Still kidding around Comedy legends back to push the envelope, this time under Amazon’s watchful eye By: Randall King Posted: 3:00 AM CDT Thursday, May. 12, 2022

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This article was published 12/05/2022 (1595 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It has been nearly 27 years since the five-man Canadian comedy troupe Kids in the Hall challenged comedy norms with their landmark sketch comedy series, which ran on CBC and HBO from 1989 to 1995.

The trailer for the new Prime Video series demonstrates the same biting-the-hand-that-feeds-them ethos — a bit between Mark McKinney and Dave Foley suggesting the Amazon corporation may be in league with Satan — that marked the quintet’s initial foray into comedy.

That sense also comes through in a Zoom interview with the group’s other three members, Kevin McDonald, Bruce McCulloch and Scott Thompson, conducted after the show wrapped production last year.

This show follows in the original’s template, says the Montreal-born McDonald, 60, who now resides in Winnipeg.

“It’s our typical humour,” he says. “Imagine us 25 years older.”

“We’re kind of going OG on it,” says the Edmonton-born McCulloch, 61. “We talked about modernizing it. But no, we just do what we do, which is write about the world around us.

“Yes, we’re older, but we’re happy to be here,” he continues. “It feels good and the material is a combination of old characters and new situations and new things.”

It was Thompson who, in a 1990 interview with this reporter, complained about CBC’s tendency to play it safe, although the show had more than its share of cutting-edge material.

Thompson, 62, born in North Bay, Ont., doesn’t have an entirely rosy perspective on working for Amazon, try as he might to stay tight-lipped about it when asked if the creators were untethered compared to the CBC days.

“I would say no, we were not untethered,” Thompson says. “We were very tethered. We did our best with the tether. But we were very tethered.

It’s been a very challenging experience, addressing this generation. The censorship has been very intense, it’s come from a different direction, and we did everything in our power to fight it.”

Thompson was gay and proud from the start of the show, and that was mainly manifest in the series via the character of Buddy Cole, a character who, while seemingly constructed from a collection of gay stereotypes, was nevertheless one of the most beloved and three-dimensional characters in the series. Buddy, Thompson says, will return.

“It might not be the part that I wanted it to be, but we did what we could,” Thompson says. “But absolutely, Buddy is going to address the world (of 2022).”

“I think they’re a large organization and therefore a bit fearful,” McCulloch says. “We certainly got enough of our great stuff through without any consequence.

“It’s still provocative and edgy, I think.”

Shot in Toronto over the summer of 2021, the series will also maintain its Hogtown flavour.

“I love Toronto and I think that’s one of the things I was so proud of in its first iteration, was how authentic we were,” Thompson says. “We fought very hard to be seen as who we were. We weren’t going to pretend to be an American group. We were a Canadian group so this show is very much set in Toronto.”

The show also put the five members back into a harmonious groove, though that harmony was often afflicted with some acrimonious dissonance back in the original run.

“That’s been the most shocking thing to me … how well we came together,” Thompson says. “All the cracks that appeared in the group got papered over. In some ways, it’s more beautiful now.”

Ironically, that feeling may have been augmented by the COVID-19 protocols in place during production.

“The production stopped for a year,” McDonald says. “And that (situation) leaked into the sketches. I have a lot of sketches about a lonely guy complaining.

“So even though we never mention it, I think it would be easy to guess that a lot of the sketches were written during that period.”

“It was tough to do this, but in a way, this bubble of us five together, unmasked, it made it like an island,” McCulloch says. “So I think it actually made us stronger together and enjoying being together.”

“I think it made it more intense because you couldn’t put your energy anywhere else but the five, and the work,” Thompson says. “A lot of times, that energy could go out to flirting with the sound guy. But we’d be so tunnelled into each other.”

So if that comedy lightning strikes twice, will there be another season?

“If this goes and people like it, I would love to have another crack at it,” Thompson says. “Maybe this time, the tethers will be loosened a little.”

“We’ve always felt vital, even if we weren’t doing things,” McCulloch says. “(This) just made us love the troupe again. So we’ll see what happens next.”

randall.king.arts@gmail.com

Twitter: @FreepKing