It's been six years since Canada's beloved comedy troupe, the Kids in the Hall, dusted off old fan favourites like the Chicken Lady, Buddy Cole, and Kathie and Cathy and took them on a North America tour.

The Kids ' Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, Scott Thompson and Dave Foley ' aren't really kids any more, and neither are some of their best-known female characters, but they're back on the road and having a blast.

"I'm a bigger gal than I was before," Thompson said with a guffaw yesterday from Austin, Texas, where the Kids were preparing to take to the stage during the first full week of their multi-city North American tour, which wraps up June 5 in Toronto.

They are in their 40s now ' three of them are fathers ' but they still sound like giddy teenagers discussing their Monty Python-inspired brand of silly and surreal humour.

Their CBC show was a big hit for the public broadcaster from 1989 to '95, and still boasts a cult following among university students and in comedy circles.

They've written a wealth of new material ' Thompson estimates about 85 per cent of the show is new ' and have been delighted to see fans reacting to it as positively as they are to the old favourites.

"What's really amazing is our audiences have been young. They have discovered us on the Internet or YouTube or through DVDs, and that's been really unexpected and gratifying," Thompson says.

A reunion tour was something they'd wanted to do for years, McKinney said, and the prolonged Hollywood writers' strike made their dream a reality since many of the projects they were working on were suddenly on hiatus.

McKinney took a moment to rail against the Conservative government's proposed Bill C-10, which would allow the government to withhold funding to film and TV projects it deems offensive. The bill is being debated in the Senate.

"Much of what we did on Kids in the Hall would never have happened under Bill C-10. We got lots of letters of protest all the time because we weren't user-friendly comedy and we were accused of crossing the line," said McKinney.

The bill, if passed, will simply give Canadians in the entertainment business even more reason to flee to New York and Los Angeles, McKinney says.

"Could you find a better way to scare the talent out of this country?" he asks. "If I want to be censored, I'll go work for ABC."

He's the first to admit, however, that the Kids' penchant for dressing up in drag to play the wives, mothers and girlfriends in their comedy routines used to be puzzling to American audiences, who assumed all five of them must have been gay.

"They failed to grow up with Monty Python the way we did, and the great tradition of drunken uncles dressing as ladies on Canada Day, and so they assumed all of us were gay," McKinney says. "But I think the younger generation gets it. They are really responding to us."

ADVERTISEMENT

Iconocast is about learning and teaching without borders; we offer eMarketing, Internet Advertising, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Online Branding, and eMarketing News Services.

Iconocast Home Page

Contact Iconocast

Iconocast Health Articles

© 2003-07. ICONOCAST is a trademark of iconocast.com.