The Kids In The Hall: Live As They’ll Ever Be

By Jemiah Jefferson

Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, Portland OR
May 11, 2008

“What? Are they still around?”

I heard that a lot when I was going around town squealing about having scored tickets for myself and my friends to see the Kids in the Hall perform live in my very own city. For someone like me, who has spent the last eleven years watching and re-watching Kids in the Hall episodes on DVD (since it hasn’t been broadcast in forever), as well as the stealthily brilliant feature film Brain Candy, this was like being visited by an angel and impregnated with sheer joy. To say that I had given up on there ever being any more Kids in the Hall material is a vast understatement; every time I saw one of the Kids in a guest-starring appearance on some show, or worse, as a regular, I felt that sad resignation of growing up and moving on.

Fortunately for us, the Kids have not grown up.

Well, maybe they have a little bit—now they are more like snarky, brilliant, impossibly vulgar teenagers, in love with their ability to freely use bad language and constantly challenge each other to keep up. If you, like me, watch the TV episodes and wish that they could just say “fuck” as appropriate, the stage show makes all dreams come true.

Of course, it’s not just gleeful obscenities and perversity; there’s also vicious political and social satire, a very Canadian brand of twisted self-deprecation, squirm-inducing weirdness, and a hefty dose of sheer absurdity. This is the Kids in the Hall, after all.

Presented as a series of seemingly unrelated sketches, as seen on the TV show, the live set also features a couple of short movies played on a video screen over an empty stage. The sketches feature the guys playing a wildly diverse selection of different characters, including, occasionally, themselves (or a bizarro version of the same), complete with costume changes, wigs, and the occasional prop. While each of the Kids performs several different roles, the trappings are less important than the ideas themselves, and of course, the devastatingly hilarious gags.

It’s been twenty years (!) since the debut of the Kids in the Hall TV series, and yes, it definitely shows on the guys themselves. They’re thicker, slower, greyer, and all seem to have an identical belly paunch, except, somehow, Kevin McDonald, who has managed to retain his slim figure. I’m sure they all hate him for it, especially Dave Foley, who used to be the prettiest lady on the show, and who now looks more like a regional sales manager for Kellogg’s. Nonetheless, their faces have lost none of their mobility and humor, especially when struggling to contain their lulz at each other’s segments. It’s always delightful to watch comedians cracking up on stage, but they just seem so into it, so immensely pleased to be working together again, and absolutely wrecked by the random ad-libs as goofier ideas present themselves on the fly. Bruce McCullough, in particular, nearly fell apart a couple of times, utterly susceptible to the extreme silliness that McDonald manages to bring to everything he does.

I was happy to see some of my favorite recurring characters from the TV show have new skits; what would a Kids in the Hall show be like without the Chicken Lady or the Head-Crushing Guy? Somehow, these hoary old bits still have some untapped hilarity swimming around in there. I must say, however, with one exception, I actually liked the new segments better; I am always a fan of the fresh.

Obscenity, blasphemy, cross-dressing, mad quotability, alcohol abuse, and time-travel: The Kids in the Hall live. And if I get a chance to rule the world, they won’t stop until one of them drops dead on stage, whereupon the surviving members will stand in a circle around their fallen brother, probably pointing and laughing.

Additional Resources:

The Kids in the Hall 2008 tour continues into June with two dates in Ontario, Canada: June 1 at Centennial Hall in London and June 5 at Massey Hall in Toronto. For more information, visit the troupe’s MySpace page.