Recent reading: "The Kids in the Hall: One Dumb Guy"

 

The Kids in the Hall: One Dumb Guy

by Paul Myers

 

This is a terrific biography of the legendary Canadian comedy troupe of Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, and Scott Thompson. It goes back to their early comedy roots (McCulloch and McKinney in Calgary, Foley, McDonald, and Thompson in Toronto) and traces their hard-fought rise through the ranks, culminating in their popular sketch comedy TV show and beyond. It also looks at their often traumatic childhoods and how these experiences shaped them personally and in how they used comedy to move beyond these upbringings.

 

There were two major things I took away from this book: One, these guys worked incredibly hard to become successful. They never waited around for fate to choose them. They were constantly writing, performing, and hustling. They earned everything they eventually achieved, and even after the show, when their tours easily brought out adoring hordes who would have been happy to just revel in classic sketches and characters, they continued to write new material and mixed it with the old. Two, I was impressed by the absolute admiration with which their comedic peers express for the Kids. They are uniformly held in high regard by other comedians as well as generations that came after them and viewed them as inspirational.

 

Author Myers takes us through their rise in clubs, through the five seasons of the Lorne Michaels-produced TV show that made them famous, the brutal Brain Candy days (when the troupe was at its most fractured), and through the touring years that served not only to promote them, but also to heal the rifts that had formed. He also looks at their non-KITH projects, including NewsRadio (Foley), McKinney's Slings & Arrows (an absolutely hilarious look at theatre people and a personal favorite), and Thompson's ground-breaking role (described as openly gay and openly Canadian) on Garry Shandling's The Larry Sanders Show. We also get a look at the production of Death Comes to Town (which I loved), a difficult period as this is when Thompson was receiving treatment for lymphoma. 

 

Myers also devotes a lot of time to the behind-the-scenes crew that helped propel the Kids to immortality. When staffing their show, the guys enlisted a number of people they had come up through the ranks with and many of those excelled beyond the Kids in the Hall - Norm Hiscock in particular - as well as the band Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, whose instrumental "Having an Average Weekend" became the show's theme music. We also get to learn how many of the popular sketches and characters were developed. 

 

Because the book was published in 2018, it doesn't include their 2022 "sixth season", but it is still the definitive history of the Kids in the Hall. Required reading if you're a fan. 

 

The book's subtitle comes from McDonald's comment, "I always say that individually, we're all smart guys, but collectively, we're really just one dumb guy."

 

A quick look at some KITH sketches: 

 

 

And now I'm off to just watch a bunch of videos.