Hi, we're The Kids in the Hall.
I'm Mark.
This is Dave, Bruce and Scott.
Hi.
And Kevin. I'm here.
There's five of us.
I really wanted to be in The Kids in the Hall.
That's the truth of it.
I saw one of their shows at the Rivoli
and I was like, "Oh my God, what can I ever do
on Saturday Night Live
that would be nearly as cool and fresh as that?"
[cheering]
I remember the first time I saw them at the Rivoli.
I thought they were funny, smart, original.
It was nothing like what I'd been doing on SNL.
Now strategically, I'm going to sit on the end.
The power position.
[Eddie Izzard] Kids in the Hall make me laugh,
and almost nothing makes me laugh.
I think we're ready to start the show!
Let the slaughter begin!
♪♪
[Janeane Garofalo] You can't fool a devoted comedy fan about quality,
and that's what Kids in the Hall is.
I’m crushing your head!
[Lauren Ash] If you were in the comedy world, you knew Kids in the Hall,
and if you didn't, it was like, What are you doing here?
They were just fucking funny.
Action.
I have a cabbage for a head!
They were kind of the only comedy group
that reflected Gen-X.
[Matt Walsh] There's nobody that was more influential
for my money than those guys.
[Reggie Watts] They're just doing what they're doing
and they don't give a fuck.
Want to know something? I'm a bad doctor.
Anarchic, Rebellious,
One of a kind.
Canadian.
[Mike Myers] The Kids in the Hall taught me that things were possible
growing up in Toronto, and that was a big influence on me.
[Kevin McDonald] Evil!
Impolite and evil!
They were groundbreaking, they were kind of multi-sexual,
multi-gender.
I don't know what the fuck they were.
If you're gay and our eyes meet it's message received.
[Eric McCormack] The Kids all played women with such empathy.
And sometimes they were freaking gorgeous.
[Dave Foley] You have to be able to find what's funny
in some pretty dark places.
Daddy drank.
But I know it helped me be sillier
as a defense system, I guess.
Comedy doesn't have to come from a quagmire,
but a lot of us are broken toys.
Comedy is ultimately about one thing:
laughing in the face of death.
[Bruce McCulloch] We came together for each other,
and we're going to keep doing it
until we can’t do it.
[interviewer] All right, here we are, The Kids in the Hall.
This feels epic, having you guys here.
So you've never seen anything epic?
[laughing]
[cows lowing]
- [laughing] - Just start saying anything.
Anything, doesn’t matter.
That rhymes with...
[Mark McKinney] It was in Calgary.
I guess this is a typewriter scene, it must be.
[Mark McKinney] Trying to do comedy somehow,
then stumbled into the Loose Moose theater.
It was Theatersports,
very democratic form, competitive improvisation.
It was wild, the crowd was hot.
[announcer] And now "The Audience" team,
[announcer speaking indistinctly]
[Mark McKinney] It was brilliant.
If I ever had to think my way on stage,
I never would have been able to do it.
It had to be accidental and with little time for consideration.
[imitating foreign language]
[Bruce McCulloch] I went to Mount Royal College.
I was in the midst of doing business
and I walked into Theatersports
and it felt like I was coming out of the closet.
Like, this is what it's like to find religion.
[screams]
I just saw these people on stage making shit up,
and I thought, "Oh, fuck, I want to do that."
Well, it all happened very fast once I got to Loose Moose.
I think within probably two months, I met Mark.
[Mark McKinney] I remember vividly,
one of Bruce’s first scenes was painting
the stage with his head.
[Bruce McCulloch] I remember he was doing some scene
where he needed a piano
and he was taking so long to rehearse.
And I kind of said,
"How fucking long are you going to need to rehearse?"
And that's sort of my first memory
of our complicated, beautiful friendship.
[humming]
[imitating foreign language]
I met Kevin, the very first Second City improv workshop
I went to at the Old Fire hall.
We were randomly paired up for an exercise.
We did the mirror exercise where
we mirror each other's movements.
We started sort of doing it funny
and sort of comically.
We had chemistry right away, and like, getting comedy chemistry
is sort of like falling in love with someone.
He was like my first girlfriend.
And it really was love at first sight because we were like,
before we knew anything about each other,
we were able to make each other laugh
and were able to pick up on each other's rhythms immediately.
And that's never changed.
It's still like the most integrated I feel
with another comedian.
[Kevin McDonald] When the class was over, I went to Dave.
I didn't know his name
and I asked him to join my troupe
and I didn't have a troupe.
And Dave said yes right away. "Yeah, yeah, sounds like fun."
And then that's how The Kids in the Hall started.
[gibberish]
[Kevin McDonald] We did Theatersports in Toronto for a year or so.
We were good, but we were learning at the same time.
So we were "rough" good,
and we'd heard about this Theatersports troupe in Calgary
called "The Audience."
So we'd heard about them. They'd heard about us.
