He's no Chicken Lady, but he won't lay an egg

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Kevin McDonald: you should see him walk against the wind. (SUPPLIED PHOTO)

Of all the Kids -- if you asked all the other Kids -- Kevin McDonald might just be considered the funniest.

"I've always thought that if you looked at all five of us, and you gave us categories -- who has the best timing, who does the best characters, who comes up with the best ideas -- that I would not be in first place in any of those categories," says Kids in the Hall cast member McDonald, who's in town this weekend to host the CBC Winnipeg Comedy Festival's late-night Saturday gala, Cradle to the Grave.

"But if you added up the points, there's a chance that I could get to be the funniest person. I can see why (the other Kids) might say that, because they've all got these other things that they do, and I'm just funny. They might be more skilled in certain areas; I'm just funny."

Cradle to the Grave, which takes place Saturday at 9:15 p.m. at the Pantages Playhouse Theatre (tickets $39.95 at Ticketmaster), features performances by Big Daddy Tazz, John Wing, Maryellen Hooper, Mike Bullard, Teresa Pavlinek, The Williamson Playboys, and Mark Little and Andrew Bush of the Halifax sketch troupe Picnicface.

McDonald, the tall, skinny, gangly, slightly gawky, curly-haired member of the legendary Canadian sketch-comedy troupe, also probably ranks these days as the Kid you've heard the least from in the past 10 years.

While his Hall-way compatriots -- Dave Foley, Scott Thompson and Mark McKinney in particular, and Bruce McCulloch to a somewhat lesser extent -- have maintained fairly high profiles in sitcoms, movies and (in Foley's case) TV poker lounges, McDonald's career has maintained a steady but distinctly more under-the-radar sort of pace.

Based in Los Angeles since 1996, the Montreal-born performer has made numerous guest appearances in TV sitcoms and dramas, including Seinfeld, NewsRadio, Arrested Development, That '70s Show, Corner Gas and Las Vegas. But the majority of his non-Kids TV credits are for roles in which he's never seen -- voice-over contributions to a long list of animated shows, ranging from Lilo & Stitch and The Angry Beavers to What's New, Scooby Doo?

"Yeah, it hasn't happened the way I thought it would," he says. "I never thought that being a voice-over actor would be how I'd make most of my living, but I'm comfortable with it. And I do think I'm young enough (47) to take one more stab at it. Christopher Guest didn't get all his improv movies (Waiting for Guffman, Best In Show, A Mighty Wind) going until he was 48, so that's what I'm shooting for. I'm going to be pitching a lot of movies and TV shows."

These days, McDonald is directing much of his creative energy into a new Kids in the Hall project, Death Comes to Town, an eight-part miniseries being developed for CBC and (in the U.S.) HBO. He also has a movie script, The Small Bank, making the rounds in Hollywood and is hoping to get a TV series off the ground.

McDonald says reuniting the Kids to work on Death Comes to Town -- the title is quite self-explanatory -- has been an interesting experience, largely immune to the sort of feuding that fractured the group toward the end of its original (1988-1995) run.

"It's great, because we've all got individual careers, which means that there's always at least two of us busy," he explained. "There's usually just three of us in the room, and it's always a different three -- which means there's less people saying no, there's more yeses, and when the other two guys show up, they feel guilty about saying no because they haven't done the work.

"We're more polite with each other; maybe there's still a tiny bit of backstabbing, but the front-stabbing is gone, because we're polite men in our 40s. I wouldn't say backstabbing is healthy, but it's serviceable and you can deal with it; front-stabbing is what kills any kind of progress in a meeting."

Given his background as a sketch-troupe performer, taking on solo hosting duties at Saturday night's Cradle to the Grave gala definitely represents something of a departure.

"Two or three years ago, my comfort level would have been zero," he says with a laugh. "And then I did a one-man show about my drunk dad -- it doesn't sound funny, but it was a comedy -- so now my comfort level onstage is high.

"All my life, I thought, 'I can't do standup; I'd be too nervous -- I need four other guys onstage with me so I can blame them when something goes wrong.' But I've been performing a lot more by myself the past few years. I've written mostly new stuff for this (gala); technically, I guess it's standup, because I'm by myself and I'm standing up, but I think of it more as a one-person version of sketch comedy."

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca

On your mark... get set... GIGGLE!

The 8th Annual CBC Winnipeg Comedy Festival is off and joking, and the Free Press will be there to cover every wisecrack, pun, witticism and punchline along the way. Read about the comedy fest daily in our entertainment pages, and follow the funny stuff even further in Brad Oswald's Comedy Festering blog

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 17, 2009 D5