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In the photo, McCulloch looks like Shatner's slightly younger brother.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/arts/30hall.html
Those Kids May Be Older, but They’re Still Fooling Around in the Hall
By PETER KEEPNEWS
MONTREAL — The return of the Kids in the Hall ranks a few notches below the Spice Girls reunion on the hype scale. But when the Kids took the stage of the 1,400-seat Théâtre Maisonneuve here on July 18 for the first of three shows at the annual Just for Laughs comedy festival, they received a boisterous response that would have made any pop group proud.
And, as they went on to demonstrate, they’re a lot funnier than the Spice Girls.
Often described as the heirs to Monty Python, in influence if not fame, the Toronto-based Kids in the Hall helped redefine sketch comedy in the late 1980s and early ’90s with a show seen in the United States on HBO and, in the late-night hours, CBS.
Their humor was as absurd as Python’s but darker and franker — darker and franker, in fact, than any other comedy on television at the time. Although they were known for surreal characters with names like Chicken Lady and Flying Pig, most of their comedy was based on families, relationships, jobs and the other fraught realities of everyday life. (They frequently performed in drag, but their female characters, unlike Python’s, were believable women rather than caricatures.)
Their series won them a fiercely loyal following. And they have continued to win new fans, first through years of reruns on Comedy Central and more recently through DVDs and YouTube.
But Kids in the Hall sightings have been rare since the series ceased production in 1994. The five-member troupe got together for the 1996 feature film “Brain Candy,” which was not successful, and for tours in 2000 and 2002, which were. Mostly, though, the members have been busy with their individual careers.
Despite the continuing demands of those careers, they recently decided it might be fun to perform together again, and also to write together, something they had not tried since their ill-fated movie.
Audiences in Montreal, where the Kids unveiled their new show after breaking it in with a few unadvertised performances in Los Angeles in May, would probably have been content with an evening of their greatest hits. They were instead treated to 90 minutes of new material; the Kids reprised none of their signature sketches and few of their familiar characters. (Scott Thompson’s acid-tongued gay-bar philosopher, Buddy Cole, and Mark McKinney’s misanthropic Head Crusher were notable exceptions.) The response was enthusiastic, and the Kids are now talking about another tour and maybe even another movie.
So how does it feel to be reunited, Kids?
“Technically it’s not a reunion, because we’ve never officially split up and we never will,” Kevin McDonald, 46 — the troupe’s most wild-eyed member, now a frequent sitcom guest and cartoon voice — said during a break from rehearsal the afternoon before the first Montreal show.
Dave Foley — at 44 still the freshest-faced Kid and probably the best known, thanks to his four years on the sitcom “NewsRadio” — observed: “I think when we did a show in 2000, that was a reunion. Because we hadn’t done anything together for five years, and we weren’t even sure we were talking to each other.”
To which Mr. McKinney, 48 — the Kid with the most extensive repertory of odd characters and the most varied acting résumé, most recently seen on “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” and the Canadian series “Slings and Arrows” — added, “And we had a hideous amount of ill feeling to overcome.”
Much of that ill feeling (which, their offstage camaraderie makes clear, is long gone) arose during the making of “Brain Candy,” a painful and acrimonious process marked by fights and walkouts. At least that’s the picture painted, hilariously, in “Hammy and the Kids,” the autobiographical one-man show that Mr. McDonald presented at a small Montreal theater, also as part of Just for Laughs.
The other members of the troupe all saw the show, which addresses both his career and his life with an alcoholic father, and all loyally raved about it. “Scott cried,” Mr. McDonald said, “and Dave said that Scott cried.”
Mr. Thompson, 48, who was a regular on “The Larry Sanders Show” and currently has his own one-man show, admitted that he did indeed cry when he saw “Hammy and the Kids.” He added with a broad smile that although it portrays him in particular as more than a little mad, “I thought he let us off easy.”
Bruce McCulloch, 46, is the most deadpan Kid and the most active behind the camera lately, as a director of feature films including “Superstar” and now as creator and executive producer of “Carpoolers,” a sitcom on ABC’s fall schedule. The box-office failure of “Brain Candy” dimmed hopes for what he called “a Python kind of second act”: getting together every few years, as the members of Monty Python did, to make a movie. Now those hopes have been rekindled, and script ideas are flowing.
There is also renewed excitement about going back on the road. And, the Kids say, there are offers from promoters. But a tour will have to wait until a few more episodes of “Carpoolers” are in the can and Mr. McCulloch is available.
Even “Carpoolers,” however, is turning out to be a Kids in the Hall project of sorts. Mr. McDonald is on the show’s writing staff. Mr. Thompson appears in the pilot episode and is set to play a recurring character. Appearances by the other two Kids are a possibility.
Meanwhile all five of them can (and do) take pride in the lasting impact they have had on comedy — seen, they say, not just in the current generation of sketch groups like Human Giant and the Whitest Kids U’Know, but also in everything from “South Park” to “The Daily Show.”
“I think we’re like the Replacements,” Mr. McDonald said, dropping a name sure to resonate with indie-rock aficionados. “They didn’t sell a lot of albums, but they paved the way for groups like Nirvana.”
Mr. McCulloch put it a bit differently. “I think we were about as big as we could be,” he said, “without being big.”
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
― Dr Morbius, Friday, 3 August 2007 20:11 (eighteen years ago)
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