[Dave Foley] Bruce came to Toronto first
and he seemed like an odd little fellow,
and I said, "What's with that guy?"
Here he comes.
Rip!
And then I saw him do comedy and realized he was hilarious.
My heart goes,
His heart goes.
Dave and I were in a line up to watch the Second City improv.
Then Mark was there and we met him and he was like
a normal looking guy with glasses.
And I'd heard that he was a genius.
And I remember saying to Dave, "He's not funny."
Yeah, he delights in telling me this.
The first time he met me, he thought, "that guy’s not funny."
What is this strange bizarre instrument
that you bring here?
What is that here?
It must be a sign from the gods
that they wish us to evolve!
[Kevin McDonald] And then we saw them perform in Theatersports,
and he was brilliant.
And after that first show of seeing each other perform,
we sort of said, "Hey, let's just do stuff together."
We worked as two separate troupes on the same bill a lot.
And we kept hitting our heads and blackouts
so we formed one troupe.
And I like to say we flipped a coin,
because "The Audience" was my title.
Thank God I didn’t win that fight.
[Kevin McDonald] We agreed on the name Kids in the Hall.
I remember Bruce saying,
"Okay, but just for now, because I hate that fucking name."
The Kids in the Hall.
What the fuck does that mean, you know?
Gwar, that's a name.
A producer hired the original Kids in the Hall
to do a show, and we had a different name.
Then he told us the story of the Jack Benny show,
that there would be kids who would hang around in the halls
trying to sell jokes
to Jack on his way in and out of the studio,
and they were referred to as "the kids in the hall."
[Bruce McCulloch] And I just looked up at one point and it was us four.
And then Scott... came.
See how I acted that out, Scott coming?
[Scott Thompson] My family were funny.
Every dinner was basically, what happened that day,
who did you see that was an idiot?
Let's make fun of them.
Everything was about making people laugh.
But when I was at York University,
I had no intentions of being a comedian.
I was in theater. I was in acting.
I wanted to be a movie star.
I wanted to be James Dean.
[interviewer] So when was your kind of,
"comedy is who I am" moment, then?
Well, it wasn't until...
it was meeting The Kids in the Hall.
Anyone seen my gold card?
♪ Cha cha cha cha ♪
[shouting]
[Scott Thompson] They were just goofing around and it seemed like so much fun,
and yet it was also acting.
[Bruce McCulloch] I did this really terrible scene
about a murder mystery, and there was jelly donuts.
Look under your seat. There's a donut for you.
I don't know. Can't even remember.
Kevin?
And that scene went horribly.
And then they started throwing them at us.
[Scott Thompson] I remember at Moose, like,
"What the fuck? Who's throwing donuts?"
And it was obviously me
because there's only about seven people in the audience.
This is typical Scott Thompson,
as he was throwing the donut yelling at us fuck off.
He said, "I'm going to join that troupe."
I just had to make them notice me.
Oh, that's crazy.
[Mark McKinney] I remember seeing an improv
at Theatersports.
And Scott was on stage.
I did this sketch, which was absolutely terrible.
It was about like, a mimed crap in a toilet.
Mimed reaching in and holding up the log going,
"He is my lover!"
And I laughed.
Maybe one other person across the crowd laughed,
and it was kind of like, I like that guy.
[shrieks]
[Bruce McCulloch] Scott brought our level up
because he would want to eat the stage.
Get away from me!
It's like a hedgehog. [imitates hedgehog noises]
And we had to eat the stage as well to compete with him.
[Dave Foley] It did feel like there was a missing piece
that suddenly wasn't missing,
and we weren't even entirely aware it was missing.
[Scott Thompson] One day they improvised a little song about me
being a member of The Kids in the Hall.
♪ And Scott's a Kid in the Hall ♪
and Scott started crying and smoking.
The moment they invited me in, I was never leaving.
No one was getting in after me.
I threw away the key then.
♪♪
[Bruce McCulloch] As a young man,
this place in Queen Street was the most important half-mile
in the world to me.
Just this fucking place, this Rivoli
and all the cool waitresses with their leather aprons.
[Kevin McDonald] Queen Street was like a magical place,
especially from the suburbs.
It was just a street where everyone wore black
and didn't smile.
That was where it was happening.
Whatever dream I had of what I was going to be,
it was going to happen there.
[Scott Thompson] Just a real melting pot of creativity.
It was about video, it was about dance,
it was about comedy.
There was always something going on
and the Rivoli was the center.
-Come, cameraperson. -Yeah.
I used to help set the lights and set the stage.
And Scott would spend... would grab all the space
to lay out his many, many costumes.
The stage consisted, if you're standing on stage
of this, there was a side stage there.
Like someone will say something here
and the lights will go down here,
and then the lights would come up here
and two or three of us would act out,
what was just set up over there.
[singing]
Whoa!
Look at her, ooh!
Excuse me, miss.
[Mark McKinney] I don't know how we survived because the first year
and a half of the Rivoli, it was like 17, 20 people,
maybe 35 on a good night.
