Last Friday evening at Ruth Eckerd Hall, The Kids in the Hall capered their way through a 90-minute intermission-free set featuring new material, some familiar characters, minimal props, and the occasional film-style short projected onto a huge screen that also served as the set.
I had high hopes for the show and was not disappointed.
The shenanigans opened with a self-referential short film that found Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney and Scott Thompson – all the KITH members – planning out their tour and brainstorming some fresh new ideas. Of course, the best (and really only) proposal came from McKinney, who, after some persuasion, shared it with the group. “What if we rape Kevin?” Kevin McDonald is the token KITH nerd – wild curly hair, big googly eyes and a way of capturing a look of absolute fear on his face in the most comic way possible. His response: “Isn’t raping me kind of dark and obvious?”
A series of more than a dozen sketches followed. Among the highlights were a skit about a couple with a smug, superior, hateful baby ala Seinfeld (Foley: “It’s like I’m cradling all of human suffering in my arms!”); a new Thompson-as-gay-socialite-Buddy-Cole skit, where he used the Bible as the source for topics like the mounting evidence of the son of God’s gayness, which includes Mary Magdalene as the real beard of Jesus; a number about two drunks in a bar, one of them, Foley, a time machine owner who uses his device to go back in time to last call, with the machine revisited in several other skits to hilarious effect; McCulloch and McKinney’s return as shady salesmen who are pimping a fat-reducing invention called “The Gut Spigot”; a new skit with secretary gossipers Kathy and Cathy (McCulloch and Thompson) that found one of the gals on a new “diet in a pipe” otherwise known as meth; a hilarious film short where a woman goes to pick up her car at the mechanic only to find a secret sex ring of car fuckers doing their dirty deeds in the back (McKinney: "I like to flip PT cruisers over on their back – they look so helpless!!”); a cute “how we danced” skit in which all five members performed dance moves as they did through their high school years; and a skit about an unlikely superhero, “Superdrunk,” and his drink-mixing, bartender sidekick. The gang encored with “Headcrusher,” which had McKinny crushing the heads of the audience members via a hand held camera, then crushing the heads of each KITH member individually before ending the show with his own headcrushing suicide.
The gang played off each other with all their trademark comic chemistry, even busting up at themselves several times when they couldn’t hold back, and generally proving once and for all that despite several years and new careers, they’ve still got what it takes to generate belly laughs.
This article appears in May 28 – Jun 3, 2008.