'Laughing all the way to the big time'

The humidity was thick in the crowded back room of the Rivoli restuarant on Toronto's trendy Queen Street West. On a recent Thursday night, the audience was more varied than usual: students and artists mingled with nationally known comedians from television and the Second City stage, media peopl and even a few men in business suits. They came to welcome five gangly young men - the latest comic proteges of "Saturday Night Live" producer Lorne Michaels - back to the tiny, bare Toronto stage where they first gained a loyal following. And for two hours, the standing-room only crowd laughed at almost everything the Kids in the Hall did. tand with baseball caps on, holding cans of a much-advertised beer aloft.

"Here's to Reg - may he be playing his guitar in heaven right now."

"I didn't know Reg played the guitar."

"Funny, isn't it. You can threaten a guy's life until he begs for mercy, fold him up like a wallet in his own car trunk, dump him in the river - and never really get to know him."

"Here's to Reg."

Fledgling comedy acts are constantly forming and disintegrating, but the Kids - who range in age from 25 to 29 - have been together for almost four years. By 1984, Calgarians Bruce McCulloch and Mark McKinney had teamed up with Torontoians Kevin McDonald, Dave Foley, and Scott Thompson to form the present Kids in the Hall (McDonald and Foley had been part of an earlier group with the same name). "Kids in the Hall" refers to Jack Benny's habit of using one-liners tossed at him by young hopefuls who lined the halls outside his radio studio. Benny would tell the audience, "That one's from the kids in the hall, folks."

It is a long way from backroom comedy to the pages of "Rolling Stone" magazine, which features the Kids in the current issue. But little has changedd about their performance over the years: they make black, bleak situations out of gentle suburban family and relationship scenes, using few props. And they play men, women and children with equal aptness and a physical skill that has grown with practice.

Toronto-born comedy impressario Lorne Michaels had already hired McCulloch and McKinney as writers for "Saturday Night Live"'s 1985-1986 season when he came up from New York City to audition the Kids in 1986. He said that he waas charmed. "They have a natural sense of rhythm and timing," Michaels told "Maclean's." He signed the Kids to an open contract with his production company, Broadway Video, which promised a minimum of one television special and the possibility of movies and a TV series.

Last October, the Kids started to work for their keep in earnest when Michaeels summoned them to New York. The five - known for inventing material barely hours before going onstage - toiled daily on drafts of a script for the planned hour-long special, already sold to the U.S pay TV service Home Box Office. And on Thursday and Friday nights, the Kids ventured out to make New Yorkers laugh at Caroline's, a popular downtown comedy club. Said McDonald: "It was good not to be in front of people who liked you and laughed at everything." In December The New York Times called them "promising" and praised their "puppyish charm."

Offstage, the Kids' boyish quality is underscored by a guarded canniness and fierce loyalty to each other. But they acknowledge that without the special - which will likely air in the fall on CBC - they probably would have had to split up to further their careers. Said Foley: "To make it, you have to go on your own onto Letterman, Carson, maybe a series character. Without Lorne, we couldn't do it together."

Under their agreement with Michaels, the five men could work together for years to come. Said Michaels: "The more they do, the better they get." But as McCulloch observed, Michaels's production company is not obligated to do anything with the Kids beyond the TV special, which is scheduled to be taped in Toronto this summer. All five expressed catious relief that no one has yet tried to remake them into a standard image. "They haven't called us zany," said Foley, "or spelled comedy with a 'k' in the press releases." Meanwhile, a possible Canadian tour in the autumn could mean the Kids can get back to their best working medium: a live audience. "You gotta do live," said McCulloch. "That's the only way you know what you're doing." For the Kids, it seems to work just fine.

---Julia Bennett, _Maclean's_, May 9, 1988

'The Real Not-Ready-for-Prime-Time Players'

Last summer, Dave Foley went to what probably should have been a career-enhancing event - his first big Hollywood party. Buck Henry, one of his idols, was there. So were Justine Bateman, Madonna and Rosie O'Donnell and the film director Barbet Schroeder.

So what di Mr. Foley do? Did he swao comedy-writing tales, try out his suave pickup lines, join in the celebrity-to-celebrity chitchat?

"I drank a lot," said Mr. Foley, a star of the Canadian comedy-sketch show "The Kids in the Hall," since it seemed no one much wanted to talk to him. "They looked at me like, 'O.K., go away now.' And I acted very Canadian. It's easy to spot Canadians. They basically sit in a chair and drink beer and hope not to be noticed."