There was no heat to it,
but we were liking each other a lot.
♪ 99 Bottles of beer on the wall ♪
♪ 99 bottles of beer ♪
♪ You take one down, You pass it around ♪
♪ 99... bottles of beer on the wall ♪
We did lots of shows for nobody
and kept doing them and kept doing them.
And I think I needed all of that repetition
and experimentation and failing so much
to find our lane.
An old friend drove by, so he would like to do an improv.
-Mike Myers! -Thank you!
[Mike Myers] I did a lot of improv with The Kids in the Hall
at the Rivoli, and it was very, very satisfying
to kill in front of a Queen Street crowd.
I always aspired to be in The Kids in the Hall,
that was my big thing.
They were like a band that only knew three chords,
but there were three great chords and had great energy.
Fucking asshole!
[Paul Bellini] The first time I saw The Kids in the Hall
was a revelation.
I'm sitting in the Rivoli with maybe 20 other people
and thinking, this is the greatest thing I've ever seen.
My sister's boyfriend had a video camera,
which I used to drag over to The Kids in the Hall shows.
Peter was very nice, wasn't he?
[Paul Bellini] So I videotaped a lot of the very early shows.
[shouts]
It was very much of a new approach to comedy,
somewhat grounded in a personal experience.
[Dave Foley onstage] Mom! We’re there!
[Kevin McDonald onstage] Mom, we’re there, open up the windows, we’re here!
Which I found fascinating because honestly,
nobody else was doing that.
♪ In the suburbs day melts into night ♪
♪ As we become our dads ♪
[Kevin McDonald] One of our first sketches that Bruce wrote
was a scene called The Suburbs.
What's the line from the song?
♪ I can see there's something of the suburbs ♪
I forget. You’ll research it, you'll find it.
♪ I want you to look into my eyes ♪
♪ And see the power of the suburbs ♪
♪♪
Four Kids in the Hall grew up in the suburbs.
The suburbs are uniform and boring.
I think the suburbs really wrecked havoc on our mind.
[Dave Foley onstage] Maybe the ’burb’s getting too tight around my neck,
maybe the suburbs is a noose choking me.
Mom!
Mark comes from a different kind of a world than we do.
[Mark McKinney] Coming from a family of diplomats,
fairly cultured community,
you know, first I thought my outsider status
was my own personal failings and then
gradually I started to follow it.
I was going to be the prime minister of this country,
but I was 20, there was acid going around.
I didn't study. I skipped classes.
I was in Calgary. I got into theater.
Excuse me, I have to go back.
[Bruce McCulloch] Calgary was a very homophobic oil town
where guys drove around in trucks
and chased me down the street.
I sought refuge first in sports
and then, of course, in rock music.
♪ Fire, fire, fire Fire on my brain ♪
Right when punk started,
I remember hearing "God save the Queen,"
the .45, and just it blowing my fucking mind.
It was like sex, anger.
Society doesn't have to be like this.
It was like a capsule of heroin right to my brain.
Does heroin come in capsules? I don't think so.
Bruce was so cool, it was intimidating.
Remember one of our first conversations,
I didn't know what to say.
So I said "what music do you like?"
And he said, "Lou Reed, The Birthday Party
and of course, Iggy."
But I was obsessed with music.
In a way that I'm not now.
I was obsessed with punk.
I was obsessed with rebelling.
You don’t have to to be into music to be punk.
[Scott Thompson] The Attitude.
- [Mark McKinney] I would say it's-- - It’s fucking attitude.
You don’t have to be into music to have punk attitude.
[Jennifer Whalen] Well, I remember hearing that they were like these
new hot guys on the scene, in that they were kind of
punk rock and it was like this new cool thing
that was unlike anything else that was happening.
Lately, at work,
there are a lot of guys bitchin’ about their job.
Not me, I like my job.
My job: I’m a faggot.
Back then, being gay was the ultimate act
of rebellion in a way.
There was something actually dangerous about putting
a gay subject on stage.
Yeah, cock sucking, man's job.
Oh, fuck me.
♪ Running faggot running free ♪
♪ See the faggot See the running faggot ♪
[Bruce McCulloch] I loved that Scott was gay
and I love that he brought that material to the show.
We used homosexuality as a weapon to bash squares.
It was my first knowledge of somebody being openly gay,
doing a character that was queer positive,
that was unashamed.
And so for my small suburban world, that was mind blowing.
[Scott Thompson] I knew within this group I could be myself.
Every moment of my life
as a young person was about concealment.
My father was violent.
I have a joke where I just go, he tried to beat it out of me,
but all it did was make me like it rough.
So...
I used to blame my dad for making me gay.
But if I was gay in a homo positive society,
it wouldn't be a big deal, right?
So I thought, Aha, I’ll blame society.
So I had my dad's chip
and I find I have myself another chip,
a hatred against society.
