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The Kids in the Hall, the beloved Canadian sketch show that ran from 1989 to 1995, launched its much-delayed sixth season on Friday on Prime Video.
And in case it hadn’t sunk in that it’s been almost 30 years since the Chicken Lady served up a disturbingly fresh omelette, grim reminders of mortality and the passage of time hang heavy over the show.
The debut episode shows the Kids — Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Scott Thompson, Dave Foley and Mark McKinney, now in their 60s — literally being unearthed from the grave in which they were buried in the last episode of the fifth season.
"The Kids in the Hall" Bruce McCulloch, Dave Foley, Kevin McDonald and Scott Thompson arrive on the red carpet for the 2019 Canadian Screen Awards in Toronto. (Nathan Denette / The Canadian Press Files)
Then the twangy theme kicks in, Having an Average Weekend by Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet. The track was recorded with bassist Reid Diamond, who died of cancer in 2001. His replacement, Dallas Good of the Sadies, appears briefly in the intro; Good died earlier this year.
It’s a bit jarring to revisit something nostalgic from your past — the theme song alone, paired with grainy black-and-white footage of Toronto, transports you immediately back to the ‘90s — and also have it remind you so strongly of everything that’s changed.
To its credit — indeed, even to its benefit — the show is fully aware of the transformations, both physical and social, wrought by the decades. When the Kids (a moniker that seems more ironic than ever) are first dug up, they are horrified by each other’s grey hair (or lack thereof) and wrinkled visages. “Am I still the cute one,” Foley wails. (Note: I think McCulloch was the cute one, but maybe I’m alone there.)
It’s a relief to discover the troupe is as funny as ever, though a lot of the laughs in the first few episodes are more rueful than gut-busting, tinged with sadness rather than the anger of their younger days. (Foley’s turn as a morning radio DJ broadcasting to no one in a post-apocalyptic world — his only record is Melanie’s Brand New Key — is breathtaking in its hopelessness.)
Old favourites — Buddy Cole, office workers Kathy and Cathy — return, but the characters aren’t oblivious to the intervening years.
"The Kids In The Hall" by The Comedy Network in 1997. (The Canadian Press Files)
Maybe it’s because he’s been doing it without a break — and doing it well — for about a hundred years that no one looks at Mick Jagger strutting and preening onstage and says, “Dude, you are an old man.” But after their long hiatus, the Kids are wise enough to acknowledge and even lean into their almost-senior status; a sketch in which they play 60-year-old strippers is utterly ridiculous and yet weirdly plausible, with a nod to topicality that is mostly absent from early KItH sketches.
“I’ve been doing this since they closed the plant in Oshawa,” McKinney’s character says. “Autoworkers and strippers, they’re in the same union, so I got to keep my benefits.”
As Homer Simpson would say, it’s funny ’cause it’s true.
Jill Wilson
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