Kids in the Hall on tour
The Canadian comedy troupe brings its outrageous characters and absurd timeless humour to Vancouver.
According to Mark McKinney, the new Kids in the Hall live tour comes down to one very simple, wonderful thing.
“It’s fun and we’re all about the fun,” McKinney said recently by phone from Toronto. “Everyone is tremendously psyched to get back together and hang out and maybe even write some new sketches.”
The Kids (McKinney, Dave Foley, Scott Thompson, Kevin McDonald and Bruce McCulloch) first delivered their absurdist humour to TV back in 1988. Their CBC show lasted until 1995, then the troupe took their antics to HBO, where the series ran until 1996. Since then, the group has had a cult hit film in Brain Candy, did a TV miniseries (Death Comes to Town) and toured in limited form. This North American tour began in late April and will arrive in Vancouver next Wednesday at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.
“I get to act for the next month and stomp around on stage,” said McKinney, whose resume includes such highlights as writer/actor for Saturday Night Live, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and Slings & Arrows.
“I am looking forward to that. I spent most of the fall and winter writing various projects. It’s kind of a sad day when you’re a writer and you finish and put down your pen and then look out the window and it’s snowing like crazy. It’s kind of sad so I am looking forward to kicking out the jams in Durham, North Carolina, which we have never played.”
The tour will have the troupe out on the road for another month and a half before finishing up at New York’s Town Hall Theatre on June 19.
“It’s really fun and it’s never long enough that it becomes boring,” said McKinney. “We go out for seven weeks. It seems like a long time but I know it is going to be over in the blink of an eye and I’ll be missing it.”
When I spoke to McKinney, he was just readying himself to begin rehearsals so a definitive outline of the live show was understandably not yet set in stone, he said.
“Some of the guys are the kind of people that finish their homework in school and so they bring their sketches in,” said McKinney. “And then there are people like me that kind of arrive with notional ideas and try and provoke people into playing with me.”
He did say, though, that fans could expect a mix of new and old. The latter is a no brainer when you consider the cult status this troupe carries. Because seeing the Kids without McKinney stalwarts like the crush-your-head guy or the incredibly cringe-inducing Chicken Lady would be like seeing Monty Python without lumberjacks or a dead parrot. No vroom indeed.
Now, some 23 years later, the Kids still remain popular and are still being discovered by new fans all over the globe. This longevity McKinney chalks up to the foundation the team builds its funny on.
“I think we’ve been lucky in that the type of comedy we did endures,” said McKinney. “You know, it’s like you can watch Python because they weren’t marrying their writing to what was happening in the moment. They weren’t a living newspaper-type of comedy show. It wasn’t current events it was just about these insane characters.”
With the idea that absurdism has no shelf life, the future of the Kids, will come down to, well, the Kids.
“I hope there is always a way to go out and perform. The live part is really the special thing for me,” said McKinney, who just wrapped shooting a sitcom pilot with America Ferrera. “It would be fun to work on anything with these guys. Personally, I am trying to push them towards large format photography.”