And they balanced each other out.
And now I move like a runway model.
They wanted to create comedy
that upset and pleased people at the same time,
pushing away from that middle class respectability,
especially for five young comedians
who basically are trying to
carve out careers doing everything
but what their parents did.
Happy birthday, son.
The cavalcade of bad parenting is spectacular.
I just can't drink like I used to when I was 40.
[Julie Klausner] Just the most misguided, miserable people,
but miserable in new
and original, exciting ways to be miserable.
[Kevin McDonald] My dad Hammie was a famous drunk.
He would do something horrifying,
like once he chased me around the table with a knife.
But I know it helped me be sillier.
As a defense system, I guess.
I've used many horrible things that he did
like, uh... That he did and said.
Daddy drank.
Son, how many girls called you today?
-Zero? -Right, right, right.
How many girls called you yesterday?
Zero? Yeah.
Well, you know what they say, son.
Zero plus zero equals fag.
My dad said that.
It's pretty common that if you're
the child of an alcoholic, you learn to be very observant.
Just as a self-preservation tactic,
you have to be very aware
of other people's emotional states,
which I think lends well to being a comedian.
[Scott Thompson] We were all very much
trying to prove to our dads maybe that we were men.
By dressing up as women.
You know, I bet it came as a bit of a shock to find
you had me as a new mom, huh?
Dave was the first one that I saw playing a woman.
I remember that and he had a a sweater over his shoulder.
And that's when I went, "Oh, that was pretty cool."
And that's how they played women.
And then we had a sweater that everybody would share.
Well, this is my door here.
Thank you for the lovely evening.
[Dave Foley] We played all the women just with
posture and our voices.
We've just changed the way we stood and moved and talked.
The audience would suspend disbelief
and they would accept us as women
when we were playing the female roles.
Hello?
-Tiffany? -Tabitha?
-What are you doing? -What are you doing?
-Well, I was just calling you. -I was just calling you.
-But it didn’t ring! -It didn’t ring here either!
Oh my God! [screaming]
The evolution was slow, and it's like, oh, I guess
I'm playing a woman too,
and then we just started playing women
and I was like, I don't know if I'm in...
Am I in drag?
I think I'm playing a woman.
You see, my watch has stopped.
It's very important that I make this meeting.
So if you could just...
I'm sorry, I'm seeing someone.
My mom definitely was horrified
when I told her that my character, Nina,
was slightly based on her.
-Yeah, hi, I'm Nina. -Hello, I'm Danny.
-How are you? -Fine. Fine.
Hi, hello, everyone.
She was like, "What? That awful woman?"
[director] 919, take three.
Ah!
They just played women like they were characters.
It was believable. It was real. It was grounded.
It doesn't feel like,
"We're going to do this thing where we put on wigs and
talk about periods."
I have a good attitude toward menstruation.
[Bruce McCulloch] And of course, it was to make these women
have important voices.
The outsiders and feminists.
And like, that's what Kids in the Hall -
that's our people.
[applause]
Thank you, our next show at the Rivoli will
be in two weeks time.
We're doing a three day run on
Thursday, Friday, Saturday, at the end of February.
For those of you who are sick to death of our old material
we’ll be doing pretty well all new stuff.
So come on down.
[Bruce McCulloch] For sure, for a while, it really didn't work,
and I think we couldn't look each other in the eyes
and go, "Is this working? What's our plan?"
It wasn't all not working.
But of course, when you're young and one person says,
"Hey, you guys are kind of brilliant,"
you can live on that in lieu of food for two weeks.
And every now and again, a sketch would hit.
I’m crushing your head.
The heads are being crushed!
Die, die!
[Mark McKinney] When we picked the best sketches,
the ones that had been hitting all along
and put them together in a show and put them in the right order,
it was a really good show and it was definitely us.
It was like a zoom snap into focus what we were about.
[Dave Foley] The show suddenly really caught on.
We went from playing to about five to ten people a night
to suddenly having the Rivoli with like
400 people packed into it.
[Mike Myers] All of the 10,000 hours
on stage had paid off.
I saw one of their shows at the Rivoli.
I was like, "Oh my God."
And it's almost kind of like the difference between
early Sex Pistols and late Clash.
[Bruce McCulloch] I remember coming one day
and there was people lined up and it's like,
"Oh, is there another show that's on before us?"
It's like, "No, they're lining up now
for your show that's in two and a half hours."
It's like, "Holy fuck."
[Kevin McDonald] For the next few months,
it was always sold out,
and we sort of became a thing,
a small, small cult thing within a cult world
called Queen Street.
It felt great. It felt like momentum,
that it was leading somewhere.
[Bruce McCulloch] We got an amazing review in the local paper.
I'm not even going to name it.
That's how cool I am.
There we were in the Globe and Mail, and there was this
kind of glorious review the review that you would want,
which just basically said, here come The Kids in the Hall.
That day, the SNL talent scouts were landing in Toronto
to do their traditional trip to go look at just the Second City.
