An Impossible Choice: Kids In the Hall

god, that is gutwrenching. keep ya head up, dave.

The whole KITH series on DVD is $34.99 right now on Amazon. I just ordered one. Maybe Dave will see a little of that $$...

that's crazy depreciation. a few years ago they were going for that much per season

Yeah, I think it was marked down from $99.00 or so...and free shipping.

yeah fuck -- i might buy that and give away the season 1 and 2 sets i already got

those poll results looked familiar...
http://i.imgur.com/rACNF.png

Interview w/ Scott on his new graphic novel and the role it played in his cancer treatment:

http://www.maximumfun.org/sound-young-america/scott-thompson-actor-and-comedian-kids-hall-interview-sound-young-america

Has anyone read the Husk comic?

Just re-watching KITH these days.

This is funny, because the list represents my favourite Kid to my 'least favourite'. I gather Bruce is a lot of people's favourite here because he was the musician and brought a lot of the music aspects to KITH.

And like the OP said, there are weaknesses in all of them. I always wondered why I enjoyed Bruce's sketches so much when he himself said he was no longer enjoying doing them (around season 3, I believe?).

Dave seems to be the one that was consistently good, however.

bruce is a lot of ppl's favorite because he was fucking hilarious

http://i.imgur.com/9OcWcuE.png

aww. i would totally sign his guestbook.

So happy to have my beautiful boys back.

Don't even care that they're playing all the hits - Buddy Cole, Kathy with a K, Erradicator, etc. - they're still great and the new stuff is on the same level, the post apocalyptic classic rock DJ is one of the bleakest sketches I've seen.

Plus they're the ultimate champs of mocking corporate culture and that has only further swallowed the world up since they were last around.

Also get ready for a lot of full frontal male nudity!

come on, surely I'm not the only ILXor left who loves KITH?

Stoked to see this. I binged the original show when it was on... netflix? I've never seen the movie or the other series.

Love Bruce McCulloch's Shame Based Man album.

Came across this by accident, I barely ever check Amazon Prime video and I feel like news of a KITH reunion has hardly been circulated! Anyway, fully satisfying so far, very much "the thing I remember" without feeling like a rehash. Amazed that in 2022 there was still a funny "Zoom meeting" sketch to be written.

loved bruce in that zoom sketch. two eps in bc i'm trying to make it last, enjoying it so far. loving all the gratuitous nudity.

The full frontal thing is def a new twist! I don’t think they leaned too heavy on the old characters and they didn’t hold back making fun of themselves a lot too. The eradicator sketch really had me laughing. There was a few guest appearances from some other old school Canadian comics that made me smile too.

I will say the "friends of kith" bits were uniformly unfunny and felt very un-KITH as well, but thankfully they were very short.

Same quality at the original series I’d say too. Not everything lands, but overall there’s some great stuff

agreed. so far imho theyre threading the needle just right as far as acknowledging the reality that theyre old dinosaurs without making every sketch be about that. and im happy with the balance of familiar stuff vs new material, across their various projects & tours over the years theyve never seemed to have trouble writing new stuff.

4 eps in and it feels like one of the most successful of these reboots. Agreed with the criticisms above but it’s easy to forget things sometimes landed weird on the original as well.

Awww, glad to hear this is good, I really want to see it at some point but don't have Amazon.

I’ve been out of the country but will start watching tonight!

I eagerly cued up the original series for a rewatch on Amazon to prep for the new episodes and the very first episode featured a blackface sketch

i assume that's mark mckinney as mississippi gary (the blues singer). they do another version of that sketch later where he breaks character and talks about how it doesn't make any sense for him to be playing that character (and he longer appears to be in blackface). but i'm not saying it absolves them for including the character (or doing blackface obviously)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_2ao-QAb5E

just to complete my thought, i guess it's interesting bc the later sketch is basically mark mckinney indicating that he knows he probably shouldn't be doing the character, and he tries to brush it off with self-deprecation and suggesting it comes from a place of love, but then he just goes back to doing it anyways. that probably just makes it worse in a way.

