Is America Ready for the Kids in the Hall?
“I don’t think we can do ‘Farmers on Heroin,'” says Bruce McCulloch, sounding a bit glum.
“Can’t do ‘Running Faggot,'” adds Scott Thompson. The other Kids in the Hall murmur general assent.
The usually cocky five-young-man comedy troupe from Toronto seems befuddled. It’s the afternoon of Groundhog Day, February 2nd, 1988, and the Kids, appearing live on a New York radio show, have been asked by host Alan Colmes to perform something on the air. Lack of material isn’t the problem: During almost four years of intermittently brilliant cabaret shows in Canada (and a few months in New York), they’ve developed an astounding 140 offbeat sketches.
But now, huddled around the studio microphone, they have to decide what would work without benefit of visuals before a large, unseen, mainstream audience – an audience they’ll soon be courting, thanks to a long-term development deal with co-Canadian Lorne Michaels, the creator of Saturday Night Live, who’s dubbed them “the Monty Python of the Eighties.” Michaels and his employee, Joe Forristal, helped arrange the Kids’ visas, flew them to New York, furnished them with apartments, gave them office space in the Brill Building, paid each one $150 weekly spending money, set up gigs at Caroline’s (the city’s slickest comedy club) and negotiated a $400,000, hour-long Kids in the Hall special on HBO.
The problem in selecting a sketch for radio is that the Kids’ humor is far removed from that of the current rash of easy-quip stand-up comics. The Kids – who all look about 21, though their ages range from 25 to 29 – take their time and don’t deliver big knee slappers; individual lines are less important than the concepts, keen observation and disciplined, confident acting. Their humor is not topical, cynical or shock oriented but insightful, gentle, generous – and subversive.
Like Monty Python’s, the Kids’ sketches begin with an absurd premise, but they’re not outrageous for outrageousness’ sake; they craft provocative, lyrical performance pieces that showcase their strikingly varied physical types and acting approaches. Many Kids sketches penetrate the psychological intricacies of relationships, like the one in which two lawyers negotiate a couple’s courtship and sexual relations and the one in which a man with a cabbage for a head brazenly uses self-pity to bully his date into sleeping with him. The Kids excel at taking familiar situations and rendering them bizarre: In a sketch called “Can I Keep Him?” a boy brings home a stray businessman he finds on the street. Nothing is sacred: In “The Dr. Seuss Bible,” the Kids wear cartoon-colored garb and act out the story of Jesus, complete with crucifixion, to mirthful gibberish rhyme. As titles like “Running Faggot” suggest, the group is one of the first to scout the demilitarized comedy zone of homosexuality. The Kids all play women flawlessly, and their shows exude a perverse androgyny. (One of them is gay; two are dyslexic.)
“Why don’t we just mention what the sketches are,” Colmes, frustrated, is saying now, “and let the audience just enjoy the concepts?” Finally, Bruce, Dave Foley and Kevin McDonald decide to perform the one in which they play construction workers ogling girls but turn the stereotype inside out, trading on-color remarks like “I’d like to meet her parents!”
“You know what I’d like to do to her, guys?” says Bruce’s character at one point. “Take her out to a little black-and-white foreign film.”
“The kind with subtitles?” asks Kevin.
“Oui, mon-sewer”, Bruce replies smarmily. “And then afterwards I’d drive her home, if you know what I mean, and I wouldn’t leave her house until – until I saw her safely in the door.”
“Ow! Love monkey!” And so on.
The sketch, which sets theaters into hysterics, sounds odd and flat without a live audience. So afterward Colmes asks listeners to call in with responses, and the switchboard blazes. In New York everyone’s a critic. Many callers just growl, “You suck, jerks,” and hang up. One makes a raspberry; another, a death threat. One sings, “Lady of Spain, I adore you!” Another screams, “Graahhh!” and hangs up.
“The hang-ups need to be more specific,” says Bruce. But the Kids are somewhat shaken. When one listener calls the characters “dinosaurs, like from the Fifties,” the Kids exchange a horrified look – that’s what they have always said about everybody else’s sketches.
“It’s great,” says Colmes, in an attempt to be jovial, “that people give you such a nice, warm welcome in New York.”
“Actually,” Dave replies, “I feel a real affinity with, say, the Italian immigrants at the turn of the century.”
Is America ready for the Kids in the Hall? At first, the answer seemed to be no. Last October, when the Kids performed for their first paying New York audience at Times Square’s West Bank Cafe, they were virtually booed off the stage. In the offending sketch, Scott played a middle-aged woman delivering a funny, compassionate monologue about learning that her son is gay. The pathos was given an edge by the presence of her silent husband (played by Bruce), who sat staring forward while behind him their son (Dave) and his friends (Kevin and Mark McKinney) acted out his worst fears: by the end, he was imagining Kevin and Dave skipping around the stage with a confetti-filled bucket labeled “AIDS,” sprinkling confetti everywhere.
Too far, yes – they’ve since changed the ending – but the Kids’ stuff is decidedly different, exposing and challenging their audiences’ prejudices. In the Rivoli club, on Toronto’s trendy Queen Street, where the Kids had been the Monday night “house band,” audiences had cheered the sketch. But New York was not amused.
“It was very important to HBO that the Kids not be perceived as a Canadian act,” says Lorne Michaels. “My feeling was since I was doing SNL, it would be easier for me if they were here. I also thought that in Toronto they were just a block or two short of complacency. There’s nothing like New York to strike terror into the heart of a performer.”
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