But there we were on the front of the
Globe and Mail entertainment section.
And they were kind of, "Oh, we better go see them, too."
[phone rings]
[Bruce McCulloch] The phone rang and I picked up the phone
and it was this woman,
and she said, "Oh, I'm scouting talent
for, you know, Lorne Michaels.
We'd like to come see your show."
And I said, "Well, you can't because it's sold out."
And they said, "Well, no, this is from Saturday Night Live.
We're scouting for Saturday Night Live."
And I said, "Well, yeah, the shows...
"The run has sold out, so I'm sorry about that.
Maybe you can try to scalp tickets from somebody."
And then I hung up the phone
and the other four guys looked at me
and it's like, "What the fuck did you just do?"
And I said "I made a mistake, right?"
♪♪
[announcer] Terrific!
And now the stars of our show,
Hart Pomerantz and Lorne Michaels.
Good evening, I'm Lorne Michaels,
and at this point in the show,
we'd like to pause a moment
to examine a grave national crisis.
[Dave Foley] Everyone in the world
who ever worked with Lorne does a Lorne impression.
[imitating Lorne Michaels] The reason Chaplin was
a much bigger star than Buster Keaton...
[imitating Lorne Michaels] Uh, Bruce. do you know, Madonna?
[imitating Lorne Michaels] You doing anything this fall, Mark?
[imitating Lorne Michaels] You know the thing about Kevin
is he's there, but he's quiet, but he's loud, but he's there.
But he's quiet and he sits a lot.
I think when you're the boss, people make fun of the boss.
I thought they were fresh.
It was original and I thought they were funny,
and I thought I knew how to make it work.
[Cameraman] But I can be your video mirror.
It has got a mirror, fine.
[Jim Biederman] It's Lorne Michaels.
For a Canadian that's even bigger than
some shithead American because he really did good.
He went and he conquered America.
The Kids represented to him
another attempt at kind of Canadian greatness.
[Mark McKinney] There was an audition at the Rivoli,
of our best stuff, closed door, which I guess is the SNL way.
[Dave Foley] We put together twelve or fifteen sketches
for these comedy giants.
For the first time ever,
the competition got a little ugly during that week
because we were sort of all fighting to get our scenes in.
I remember the first time I saw them at the Rivoli,
it was just energy and had juice,
and you just could tell that
it was smart and nothing like what I'd been doing on SNL.
And I liked all that.
Hold me back.
[Kevin McDonald] And you couldn't tell if they were laughing
because people by themselves don't really laugh.
And after the show, Lorne said, "You guys are funny,
but what are we going to do with five of you?"
And then it became sort of the tensest...
The tensest?
The most tense time in our lives after they left.
What was going to happen?
Are they going to take us all?
Are they gonna take any of us? None of us?
[Kevin McDonald] And then a few weeks later, Bruce afterwards
says, "Guys, I gotta tell you something.
They want Mark and I to write for them,"
and that's how we found out.
[Mark McKinney] Saturday Night Live picked us as writers,
which is huge fucking news,
which must've been fucking hard for the other guys.
Yeah, yeah.
Great for them and great that The Kids in the Hall
did something, but horrible that it wasn't me.
So... sorry.
[Paul Bellini] It felt like maybe this was the end.
Bruce and Mark were off in New York doing this fantastic thing.
Poor Scott, Kevin and Dave left behind
with a bag full of old wigs.
We'd done a big last show before they left.
And that was a huge night.
And that was really packed.
And we, the Kids were all sort of crying on stage
and going "Well, we’re really excited for Mark and Bruce,
and I don't know what's going to happen
in the future with the troupe,
but thank you all for being here."
[interviewer] But you didn't get the job.
No, apparently there was a technical oversight of some clerk.
- [operator] Five seconds. - [director] Here it comes.
- [operator] Four, three, two... - [director] Take.
[Lorne Michaels] Mark and Bruce made perfect sense
to just give them that experience of
this is the way a show gets mounted.
[Mark McKinney] I literally went from working at the Second Cup,
and two weeks later I was showing Madonna my sketch.
[Bruce McCulloch] Saturday Night Live, I wasn't very good at it.
I'd always be fighting with them about,
like the weird ideas I wanted to do.
It was a big machine.
I guess I was overwhelmed.
It was all awful, torturous, agonizing, nerve wracking,
exhausting.
But it really wasn't fun.
[Scott Thompson] I remember going down to see them.
Bruce had gained a ton of weight and they looked terrible.
Both of them, they weren't happy.
[Bruce McCulloch] Through that process of sort of
failing at Saturday Night Live,
I realized how much I needed The Kids in the Hall.
[Mark McKinney] And then when we got back at Christmas,
it was like a reunion of hungry lovers.
You guys are the unsung heroes
that you came back, because usually
any other troupe would split up
and you guys kept coming back.
-Did you see the SNL that year? -Yeah.