It very quickly became obvious that the blackface was completely tangential to the core of the joke and the follow up does show that they were thinking very subversively about it, so I actually think it does absolve them!

isn't there another sketch later on in the series with Scott Thompson in blackface as a guy meeting his white girlfriend's disapproving parents for the first time, and the gag at the end is that the parents don't want their daughter dating a guy who wears blackface i.e. it's diegetic blackface

Thompson also plays a south asian character in the sketches with Raj and Christine where the blacking/browning up is seems almost entirely superfluous, you could filmed those sketches with him playing a white guy and it wouldn't really change it that much afiact, which makes you wonder why they bothered making him south asian in the first place? I guess maybe there's something implied about the backgrounds of the two characters and that being reflected in how Christine dominates and bullies Raj without really thinking about it - she's from a rich and privileged and family and is part of the counter-culture by choice whereas he is gay and from an immigrant, possibly conservative family, and is part of the counter-culture through necessity? I don't know if they ever reveal much about Raj's background, maybe he's from a fancy background as well for all I know.

xp there's one where scott in in brown(at least)face and brought home by his gf (dave), who warns him that her parents are awful racists

but the parents turn out to be super lovely, thwarting the gf's desire to transgress

but maybe there's another one later that goes a level deeper?

been re-watching the first season

i was always a dave guy but upon reflection i might be turning into a bruce guy

Funny, I’ve always rated them Mark, Dave/Scott, Kevin/Bruce. But I’m thinking I might have Marge Simpson syndrome (whereby I loved Homer as a teenager and now love Marge above everyone else) and might come around to Bruce

I’m not watching the new season til I finish my rewatch of the originals

Idk Bruce is so one-note to me (and tbh it’s a great note). Mark is amazing. The sketch where she’s flunking the dance prodigy in favour of Kevin and then says “obviously I’m totally kidding!” I just died it was so good

They’re all good but I admit the cult of Bruce is sort of beyond me

The sketch where she’s flunking the dance prodigy in favour of Kevin and then says “obviously I’m totally kidding!

lol i actually just tried to look up the dance prodigy to see if she'd done more acting! she was solid

with mark, for me, it might mainly be that the headcrusher was worthy of one skit only but it just kept going

scott is beyond rankings tho. rank the others however you want but scott will always be at worst 1a

I just had the realization tonight that, despite watching the series on and off and even going to a taping of the show in 1989, they never got beyond "theoretically funny" for me at best; as if they were content to be absurd, daring, squirmy, trenchant etc. without actually connecting that to something that made me laugh then or now. I would assume even the fans would accept that a lot of their material was so dry or conceptual that its humour content was hypothetical?

Nonetheless I just read the summary of their 2007 Just for Laughs appearance on Wikipedia, and it made me laugh more than the show ever did!

I think what makes a lot of their characters funny for me is that the characters feel like they have an existence outside of the sketch, it's not just that they've had an idea for a sketch and invent a character that acts a certain way dictated by the structure of the sketch, but they make it seem like the character is out there being like this all the time and you're just happening to see a particular five minutes of it.

Enjoyed this long-ish appreciation of it

Must-read long-read on the Kids in the Hall by @evankindley. https://t.co/iWKFhTlfbh

— Tyler Wilcox (@tywilc) May 12, 2022

Opening blurb of that medium post otm.

I would assume even the fans would accept that a lot of their material was so dry or conceptual that its humour content was hypothetical?

Yes and no - there's some material that crosses over into performance art/art film weirdness and as such isn't about belly laughs, but it's a small slice and really their skills in terms of timing, expressions, reactions - old school comedic chops I guess - are so off the charts, they make me laugh as much as any sketch comedy I've ever seen.

they never got beyond "theoretically funny" for me at best

ffs, smoke some weed

some stuff can feel like that – where they have a great idea and it's not really an obvious/easy laugh. not so much a joke that doesn't land – but a joke that isn't intended to land.
but then at the same time they have lots of stuff that is just goddamned funny as hell.

i feel like a lot of those end up hilarious on revisit still

i admit when i was a kid i did not entirely *get* this show but i watched the comedy central reruns religiously lol

i was in college when it suddenly clicked

fine ham abounds

god even in that one sketch there's the kind of low-key joke about how many people hanging out at once distinguishes a "get-together" from a "party"

"someone has to leave"

"lyle"

everybody: "lyyyyyle"

every line of dialogue has some sort of hilarious content embedded in it

any indication if they are doing another new season? the cliffhanger jokes made me think another one might be coming, but then the way they ended it made it seem like they are done with new episodes.

god i love these guys so much.

One great low-key joke in the new series: Mark’s dumb cop instructing Kevin and Dave to “Put your hands on your own head”.