Americans may not have noticed "The Kids in the Hall" as mmmmmuch as Mr. Foley and his four co-stars might like (although Conan O'Brien did call their show "very cool" when Mr. Foley appeared on "Late Night" recently). But that doesn't mean the group has ever been bashful or quiet on the job. Since the Canadian expatriate producer Lorne Michaels discovered their act in a Toronto comedy club in the mid-1980's and brought them to television, the five Kids - Mark McKinney, Kevin McDonald, Scott thompson, and Bruce McCulloch are the others - have found a niche in tweking convention asnd worrying their sometimes nervous television minders by pushing their work beyond the limits of general comfort. The question now is whether they can, or even want to, broaden their appeal.

Their hourlong show, a collection of short skits closer to "Monty Python's Flying Circus" than to "Saturday Night Live," is filmed partly before an audience and partly on closed-set locations around Toronto. It differs from "SNL" mostly in its comic targets. Rather than repeating the parodies of television, celebrities, and news of the day that are "SNL" staples, "The Kids in the Hall" tends toward broader social commentary and absurdist satire that appeals to odder,more skewed, tastes. (In a Pythonesque touch, the troupe's members play most women's parts in drag.)

Examples of Kids bits: A man who says his job is "ax murderer" laments the fact that his work keeps him indoors. A soon-to-be-corpse, gushing blood and apparently unconscious, upsets and perplexes a group of surgeons by pulling out his I.V., turning off his heart monitor and ordering a stack of pizzas while their backs are turned. A yuppie daydreams constantly of a tiny oompah band playing nextt to a radiator and is astonished to discover that other people daydream about different things.

When the kids began working together about eight years ago, when all were in their early 20's, their name made sense. It had respectable comedy roots, too:When Jack Benny wanted to use a joke from someone other than his staff writers, the story goes, he went to one of the hopefuls who used to hang around the studio: the kids in the hall. But in their 30's now, they don't feel much like kids anymore. "We should be called the Pathetic Aging Adults," Mr. McDonald said.

It may well be their perverse sensibilities that have kept the Kids off American prime time. While Canadians watch the show at 10 P.M. on Fridays on the CBC, CBS affiliates in the United States carry it at 12:30 A.M. or later, usually on Saturdays. (The show also appears in this country daily on the cable channel Comedy Central.)

Middle of the night or not, the CBS deal has put the kids within reach of most homes in America. Better still, since autumn David Letterman has been serving as their lead-in in many cities. Even as they yearn for the broader audience that seems poised to discover them, though, they wonder if they should give up the cult status that allows them to become racier and stranger. Doing what they like has sometimes meant navigating a narrow path - one whose boundaries changed in the five years since their show began. The CBC has loosened up considerably, but in the United States, when the Kids moved from HBO to CBS in 1992, they found a whole new set of standards.

"CBS has a more conservative standards policy," said John Blanchard, the show's director, in a recent interview in a Toronto restaurant where the caast was filming a sketch. Mr. Blanchard said that sometimes the writers (six of them, along with five cast members) must come up with two versions of the same skit - the unexpurgated one for Canadian television and a relatively sanitized one for the American audience.

But Rod Perth, vice president of late-night and non-network programming at CBS, said the network was adjusting, too. "They're incredibly creative and have a particular point of view," he said. "And frankly our standards are far more liberal than they were a year and a half ago."

In the best-known quarrel between the show and the network, CBS last year refused to air a sketch about hypocrisy in the age of AIDS written by Mr. Thompson, who is gay. The skit shows a gay actor, played by Mr. Thompson, who dies after contracting AIDS from a male prostitute. A stream of mourners speculate about hte cause of death - was it AIDS, or was it "cancer"? The corpse speaks, still in full denial: "It was cancer," he says from his coffin.

CBS says the issue was too sensitive to be treated so lightly, but Mr. Thompson cried censorship. "It was one of the skits I was most proud of," he said.

Other members of the group seem to attribute run-ins to inevitable creative tensions. "We expected a few fights and we got a few fights," said Mr. McDonald in a lunch interview in Toronto for which he showed up wearing the day's costume: a flowing flower-print dress, a helmet-head wig and a great deal of pancake makeup.

He looked like a fairly passable woman, which is helpful because the Kids have a propensity for slipping into drag. Their characters include Kathy and Cathy, two unhappily single secretaries of a certain age; a feathery woman with claws for feet, known as the Chicken Lady, and an assortment of career women and suburban matrons.