There was real affection between the five of them,
and I thought, you have to keep this group together.
The beer’s as free as the coke.
Is this on? Am I on right now?
I've got to talk to the pilot.
Give it a rest. Give it a rest.
If it wasn't for the performance moxie
that Scott Thompson and I showed nightly,
underneath those hot lights,
this troupe would not be on this plane headed on this adventure.
No.
[Paul Bellini] It was in the fall of 1987,
and Lorne brought all five of them to New York.
The idea was that they would write and perform material
working towards a one hour pilot.
[Kevin McDonald] New York!
This is West 23rd.
YMCA that Paul went to.
[Scott Thompson] Lorne paid us in cash like a father.
Oh, you did the lawn and you've got your paper route
and you took the garbage out. Here's five bucks.
We're really young. It's like the ’80s.
The late ’80s in New York.
Got a big night ahead of us.
The ecstasy is kicking in.
♪♪
[Dave Foley] We were young men who had been given the keys to the kingdom.
Let's say some of us were burning the candle at both ends.
I'd like to introduce you to some New York hot dogs.
Take my goddamn cock!
[clamoring]
[Paul Belleni] They were just young and loose
and wanted to do a million things.
Do you know where your children are?
[Kevin McDonald] During the days we concentrated
on writing the pilot.
That was what we were there for.
The shows were to keep us from not going rusty
and Lorne said to toughen us up for the American audiences.
Dirty girl, dirty girl!
[Paul Bellini] There was a sense of they have to develop
their best pieces, get them ready for television.
[singing]
[Scott Thompson] Lorne would just give us
our marching orders every week.
He’d say, "I want you to open for this person, this person,
this person, you're going to do these shows
and then we'll see what you do next week."
[Lorne Michaels] I just needed them to have
a level of seasoning that they weren't going to get
if they just stayed at the Rivoli.
[singing]
[Lewis Black] If you look at those five guys,
that's a group of odd fuck balls.
You know, I mean, really, talk about weird.
I met The Kids in the Hall while running a room called
the Westbank Cafe Downstairs Theater Bar, about 100 seats.
Nice little small stage,
perfect kind of a setup to work on projects.
[Bruce McCulloch] Lewis was one of our first fans,
and I think he kind of said, like,
"Come on, they're good," you know, give us some support.
I was encouraging because I really did think...
You know, they were just fucking funny.
If I slept with you, it would only be out of pity,
Hey, I'm the king of the mercy fuck.
The great thing about comedy, when comedy is really good
is it brings another point of view,
and they established another point of view.
We'll wash him in wine and make him all clean.
And into Sam Zittle’s crucifixion machine.
[screaming]
They're going back to Toronto to do the pilot,
and I said, "I think you're close,
but think you can do it better."
You know, they say lightning doesn’t strike twice,
but I found it can strike nineteen times.
It was hot and cold, an audience would like us,
an audience wouldn’t like us.
An audience would like us, an audience wouldn’t like us.
[Bruce McCulloch] It was sort of like Toronto, where we kind of kept at it,
kept at it, and then something sort of sparked.
[applause]
But we were spending all our money for the pilot
on the four apartments we were in,
and we felt like it might not happen, after all.
[announcer] This is CBC.
[club host] My manservant here on Earth at the CBC.
Ivan Fecan, director of programming.
[Bruce McCulloch] I was friendly with Ivan Fecan,
and I remember phoning him and he took my call
and I said, "Why don't you invest in the Kids in the Hall show?"
[Ivan Fecan] I always wanted to do something with the Kids.
They were brash, they were fresh,
and Lorne and I had talked about,
wouldn't it be great to do a show?
A lot of the CBC shows at that time were skewing old,
and I kind of wanted something for people under 40.
Without further ado, The Kids in the Hall.
[applause]
[Ivan Fecan] It was a pilot for a series.
It was billed as a special at the time,
but to us it was a pilot.
Our hope was that it would do well enough for a series.
[Paul Bellini] The shooting was in the CBC studios
and key guys from SNL came up from New York
to help build the sets and light it.
[Ivan Fecan] At that time, the pickup between pilot and series
is like one in ten.
There was a lot riding on it for them.
[Kevin McDonald] The stakes were like incredible.
It was like all or nothing.
I remember being really nervous.
The pilot has to become a show or I'm a movie usher.
[Mark McKinney] I was not feeling good
during any of this, even though I think we knew the material.
It was like, it was sweaty, like it had to work.
It had to work.
[Lorne Michaels] What they were about to go through
was sort of professional show business,
and they'd never been in front of television cameras,
which was a whole other set of skills.
[Bruce McCulloch] We did two tapings with two audiences,
and the first taping, we were scared.
I remember peeing and thinking,
have my balls retreated back into my body?
[Kevin McDonald] Even though we'd been rehearsing
all week with cameras,
I remember when it started I, should I turn to the audience,
or by the camera?
But the first show, nobody laughed.
