Daddy Drank For The Government: A Look At The Kids In The Hall

By Mackenzi Johnson

The Kids in the Hall were going to be huge. They never got there. Oh, they got close. But much like the gun fighter played by Dave Foley who once shot a man just to watch him die, something happened and they missed the big moment.

The Kids In The Hall aired on HBO, CBC, and CBS from 1988-1995. It is an unavoidable part of the vernacular of Generation X discontent, but the show never conquered the zeitgeist. It’s not that the Kids are under appreciated. Comedy nerds and pop culture bloggers adore them. Any list of the best sketch comedy troupes of the twentieth century worth its Internet space has to include the Kids. Rare was the person with access to Comedy Central in its salad days (before South Park and Jon Stewart made the channel relevant) who did not pass dull moments crushing heads while getting girl-drink drunk. The opening bars of Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet’s “Having an Average Weekend” can stir sense memory in many a thirty- or forty-something.

Despite having the power of Saturday Night Live‘s Lorne Michaels behind them, The Kids in the Hall never expanded past a niche market. Their work shaped the comedic sensibilities of a generation, but they remain a humor secret handshake.

The Kids in the Hall formed in 1984. From the beginning they were as much punk rock as sketch comedy. Nothing was sacred to the Kids. They were willing to do whatever necessary to get a laugh. They took their name from the title Sid Caesar gave to the young writers who were desperate to get their work on TV. These wannabes or hopefuls hung out in the hall outside of the writer’s room of Your Show of Shows and The Sid Caesar Hour.

The Kids wore a lot of dresses and did some of the best female comedy of the ’90s with not a single woman in the troupe. Feminists would have to work awfully hard to get mad about that. The respect paid to women by these men was far greater than anything evident on Saturday Night Live or most other contemporary sketch comedy shows. Contemporary female comedians and sketch troupes could take a page from the way the Kids portrayed women. In the world of The Kids in the Hall women were funny because life is funny and people do funny things.

The viewer that doubts that men can play humorous women without lapsing into high pitched parody should check out “The Day They Switched to Decaf” in which Cathy with a C (Scott Thompson), Kathy with a K (Bruce McCulloch), Tanya the temp (Mark McKinney), Erin (Kevin McDonald), and Elizabeth (Dave Foley) suffer the effects of trying to get through a day in the secretarial pool without a steady caffeine supply. The jokes would be nearly unchanged if the Kids were playing male characters. The humor isn’t pointing and laughing at women, it’s pointing at wage slaves and the minimal joy of a corporate-supplied caffeine addiction. There are no cheap shots at femininity, only jabs at corporate culture and socially acceptable addictions.

One of the hallmarks of the Kids’ comedy was their ability to simultaneously skewer and embrace cultural hypocrisy. The Kids in the Hall comforted the social outsider by shining a light on ostracism and taking solace in discomfort. The audience recognized themselves in the skits and monologues. When Bruce McCulloch looks at the screen while giving advice on how to break into showbiz and reminds his audience “No one understands you,” he is reinforcing a belief the audience already holds dear. His advice, to listen to tragically loud music every day and “let liquor be the wind beneath your wings” got loud calls of approval from the studio audience, many of whom lived by those rules every day of their lives. The monologue gave them a raison d’etre. These monologues were not always kind, but they were honest.

In one of their best known and most uncomfortable skits, Kevin McDonald tells the story of how “Daddy Drank.” In it, Kevin describes how his Daddy (played by Dave Foley) was a vicious drunk who made his son’s life a living hell with threats and insults. The skit ends with Kevin sipping an alcoholic drink and justifying his actions by pointing out that he’s nothing like his father because “he was older, and had children like me.”

The Kids made one movie, 1996’s Brain Candy, a critical and financial failure. The movie had undergone a series of changes that had weakened the overall message of the film and had succeeded in straining the Kids’ relationships with each other to the point where they were barely willing to be in the same room with one another. After finishing the movie, they went their separate ways.

In the years that followed the individual members all had critical, if not financial, success. Dave Foley starred in one of the greatest sitcoms of all time, NewsRadio. He is now well-known for having one of the most horrible ex-wives of all time, a story which he has recounted in depth on the podcasts WTF with Marc Maron and The Joe Rogan Experience.

Scott Thompson co-starred on another great comedy of the 1990s, The Larry Sanders Show. He survived a bout with cancer in 2009 and did a stand up tour with Kevin McDonald in 2011. Always willing to try new things, in 2010 Thompson spun off Kids character Danny Husk into a comic book, Husk: The Hollow Planet, and he has ongoing podcast and YouTube video series. Bruce McCulloch co-starred on one of Canada’s weirdest comedies, Twitch City, and wrote and directed several feature films. Kevin McDonald guest-starred on several sitcoms in the late ’90s and early 2000s (That ’70s Show, NewsRadio) and became a well-known voice actor (Lilo & Stitch). Mark McKinney had a short stint on Saturday Night Live from 1995-1997 and also co-starred in Twitch City as Rex Riley, the same character as Bruce McCulloch. The only way to understand how that worked is to watch the show, and even then, it might not make that much sense. Mark also wrote and starred in the undisputed greatest TV show about a Shakespearean theatre company, Slings and Arrows.

In 2000, the Kids in the Hall reunited for a successful tour, a tradition which they continued until 2009 when they produced a new series called Death Comes to Town. The series was well received but did not achieve the level of attention they had hoped. It is well worth watching, not just for the joy of seeing Death living in a cheap hotel and marveling at the twists and turns of a small town mystery, but because it shows that after nearly 30 years, the Kids are still damn funny.

When cultural anthropologists examine comedy at the end of the century they’ll recognize the jokes, even if they don’t recognize the comedians. In the future, historians of comedy will stumble on old episodes of The Kids in the Hall and wonder where they came from and what stroke of bad luck kept them from becoming legends. Like the running joke from a first season episode, wherein each of the characters found themselves distracted by thoughts of the never seen Tony, where he could be, who he was with and if he would ever return someday . . . there is no good answer to that question.