They said they try hard not to take cheap shots, any more than they would take cheap shots at male characters. "We call it femming out - getting in touch with our feminine sides," Mr. McKinney said. Their sensitivity strategy apparently paid off when they won an award from a Canadian women's group for presenting women in a positive light. In one skit, for instance, two women executives are having drinks in a bar when a sleazy God's-gift-to-females type sends them a round of drinks and sidles up.

Woman 1: "Let's deconstruct this, shall we? What did you hope to gain by coming over here?

Man: "I just thought maybe we could get to know each other."

Woman 2: "Oh, you wanted to get to know us?"

Woman 1: "Why us? Why do you find us so interesting?"

Man: "You strike me as being...interesting."

Woman 1: "So you find us interesting because we are interesting. That's a tad tautological, don't you think?"

Man: "I just thought we could have some fun, that's all."

Woman 1: "So you never entertained any thoughts at all of vaginal intercourse?"

In minutes, the women's rhetoric has reduced the man, literally, to a 6-inch-tall figure. He scurries off squeaking, "Lesbians!"

It is obvious where the skit's sympathies lie. "We didn'twant to do it badly and insultingly, all high voices and big breasts," said Mr. McDonald.

Or, in the words of Mr. McKinney, "We were a five-man troupe who wanted to write about the social and personal relationships we had with women." In their improv days, he said, the Kids occasionally included women. But since then, they've preferred to stick together alone, in the manner of an almost too-close family that coheres even as its members argue, sulk, and threaten to leave home. While the Kids can seem almost interchangeable in skits, particularly when they wear wigs, and they share the same self-deprecating, defensive-Canadian outlook, their comic ideas tend to bounce off, and sometimes into, each other.

"Of course there's friction - fights and threats and mostly throwing of food," said McCulloch,

After being all over one another 12 hours a day, 10 or 11 months of the year, the Kids take time off in the summer to pursue other projects - appearing in (and writing) plays and short films, traveling. Last Summer, Mr. Foley took a role in a movie based on the androgynous Pat character from "SNL."

None of the Kids expect to be on television indefinitely. "The life span of the troupe is much longer than the life span of us on television," Mr. McCulloch said.

Mr. McKinney said he looked forward, in a way, to the last season. "It means they'll let us go home for dinner," he said. "Like true artistically driven intellectuals, we always work better when we can smell food."

---Sarah Lyall, _The New York Times_, January 16, 1994

Oh, Those Darn Kids

Black humor from the Great White North

The Kids in the Hall, a Canadian comedy troupe, are approximately half famous at the moment. Example: it's Saturday afternoon in the Kid's office, a fifth-floor walkup on a Toronto back street. Group member Mark McKinney is on the phone to the box office at Second City, trying to wangle a visitor into the early show. "Well, how about if we gave you a fashionable 'Kids in the Hall' T shirt? he says. Negotiations ensue. After a minute McKinney puts his hand over the phone.

"This is actually a prettyu good indication of how much influence we have," he says. "We can't get you in free. But they have agreed to let you in on a student discount."

Moral: the Kids aren't yet the toast of the town. But with a weekly series on HBO and the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., and friends in high places, that may be subject to change. Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels is the executive producer and comedy overlord on the HBO/CBC series, offering advice and connections. CBC director of television programming Ivan Fecan is also a fan, prowling the studio in an expensively baggy black suit that makes him look, group member Dave Foley says, "like a hip Johnny Cash." "They're original, and original is impossible to find," Fecan says. "Something like this may take a little longer to find its audience. But it's worth it when it happens."

Individually the Kids are not kids at all, but five writer/actors between the relatively advanced ages of 26 and 30: Mc Kinney, Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald and Scott Thompson. They connected in Toronto in 1984 and built a loyal following in cabaret performances at the Rivoli on Queen Street. (Their name comes from show-business history: Jack Benny would occasinoally buy a joke from the struggling writers who gathered in the corridor outside his radio studio. "That's one from the kids in the hall," he'd tell the audience if it went over.) As a group they seem to share one subconscious, creating in carefully crafted sketches a sort of parallel earth. It's a place that's similar in shape to the world we know but not identical - more desperate but also more bleakly funny. It has a certain internal logic. It makes sense to them. "There are no rules," Dave Foley says. "We don't really have any criteria for anything. Just if it makes us laugh."

In a sketch called "Bored Robbers," a thief and his victim are so deeply alienated that they can barely rouse themselves to walk through the robbery. "Okay, homeowner, you're being robbed. Where's all your valuables?" Scott asks listlessly. "Everything's over there on the shelves," Dave replies from his easy chair, eyes glued to the TV. Scott, disconsolately: "It's so far." In a piece called "Reg," five friends sit around a fire drinking to the memory of a childhood friend. It's clear that they miss him terribly. Bit by bit it also becomes clear that they've murdered him. Snuck up behind him and strangled him with piano wire - "Good, strong piano wire." "Remember how he fought back?" Mark says nostalgically. "Easy to beat up, hard to kill," Dave answers with a smile, and they all chuckle fondly.

