would become his above-mentioned ex-wife was a debate about whether Richard Butler, frontman of seminal English post-punk band the Psychedelic Furs, was a good singer.
His position, for the record: “I said I like his singing, but that doesn’t necessarily make him a good singer.”
Some of the members of the troupe express concern that their presence on the set of Spun Out may be annoying the show’s writing staff, given the Kids’ tendency to rework jokes (usually making them better in the process). It’s like they’re equalizing the imbalance of being billed as guest stars on Foley’s show. “Given the dynamics of the troupe,” says Kevin McDonald, “we’re involved a lot more than we’re actually allowed to be. It’s been like one of our things, where we just break down everything and rewrite all the jokes.”
“We’re really breaking a lot of union rules,” Scott Thompson laughs. “Writers should be furious.”
“I don’t think we’ve angered anyone yet,” counters Mark McKinney. “But it is only Thursday.”
Seeing the Kids in the Hall, as fifty-something adults, dressed as cartoonish high-school goths, it’s as if nothing had ever changed, as if they’d been buried in a time capsule in the late 1980s and unearthed in 2013, not much worse for the wear. When they’re all together like this, keeping them on topic is tricky. They talk about bands, their work ethic, the state of modern sketch comedy and Canadian TV. Bruce McCulloch is mulling over plans for a short run of Toronto shows, talking quickly and gesturing excitedly, like he’s all hopped up on the buzz of the troupe performing live again. Scott Thompson starts going on about seasonal mango cultivars. Kevin McDonald is complaining about his back. “If I have a pained expression on my face, it’s not because I’m upset,” he says. “It’s because my back hurts.”
“You’ve had that expression for about forty years,” Foley snaps back.
Their naturally manic comic minds zip around, looking for a new joke, then a joke to one-up that joke, then another joke about how the last joke sucked. They’re masters of the riff: that free-form process that exists in aid of nothing beyond making whatever space they happen to be in seem funnier. There’s an invigorated comic energy flowing between them that’s infectious.
The previous night, Wednesday, July 17, all five Kids in the Hall reunited onstage for the first time since completing publicity on their 2010 miniseries, Death Comes to Town.
The occasion was a Red Cross benefit at the Yuk Yuk’s comedy club in downtown Toronto, to raise relief funds after floods ravaged southern Alberta in the summer of 2013.
(Two of the Kids, McKinney and McCulloch, are of hearty Albertan stock.) That night onstage, the Middle-aged Men in the Hall performed a chucked-together variety show at a moment’s notice, with what McKinney estimates was only “nine minutes of rehearsal.”
Just as it is on the set of Spun Out, where the Kids quite simply can’t not be funny – no script is too limp, no joke too lame for them to improve through the sheer strength of their collected comedic will – that electricity, that creative spark was there onstage. Here, dressed as aging, pudgy goths, hanging around an ostentatiously professional-looking TV sitcom set in Toronto’s industrial wetlands, are five men who created, in the recklessness of youth, one of the most irreverent, funny, and important pop-culture landmarks of their era. Their namesake sketch series helped define Gen Xers, arresting their generational sensibility mid-eyeroll: sarcastic, sneering, derisive of authority and self-importance, yet also progressive, compassionate, wildly intelligent, and maybe even more than a little self-indulgent.
Individually, the Kids in the Hall’s careers have been marked by wavering degrees of success, failure, and personal turmoil. Yet together, the Kids in the Hall always (well, almost always) become something more than the sum of their parts. It’s like in those cheesy 1980s and ’90s kids shows imported from Japan – Voltron: Defender of the Universe or Mighty Morphin Power Rangers – where five different shape-shifting robots would snap together into some giant, super-robot; where discrete, sometimes totally modest powers have the potential to combine into something truly extraordinary. These are the five people who can make something as suffocating and insufferable as sitting through a three-camera, laugh-tracked sitcom taping seem not just tolerable but, somehow, totally hilarious. They can take a show like Spun Out and, improbably, thread in a plot about a suicide pact and, even more improbably, make it really, deeply funny.
This is the story of these five deeply funny people who, across Canada’s frozen, inhospitable expanses, managed to find each other. This is the improbable sorta-success story of a band of five bass players.
Excerpted from This Is a Book About the Kids in the Hall by John Semley. © 2016 by John Semley. All rights reserved. Published by ECW Press Ltd. ecwpress.com.