I've finished watching all 101 episodes of the original 1989-1995 run of "The Kids in the Hall." While I became a fan through watching the reruns in college decades ago, I'd never seen the full, unedited versions before. I estimate that roughly half of the episodes were completely new to me. I'd never seen any of the sketches with the "Extreme" or "Steps" characters, no Tammy, no Croation cabbie, and I never knew there was more than one sketch with the King of Empty Promises. With the recent revival of the series in 2022, "Kids in the Hall" is seeing a nice resurgence of popularity, and there have been a lot of old fans coming out of the woodwork and remarking about how well the show has held up compared to other comedy of its time.
Well, some of it has and some of it hasn't. There's no getting away from how different the culture was in the late '80s and early '90s. While "Kids" was very ahead of its time in terms of portraying women and the LGBT community, it was pretty miserable every time it tried to do anything with race. The five members of the Kids in the Hall comedy troupe, Dave Foley, Scott Thompson, Mark McKinney, Bruce McCullough, and Kevin McDonald, are all white men. They wrote sketches with women in them and would play the parts themselves in drag. And they also wrote sketches with black and brown people in them occasionally, and appeared in blackface and brownface to play them. Mark McKinney's blues musician character Mississippi Gary showed up in the very first episode, made appearances on the show until the third season, and later popped up in their live shows, rewritten to be a very out-of-touch white guy in blackface. There's not an ounce of malice in any of these sketches, but the cringe is off the charts.
Then there's the LGBT content. Scott Thompson was one of the only out gay comedians at the time, and "The Kids in the Hall" ran during the height of the AIDS crisis when homophobia was rampant. Thompson used his unusual visibility to fight back as best he could, even devoting one of his Buddy Cole monologues to calling out haters like Andrew Dice Clay and Sam Kinison. The f-slur is all over the show, and from interviews I've dug up, this was deliberate on Thompson's part - he wanted to reclaim the word the way that "queer" eventually would be. This didn't work out, and now the culture has changed so drastically since "The Kids in the Hall" went off the air that some of these sketches need an awful lot of additional context and qualifiers to parse. However, they're also a fascinating encapsulation of the prevailing attitudes of the times, and really should be in wider circulation.
I got so much out of working my way through the whole show in order, seeing how the characters evolved, and how the production kept getting more ambitious and impressive every season. In year one, most of the sketches were adapted from the troupe's existing stage material, and everything felt much more scroungy and low budget. As the show gained momentum, more and more filmed pieces were incorporated, and everyone eventually figured out how to write for television. The costuming and makeup went from barely passable in the first season to jaw-dropping quality in the fifth. Even now, there were instances where I completely forgot Dave Foley in drag wasn't actually a woman, because the work was just that good.
"Kids in the Hall" is unusual for a sketch show because it is an unapologetically provocative and adult piece of work, with material that kept it from ever becoming mainstream, but it ran for over a hundred episodes. It was also remarkably consistent, maybe because it all came from the same small group of comedians who got away with more than people thought they could. Not every sketch was a winner, and the show had its ups and downs in quality, and inevitable bouts of repetitiveness, but when it worked, it worked. The absurdism and the rebelliousness and the GenX worldview of "Kids in the Hall" made it distinctive and memorable. It's more nostalgic than subversive now, and some elements are very out of date, but I'd argue that more of it holds up than not.
As much as I love the weirder characters, the show's enduring fascination with and hatred of corporate culture and dysfunctional families was what really drove it, and those themes have stayed pretty universal and relevant. I'll get into that more in the next installment, where I talk about the top ten sketches that were new to me from watching "Kids in the Hall" this time around.
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