Kids say the darndest things

Kevin McDonald

Time Out New York: The show is almost all new—why include old material at all?
Kevin: There are only two old scenes, but we’ve never done them live onstage before. We wanted to please the people a little bit, give them old characters like the Chicken Lady, but we were sick of the Chicken Lady we had been doing. So we dug into our TV catalog and found a Chicken Lady we’d never done live. It’s got a neat special effect, too. That’ll be fun. The same with Bruce’s kid character, Gavin. We were looking for a new Gavin.

TONY: Do you write as a group or individually?
Kevin: We split up into small groups. The L.A. crowd will meet up in different combinations of Dave, Bruce and me. Then Scott, when he was in Toronto, had phone sessions with Bruce, and Mark and I would get together. Then we bring it all together and everybody improves it. Some of the scenes that are considered classics, the first drafts were shaky. After we rehearsed it a few times, everybody contributed their thing, and that’s what makes the sketch. We were a little worried when we started to meet two years ago that that wouldn’t still be there. But it was there right away, effortlessly.

TONY: That’s great. Can you think of a specific example?
Kevin: There was a sketch in the Montreal show called “The Professor.” It’s about two gay couples having a dinner party. Scott wrote it one night in the bathtub and brought it in full of coffee stains and blood from cutting himself shaving. There was something there, but it was sort of a mess. We workshopped it and workshopped it, and we never gave up. I think it was the last big show we did before Montreal when it came together and we figured it out. Usually something will pop, and a good thing will happen.

TONY: When do you just give up?
Kevin: Bruce and I wrote about a guy who has a heart attack for three years. But I always thought it should be a film sketch. We tried it at one of our sneak shows in L.A. It didn’t work. But we didn’t totally put it away. Cause I think we’re gonna do a Kids in the Hall movie of sketches and that would be good for that; you’ve got to have a montage for it. Also there were jokes we took out and put in other scenes, so it survived in spirit.

TONY: Why tour again? And why with new material?
Kevin: It’s the only chance we can get together it seems, the five of us. And this time, we’re pushing for a renaissance. The new material just makes it more exciting—part of it is semicynical: If people want to come see the show, they want to see something different. Also, it was invigorating to be reminded of our roots, when we were a club act and did a completely new set of sketches every Monday. We did that for a year. We never repeated sketches until one day Mark said, “Hey, we should repeat sketches.” That’s how we were discovered.

TONY: It’s interesting to come back to sketch as opposed to another movie. So often people see sketch as a stepping-stone.
Kevin: It’s funny. I grew up watching Monty Python, and they graduated to movies. Saturday Night Live: Bill Murray, Belushi, they all became movie stars. So I always grew up thinking it was a stepping-stone. But now I see it as an end in and of itself. It is its own art form. There’s no shame in doing the sketches your whole life. I don’t know how you could…to think of the same amount of sketches we used to think of every day. But Lou Reed still writes great songs after 40 years, so I guess it’s possible.

TONY: Do you wait for inspiration or have a process to drum up ideas?
Kevin: The best ideas hit you by surprise. But if that’s not happening, then you have to work hard. The first three days [on a new project] are the hard work. Then, when you’re in the groove, you start getting the surprises. Sometimes blues singers say, “I didn’t write the song; it came from God.” I understand that. My favorite sketches are the ones that just hit me when I was taking the bus to work in the old days in Toronto. But you have to work hard to be able to get into that loop.

TONY: Kids in the Hall is known for not following celebrities, politics or current events. Has that changed?
Kevin: I see it popping up a little more—but those sketches are usually the weak ones that don’t get in. There was one sketch we did two years ago that was a big hit, but we can’t do it now because it was really current. It was about two couples in their fifties; at the beginning we’re seeing Brokeback Mountain. And then the women slowly realize that their husbands have been going away every weekend to see movies—quote-unquote. That was a big hit. But its time has passed. We always said we never did satire or current politics, or celebrities. It never interested us.

TONY: For a long time troupes were compared to Monty Python. Now they’re being compared to y’all. How do you feel about that?
Kevin: That’s truly amazing. I, of course, grew up loving Monty Python. It’s like, in rock & roll, there’s the Beatles and there’s lots of other bands. There’s really only one troupe that has a bible, and that’s Monty Python. We were following that bible: We’ll do a TV show and then a movie every three years. That’s the sketch troupe bible. The Beatles made their bible: You make the fun albums, you get serious in the middle and do your great albums, one of you falls in love with a woman and you split up the band. That’s the rock & roll bible. But Monty Python is the only sketch comedy bible.

TONY: Would you rewrite the bible if you could?
Kevin: It’s a pretty good bible. Well, now there’s a new step that we missed, because of our age, and that’s the Internet. I guess the bible now is, you do a few stage shows, you film a few things and put them on the Internet, and you get a TV show and hopefully a movie. It’s still the Monty Python bible, but with the added twist of technology.

TONY: We hear you had a stalker.
Kevin: Yeah. It was during the TV show. I got a letter from a woman in Edmonton, where we were going on tour, who said she liked my “Daddy Drank” scenes because she had an alcoholic father too. I was touched. So I wrote her back, this was before e-mail, and said “I’ll get you two tickets to the show.” During that show, we did a thing where I’m in the audience and wherever the lights are, I pop up. Just by coincidence, I was next to this woman and she took it as a sign that she was supposed to follow me. So she moved to Toronto and was outside our office every day. I had to find ways to sneak out. It lasted for a few months. She even got a job at the record store I go to all the time.

TONY: Wow. Did she have romantic intentions?
Kevin: I don’t know. I guess so, at first. And after a few months—the police said this was normal—she started saying that I’d lost it, that I wasn’t funny anymore and she was disappointed in me. It was awful.

TONY: What’s in your rider when you tour?
Kevin: They like beer. I don’t, but there’s beer for them. I’m the only vegetarian in the group and I’m just lucky if I can eat before the shows.

TONY: Was becoming a vegetarian a political choice?
Kevin: Well, my girlfriend is a vegetarian, and I never loved loved red meat, so I stopped eating that in front of her out of respect. She never asked me to, but I thought I would. And eventually, I fell out of taste for it. So I quit that. And then a few years after—we used to have two lovebirds, Simon and Hecubus were their names, and I always felt guilty eating chicken in front of them—my girlfriend and I went to a Greek movie, and in real time, they kill this chicken. That night I had what is now called by the other Kids “the chicken dream.” A chicken came up to me and said, “Stop eating us! Don’t eat us anymore!” And I haven’t since.

TONY: So the years of being involved in a sketch about a chicken that is half human had nothing to do with it?
Kevin: Nope.

NEXT: Scott Thompson»