Simply put, I’m a bit ignorant of pop culture. I’m terribly lazy when it comes to mustering the focus required to invest in a new show, and almost faint when someone tells me I must start watching something that is already several seasons and hundreds of hours deep. With attention smothering inventions like YouTube, I find it far easier to spend ten hours watching Youtuber apologies than to get invested in the long-winded glory of shows like Game of Thrones. Much like the way I prefer a night in than a night on the town, I tend to prefer watching my favourite shows on an annual basis instead of starting something new and unknown. I guess you might say I have commitment issues when it comes to media, and you may even say I’m boring, but I’d prefer if you used the former….
One of my favourite shows—and the one that I seem to have been watching perpetually since I was a teenager—is The Kids in the Hall (“KITH”). While I (and most students at Osgoode Hall) was not alive when it first aired, my parents watched it and would quote their favourite characters and sketches to my abundant joy. I have fond memories of rolling about the floor catching fleeting glances of Mark McKinney as the overly titillated chicken lady, Bruce McDonald as the misogynistic cabbage-head who always got his just desserts, or (my favourite) fifty Helens agreeing on useful advice like “you can never spend too much money on a good pair of shoes.” Grainy Monochromatic b-roll of an energetic Toronto in the early 90s bookends the sketches with sultry surf guitar riffs; footage that still makes me feel a tender nostalgia to a Toronto I never got to experience. The show has—for better or for worse—informed my humor and has kept me laughing for all my time on this planet.
I had always heard murmurings of a reboot but most of the cast had seen few collective successes after the show, such that I never expected much to come of the rumors. The cast had released a few limited series with tepid reception and most notably a feature film called Brain Candy, which was a massive box office flop but still oddly funny. The cast in true KITH style always made fun of themselves for this release, and the new series was not a lost opportunity in that regard.
One of the members Scott Thompson said of their success, “we thought we were going to be Nirvana, but really, we were Sonic Youth,” which perfectly embodied the nature of the groups critical acclaim among its fervent but small fan base. Mark McKinney went on to take a starring role as Glenn in Superstore and Bruce McDonald enjoyed similar success, writing for, and starring in a host of CBC comedies. In 2017 I saw Kevin McDonald’s stand-up set at the Casbah in Hamilton, where his self-deprecating humor had me in pieces. David Foley—“the cute one”—also enjoyed some success in NewsRadio and as voicing Flik in a Bug’s Life among other minor roles.
The original show was a product of Toronto’s cultural and social growing pains in the late 80s and early 90s: a decline in blue-collar employment and values, a growing LGBTQ+ movement on the heels of the Toronto Police bathhouse raids and a sense that Toronto had to establish itself on the world’s artistic and cultural stage. The show illustrates and blatantly makes fun of traditional Canadian life and values by putting angst and surrealism front and centre. In considering the context of a KITH reboot, I think I fell into that old trap of thinking that there are no new jokes in our modern world, that everything has been critiqued or satirized within an inch of its life. However, after watching the new season a few times, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
In 2019 the rumors were finally realized; the cast announced they were beginning to write a new season of KITH to be produced by Amazon Prime Video. I was filled with emotions: joy for the potential that the show had, fear for the let down it could be and anger that Amazon had again sunk its bloody claws into another commodity I hold dear (see the decline of physical bookstores). After three years of pandemic related delays and a serious internal argument, I signed up for the free trial to watch the new season. I’m here to tell you that the reboot (more like a renaissance) is a masterpiece of comedy.
The first episode comes out swinging (dangling or flopping might be better words for it) and from then on, it’s that same calibre of absurdity and hilarity that one expects from KITH. The new series proves that there are new funny perspectives to be shared. While the Kids manage to create a brilliant new catalogue of characters and sketches, they also manage to hilariously modernize many of their classic bits including Cathy and Kathie, Buddy Cole, the Head Crusher and Gavin. One of my favourite new bits is David Foley as a disc-jockey in a fall-out shelter who’s only record left is a single of “Brand New Key” by Melanie, a song which he plays repeatedly underneath a nuke-scorched wasteland. Foley’s archetypically zealous rock host voice amidst the horror and loneliness of a nuclear apocalypse is hilarious, depressing, and terrifying. If you’ve got a few moments during this busy time, when the shadows of midterms are making themselves known on the horizon, I implore you to view some KITH sketches on YouTube. Maybe you will enjoy the comfort of laughter or maybe you will think it’s terrible! Either way you may finally know what I’m talking about and if you promise to do that, then maybe I will finally start Game of Thrones.
