An Impossible Choice: Kids In the Hall

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”.

yeah that slayed me. exactly the kind of pointless tossed-in joke i come to KITH for.

That went right over my (own) head.

KitH was my favorite show as far back as middle school (comedy central reruns also) because it was goofy and funnier than everything else I'd ever seen, don't really get the "theoretically funny" part because nearly every joke is still executed with maximum goof

Like I didn't "get" the the God Is Dead sketch but the visual of mark holding god's dead body and saying "and he's really light!" was the funniest thing in the world to me

For me it's about the small, unique turns of phrases and the line readings. So many are permanently etched in my head, and when they come out now no one knows what I'm talking about. :)

"I'll eat pancakes on your grave" is something i will never stop saying whenever i get the chance, regardless of the odds no one will have any idea what i'm quoting.

fuck the bank i work for, fuck the baaaaaaaaank

really enjoyed the new episodes, including a few that seemed slight but popped back in my head a day later

they have this ability to concoct an utterly absurd premise, roll with it through an entire sketch, only to end it with someone saying something that's obvious or common sense followed by "oh, of course!"

the main thing that differentiates KITH from something like SNL at a basic level is that 90% of SNL has winking at the audience -- hey, we're your featured players doing these characters to get some laughs -- where KITH starts from the premise "we really are two ladies working in an office reminiscing about fax machines" and you can forget that they're acting

Started rewatching from the first season and got to the blackface skit. It was pretty weird because the blackface half of the skit is awkward and cringe but whenever it switches to Kathy the same skit is solid gold. The notion that THIS is the devil woman that the old bluesman is forever cursing is hilarious.

That first ep is pretty amazing - Kathy, Headcrusher and Eradicator all make an appearence iirc.

mh I def think SNL is trash and KITH gold but I think the thing you highlight is more about format than comedic sensibility; the "live" aspect means the frisson that anything could go wrong at any second is built into SNL and so a higher amount of meta and mugging kinda comes with the territory

I think my point-of-view on Kids in the Hall was shaped by the context of contemporary Canadian TV comedy. At the time there were a lot of (not very hip) Canadian sketch comedies like "Smith and Smith Comedy Mill" and "Royal Canadian Air Farce" from which, I'm sure, the Kids wanted to distance themselves. So it seemed to me that their ethos was "avoid being corny" more than "be funny".

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.

...ending up at the infinitely unpopular Point C

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uSSobogtHQ

Checked out the new Prime documentary, weirdly split into two episodes. Mostly the fluffy lovefest you'd expect, but they do get pretty real about the bad vibes circa Brain Candy. Mae Martin talks a lot about how much it meant to her as a queer person, incl being attracted to Dave Foley's woman characters (nice to know that's not just a straight guy thing). Kind of deflates the comeback a little to see how many times they'd reunited before lol, but I appreciate the doc doesn't pretend they didn't. Overall would recommend.

Only a whore weighs herself