So I watch a celebrity game show type thing in the UK called Taskmaster, and this season a Canadian comedian called Mae Martin is one of the contestants. I became instantly mildly fixated with them, and watched everything they’d ever done, including a sharp and dark and funny drama on Netflix called Feel Good (2020-21), their stand up set, and a sort of comedian game of chicken called Last One Laughing (Canada) on Prime, which also starred Dave Foley, who I knew from NewsRadio (1995-1999) the first time around and random guest appearances on various shows since. Foley, it turns out, was a founding member of Canadian comedy troupe The Kids in the Hall (sketch comedy TV show 1988-1995), along with Mark McKinney, who it turns out is Glenn (a bemused, often loveable, frequently unlikeable character) on Superstore (2015-21), which I love, and who also made Slings and Arrows (2003-2006) which I haven’t seen for twenty years but would love to watch again but isn’t streaming anywhere in the UK, and troupe member Bruce McCulloch directed some episodes of Schitt’s Creek (2015-20) which I also love.
Anyway, I watched all the Kids in the Hall episodes available on Prime in about ten days (I have zero social life and a lot of stress), and then I bought this book.
There are 109 episodes in the original run of Kids in the Hall, which first came out when I was 6. A lot of the commentary I’ve found on Pajiba and elsewhere is infused with deep nostalgia, which is interesting to navigate as a first-time viewer in this moment in time. There were a lot of moments on the show that made me laugh, there were moments of breath-taking audacity, and moments of breath-taking sweetness and humanity. One of the things that people have talked about is the fact that even though all of the troupe play women characters, neither the drag itself nor caricaturing women is the point of the joke; there’s a sense of naturalism that would make for a great essay on gender performativity. All of the troupe play gay characters in various sketches–and the gayness itself isn’t really the joke, which seems rather to be finding humour in the specificities and quirks of late 1980s-early 1990s gay culture, and exaggerating and satirising heteronormative views of gay stereotypes. The f***** word is used a lot but in a sort of ‘inside baseball’ way–Scott Thompson of the troupe is gay and was out at the time; his overtly and exuberantly sexual character Buddy Cole and the other casually sexy gay characters in the show are fairly and perhaps necessarily transgressive several years into the AIDS epidemic. I can see how a reading of reclaiming and subversion and celebration of queerness is made possible there–though not being a queer person of that generation I’m not sure I’m qualified to comment further, especially with my current limited knowledge–one reason I bought the book is that I was interested in understanding more about all of this.
Overall, as an amateur comedy scholar, and comedy enthusiast, Kids in the Hall is hugely intriguing to me–the Canadianness (as opposed to my usual fare of UK and US comedy), the metaness, the meatiness, the Monty Python inheritance writ large but made new, the vast range in register from broad to baroque–but also the process of making it. I picked this book up because I wanted to know more about how it got made then, why it got made then, and the shifts in thinking from “of its time” which was before my time to now which is our time (if that makes any sense–I guess I mean the politics (in a wide sense) of its reception when it was made and the politics around its revival, especially when there’s so much discourse around comedy and voice).
None of these hows and whys are really fully unpacked in the book. It’s descriptive rather than analytical–perhaps to be expected in an authorised biography–there’s a lot of “this happened with these people and then this happened thanks to the SNL guy and funding from this place and then this happened”. I would have liked a more thoughtful examination of some of the more controversial and problematic aspects of the show; a few characters and sketches are definitely “of their time” –there are a couple of sketches that imply sexual assault, for instance, which strike a jarring note amid the fairly chill and progressive vibes of the show, and there are a couple of characters in a few sketches who wear blackface. In the later seasons there are a few sketches where being offensive to be subversive veers, to me, towards being offensive to be offensive. It’s easy to shrug things like that off as “of their time” (which is an over-simplification, which is why it’s easy), but in our time, that should perhaps be a starting point rather than an end point to further consideration, and the almost complete omission is troubling. I absolutely admit that I don’t know the best way to approach this in a book like this, or the best way to talk about it here, and I’m not sure I’m the right person, as a white woman, to determine the ideal depth for that further consideration–recommendations for further reading welcome.
Indeed, I would have liked more critical examination and contextualisation overall. The quotes from Seth Meyers and Judd Apatow and other comedy people of their generation are fairly generically nostalgic. There’s some discussion of the show’s legacy among comedians and on comedy shows, but most of the examples are from the early 2000s–I’d like to know more about what contemporary comedians (like Mae Martin) think about it.There’s some interesting stuff about the troupe’s early lives and family backgrounds, which certainly explains some of the darkness of the show, but overall the quotes from the cast are expository rather than hugely illuminating about the comedic process or sensibility or their relationships with each other. There are intriguing hints about tensions within the troupe, but these tend to be skated over, the emphasis on warm resolution and final product. If you’re a long-time or original fan, I’m sure there’s lots of trivia and moments of recognition in the book that you’ll enjoy–I think overall it’s not necessarily a bad book, just the wrong book for what I was looking for.”