It was a shit show.
And it was kind of like the only time Lorne ever yelled at us.
And he sort of fuckin’ told us to get it together.
[Kevin McDonald] He said something like,
"It's gotta be nineteen times better."
What? Is that mathematically possible?
19 times better?
You know, for us to have a chance of selling it.
I could have told them that it was perfect.
I would have been lying.
And the essence of show business
is you have to get off the stage to make another entrance.
[Scott Thompson] The message was, "You let me down.
And this is your big chance."
[Dave Foley] That kind of got our punk rock blood flowing.
So I guess some of us got angry at Lorne for saying it.
I know I got angry with us
for allowing ourselves to be so lame.
So we put on some loud punk rock music
and we just started smashing up
all the furniture in the dressing room.
I didn't trash the dressing room, I’m a diplomat’s child.
We don't trash fucking dressing rooms.
Kevin, did you trash your dressing room?
No.
For good luck, Scott and I peed in the sink.
[Scott Thompson] And so when we came out of that room,
we proceeded to just give the performance of a lifetime.
Hey, you millionaires, get out of that garbage.
-I like to meet a girl... -Whoa!
A woman...
Here, let me help you with your sweater clip.
Oops, the wind.
[sobbing]
Second show really felt like a Rivoli show.
[Paul Bellini] It was fantastic.
Characters that I had seen for four years on the Rivoli stage
were now fully costumed and on sets, and they were real.
They became alive.
Hey, I'm the king of the mercy fuck.
Easy to beat up. Hard to kill.
To Reg.
[Mike Myers] When I saw their pilot,
I went into an existential depression
because I realized that they had done
everything that I ever wanted to do. It was... to this day,
I think it's a near perfect comedy pilot.
He was just so depressed after watching it
because he said, "Oh, fuck you guys did it.
You guys did what everybody wants to do, fuck."
And he was just really mad.
See that? Your head's flat,
Is your mother still dressing you?
She should have just crushed your head.
Goodnight.
[phone rings]
[Kevin McDonald] We were in the middle of rehearsals
when someone from CBC came and said,
"Mark, some distinguished sounding gentleman
wants to speak to you."
And we thought, "Oh, is it Lorne?"
Lorne always talked to Mark because Mark
wasn't from the suburbs because he's a diplomat son.
I took the call and it was Lorne,
[imitating Lorne] "Congratulations, they want twenty-two."
And we were like, what?
It was twenty. It was twenty episodes. Yeah.
And he's "Well did we get it? Did we get it?"
He was just shell shocked, he said, "Wait till you hear."
He kept saying that for... it seemed like five minutes,
it was probably 30 seconds. "Wait till you hear.
Wait till you hear."
What is it?
"We got a show." Oh, good.
Oh, good, thank God... How many, ten episodes?
"No." Twelve episodes?
"Twenty episodes a season."
What?
Did you say yes?
Who is this? Who am I talking to?
Home Box Office?
[Ivan Fecan] HBO put in the cash.
Oh boys.
[Ivan Fecan] We put in the crews, the facilities.
We were able to cobble together enough to do a show.
-We're on. -Excellent news, prick.
-Well done, prick. -Champagne.
We’re sure to be accepted by high society.
[chattering]
[Kevin McDonald] Before this show, what do I feel?
I feel up, I feel down,
I feel asleep, I feel more excited
than I've ever been. I feel traumatic.
I feel...
[Mark McKinney] We did not know TV,
so the first season is full of sketches
that were done at length without much editing.
There were great hits at the Rivoli at 11:39 at night.
[Paul Belllini] On stage, you just do things, right?
You make your entrance, blah blah blah.
Television is a beast.
I remember at the taping of Dr. Seuss Bible.
Scott had to do that crucifixion pose for so long.
And of course, your arms just atrophy.
And he was literally in agony.
Having to do those long takes.
Hurry up, just do it, come on, hurry.
My arms are going to literally fall off.
Let's go.
-Ready, and? -Quiet please.
Let’s go!
You walk towards camera.
Rolling. Action, Bruce.
[Dave Foley] The crew were like old crusty CBC lifers.
They developed crushes on different characters.
I had crew guys come up to me, going,
"So Dave, are you going to be the redhead tonight?"
When will this nightmare end?
"No, I’m not doing the redhead tonight."
"Oh, fuck! Okay."
Anybody that says they didn't get a little crush on Dave
when he was a certain female characters is just lying.
This came.
I was very obsessed and confused by Dave in drag
and found him very sexy.
Dave was hot!
What are you gonna say? He was hot.
There's no debating it.
In drag I was the sexiest.
Bruce McCullough. Ladies and gentlemen.
It was the most fun to do live tapings
and have people come again
like they lined up at the Rivoli.
[Jennifer Whalen] My friend Sue had cool older sisters
and her cool older sister Julie,
knew somebody who worked on the crew
and that person was friends with Bruce,
and that's how we got hooked up for tickets.