Building slowly: Michaels sees in the Kids a style of comedy that's purely Canadian, darker and edgier than American comedy, and the Kids themselves agree. "In Canada there's no mass audience," Foley says, "so you don't have that mass mentality. Performers here are a bit more free to please themselves."

We're observers," Thompson adds. "We're not taken seriously in the world so it's very easy for us to watch and judge. America's the culture everybody seems to flock to and listen to, but not Canada. So we bus the tables and make jokes."

For now the Kids' reputation is building slowly, being passed from person to person, or at least from person who has HBO to person. A friend called Lorne Michaels recently to say that she'd overheard two people talking about the Kids in a Santa Monica health club. "And I thought - yeah. That's exactly right," Michaels says. "That's the audience." The CBC shows started two weeks ago; the HBO series runs until December, when it comes up for renewal. ("Next year we gotta get some money in the budget for women," Mark McKinney mutters darkly, walking onto the set in a blond wig, red skirt and black flats for a sketch called "Secretaries.") Right now the members of the group are writing frantically to keep up with the demand for new material. They write in groups of five, four, three, two, and one. McKinney is trying to kick start a piece for which he's had just a title since 1983: "Sex Girl Patrol." "It's about a group of superwomen who have..." he says, and stops. "Uh, never mind."

SNL producer Jim Downey, a thoughtful theorist of comedy, is asked about the Kids. "They're very much alike," he says slowly. "And I think it's fortunate that they found each other, because..." Long pause. "Because they're not like anybody else."

"He's calling us freaks!" Scott Thompson says indignantly.

"No, I know Jim," Mark McKinney says. "I'm pretty sure that's a compliment."

"He makes comedy sound so classy," Bruce McCulloch says admiringly.

"When it's really so sleazy," Dave Foley says. As one, The Kids in the Hall crack up.

---Bill Barol, _Newsweek_, October 2, 1989

Close-UP - The Kids in the Hall

In a sketch set in a steam room, a man shows off his newly sprouted breasts. A farmer in a gimme cap tells how Mickey Ronney came to dinner - and wouldn't leave. And a lacy old matron complains, "Why did they have to take the word gay?...What was wrong with pervert?" Welcome to the new season of HBO's The Kids in the Hall, airing at midnight on Fridays and starring the Canadian comedy troupe that has won an avid cult following since Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels put their half-hour, skit-filled show on the air in 1989.

The kids - from left, Kevin McDonald, Scott Thompson, Bruce McCulloch, Dave Foley, and Mark McKinney - came together in Toronto's comedy clubs seven years ago; the name is an homage to the writers who used to hang outside Jack Benny's radio studio, peddling their jokes to him. Their favorite targets are middle-class values and sexism, and they aren't afraid to "treat homosexuality like it's part of the mainstream," says Thompson. Much of their material, though, focuses on hilariously warped bourgeois couples (their straight-faced impersonations of women could fool even Warren Beatty).

The Kids write most sketches separately, then fine-tune them (with three other writers) in their Toronto studio. With plans to do more TV and feature films, they'll keep it up a while longer. "It's like an old marriage - the skits are our kids, so we stay together."

The Kids aren't kids anymore: They're in their late 20s or early 30s. This year, the establishment embraced them with an International Emmy nomination. Can they keep their edge? Foley says yes: "As writers, we're more skillful than we were a year ago, or two years ago." McKinney, though, has doubts: "Following that logic, Paul McCartney has never been better."

--by Jess Cagle, December, 1991

To Paul Simms, workman's compensation is funny.

His hit NBC series "NewsRadio" takes place at a New York radio station, but unlike all those other media-based comedies set in the Big Apple, it's not about the inner workings of major-market media.

Simms has an older and broader subject in mind: office politics.

Plenty of other shows, including a host of new sitcoms, have used the office setting, dealing with situations that regularly come up in real workplaces. For instance, in the new shows "Almost Perfect" (whose lead is a TV drama writer) and "Live Shot" (set at a TV station), office rivalries abound. And office romance has played a role in series ranging from "NYPD Blue" to "The Drew Carey Show."