So we went to the CBC studio.
["Kids in the Hall" theme plays]
And the cameras come in.
And there's this platform high up to our left,
and I was like, what's that for?
And then the show starts and Shadowy Men
are playing on the platform, so they're playing live.
♪♪
[Don Pyle] The song "Having an average weekend"
was on our first seven inch single.
That sort of like became
the theme song, the thing that they opened
all their shows with.
The Shadowy Men are what made us cool if we're at all cool,
and they would play and it rocked hard.
[Don Pyle] We played every single taping of every episode.
You can just go boom, one note
and it's like pushing a button.
People know it.
It's a thrill seeing people kind of get all excited about it.
[Kevin McDonald] Sometimes Dave and I in between scenes
would like, we’d dance in front of the audience,
and the audience would love that.
[Dave Foley] Our hair, makeup, and wardrobe team would be like a pit crew
and swap you from one to the other in about fifteen minutes.
And then you'd be back out on the floor
dancing to the Shadowy Men again.
I would like to thank you very much for coming.
-Thank you very much. -Thank you very much.
We'd like to thank The Shadowy Men!
[cheering]
[Jennifer Whalen] When it finished, we were just like beyond excited
and we were like, we got to do this every taping,
we got to come back,
we've got to bring all of our friends.
And then it was the hottest show in town and there was no way.
♪♪
Hey, I'm on TV, and so are The Kids in the Hall.
[Michael Musto] All of a sudden they were everywhere
and they were groundbreaking.
They were kind of multi-sexual and multi-gender.
I don't know what the fuck they were.
[Jay Baruchel] These guys were fucking all world.
The coolest motherfuckers on TV
and they were ours.
Americans know as much about Canada
as straight people do about gays.
[Mike Myers] I saw them evolve to becoming unbelievable professionals.
They became their own entity and I was blown away.
I immediately knew this was good.
The range, the insanity.
-We would like two shitty soups -Two shitty soups.
[gagging]
[shouts]
[Kevin McDonald] Gentlemen, gentlemen, gentlemen.
Shame, gentlemen, this is a business meeting.
Grew up with Python, watched SNL in junior high.
After you get a training bra,
you graduate to The Kids in the Hall.
Skora!
[shouts]
Look skyward, moron.
[Eric McCormack] I was so amazed by how young and fresh faced
everybody was. Nobody looked dangerous,
but clearly there was an intellect there.
All five of the Kids seemed so confident as actors
in their ability to... to morph into these various characters.
Are you crying?
No, I'm not crying.
I'm just thinking about Tony.
[Reggie Watts] It just felt like it was really them.
They're playful.
They kind of don't give a fuck.
You felt the enjoyment of them being free.
Saturday Night Live always covers
what's ripped from the headlines.
Kids in the Hall were never about that.
They weren't so much riffing on pop culture.
The Kids examined everyday Americana.
It's not like a political sketch
or about some protest or something.
It's about people and like, their faces.
[Julie Klausner] They were five sexy boys romping around
like the goddamn Beatles in "Hard Day's Night".
They were fucking adorable.
[interviewer] Has the show's success
changed their lives that much?
Well, we have a bit more money now.
Kids in the Hall, I just took to immediately,
and I remember crashing a party they were at.
Oh my God. Oh my God, it's so amazing.
[shrieking]
Show business is fun. Like, real show business.
American show business is fun.
I loved it.
[screaming]
I used to like to go to bars and just write my ideas,
and when the show came on the air, I couldn't do that anymore.
They'd go, "Hey Bruce!"
Scott’s boyfriend.
[Kevin McDonald] I had a girlfriend and we were like making out,
and then TV was on and I saw
a Kids in the Hall scene where I was a woman.
It was kinda weird.
What do people say about our show?
They thought it was daring.
Original.
I love it. All my friends love it.
[interviewer] Do they like it on HBO?
Yeah, I think. HBO are really happy.
Yeah.
-The reviews are really good. -The fans seem happy.
Fans. It's just barely plural, though.
We were rehearsing, someone from CBC came and said,
"Mark, a distinguished sounding gentleman
wants to speak to you."
Hello?
Yes, I took that call, too.
So yeah, we got canceled.
[Kevin McDonald] Then Mark came and told us.
It was sort of a shock.
[Scott Thompson] It felt like it was over.
[Lorne Michaels] I didn't think of it as in any way
a judgment on whether the show was good or bad.
It was purely economics of
what HBO was going through at the time.
The great part about troupes is there is strength in unity.
You go get a drink afterwards,
you sit and talk and you have an ally.
[Dave Foley] We all went out to this sort of dive bar,
sat, and made each other laugh for about two hours,
getting drunk and just mocking our own fate.
There was a recognition that we'd all worked our asses off,
and now we're canceled.
And what now?
[Bruce McCulloch] And of course, arrogantly, I thought, you can't stop us.
I don't know what's going to happen, but you can't stop us.
♪♪