What makes "NewsRadio" (7:30 p.m. [Central] Tuesdays, WMAQ-Ch. 5) different is that it focuses exclusively on how people interact in the workplace and the fallout from the relationships that develop there.

"Most people my age and most Americans spend more time at the office than they do at home," Simms says, "Everything that happens in your life between the ages of 22 and 40 or 50, it happens in the office. That's where most people's lives play out on a daily basis. If it's your birthday, if you have a girlfriend problem, you deal with it in the office. It's the setting where every interesting dramatic aspect of human life comes out: greed and envy and love and cooperation and sloth."

On "NewsRadio," sloth takes the form of Matthew (Andy Dick), an office drone who's both lazy and overly sensitive. When a fellow worker requests a moment of silence on Ghandi's birthday, Matthew can only think of himself.

"I bet if we lived in India," he says, "we'd get a three-day weekend."

Later this year, Matthew will accidently put his hand through a window and have to be rushed to the hospital. He doesn't have health insurance, and Simms will make light of whether the injury is covered by workman's comp.

When "NewsRadio" debuted as a midseason replacement series last spring, it immediately established its office-politics premise. The owner of WNYX (Stephen Root) had hired a new news director (Dave Foley), with one little oversight: He hadn't fired the old one.

That was left to the new guy, who also had to deal with the assistant news director (Maura Tierney), an overachiever who thought she was entitled to the job.

The rest of the characters - based on people Simms has known in his various jobs inside and outside the TV business - will be recognizable to anyone who has done time at a desk, including:

* The cynical suckup. Phil Hartman's manipulative news anchor, Bill McNeal, will give phony compliments or act friendly to get what he wants. You've never seen anyone pucker up like Bill when the boss was deciding how big a bonus to give out.

* The cutup. Joe Rogan plays the station's electrician, who in the last week's season premiere set an exploding trap in his gelato to find out who was stealing his special dessert.

* The bored administrative assistant. As Beth, Vicki Lewis knows everything that's going on in the office and uses the information to push other people's buttons.

Simms created "NewsRadio" after working as writer at Spy magazine, "Late Night with David Letterman" and "The Larry Sanders Show." Earlier in life, he served ice cream and worked at a Kroger's in Dallas while taking a break from college and living with his parents.

"Every office is the same, whether it's a late-night TV show or an insurance office - who has the bigger desk, who's [sic] name goes above who's on the stationary," says the 29-year-old California native.

One episode last season was based on who had the nicer desk. After Matthew ordered himself a new one, everyone else wanted one, too. "My goal for the first six episodes was never to leave the office," Simms says. Except for a tag with Matthew in a subway tunnel, he succeeded.

Simms [sic] iconoclastic approach - in recent years, only "Murphy Brown" and "Herman's Head" have had much success confining themselves to then office - extends to sexual TV tension.

Rather than let the budding romance between the news director and the assistant news director build for a season or two - a TV cliche - he had the rivals jump in bed in the first episode, a fresher and possibly more realistic approach to office romance.

"More often than a long flirtation, people rush into something and then deal with the consequences," Simms says. "That 'Will they or won't they?' - who cares? How about: "They did it and now what happens?"

Dave Foley, a veteran of "The Kids in the Hall," is a wonderful lead on "NewsRadio," but oftentimes, if Vicki Lewis isn't stealing the show, Stephen Root is. As Jimmy James, the rich owner of WNYX, he's the hardest character to pin down.

"He's sort of like my fantasy of a great boss," Simms says. "He's very smart, but he has his own weird things that he likes. The key to that character is he knows exactly what's going on but he acts befuddled."

In another episode, James has bought a toy company, and he brings one of the products to the office: a ball that makes funny noises. Needless to say, it disrupts the workplace.

Simms has made a similar impact with "NewsRadio," disrupting the sitcom format with some funny new noises.

The Reel Deal

The Kids in the Hall Movie

The Kids created a bevy of memorable characters - but don't expect to see many in the Kids in the Hall movie, like in those bad SNL-spawned movies.

"We could have just taken our big hit characters and forced them in, but we set a higher goal," explains Thompson.

Something else will probably surprise Kids fans. When the Kids quit series TV, rumors flew that they hated the sight of each other, but you wouldn't know that from the relaxed atmosphere on the set.

"We fight ritualistically almost," explains McKinney. "When we stop fighting, we're dead."

Despite a yearlong hiatus, the Kids begin feeling comfortable after a couple of takes.

We're nervous creatures," McDonald says. "The more you make us feel at home - the more you cuddle us, put slippers on us and give us a paper to read, the funnier we'll be."

by Steve Gravestock, U. of Toronto

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