Kids in the Hall

Mark McKinney and Scott Thompson talk the sixth season of the sketch series starring the freewheeling Canadian comedy geniuses.

Why did it take more than a quarter-century to get a sixth season of The Kids in the Hall? “We love each other as comedians and artists, but also as friends. But as Thompson, Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald and Mark McKinney took their classic material on the road, they began writing new sketches.

Amazon's The Kids in the Hall (2022) season 1 will be released on the streaming service on May 13, 2022. Friday the 13th sees the release of the comedy.

There is a lot to learn and be inspired by from this series. Friday the 13th sees the release of the comedy show The Kids in the Hall (2022) on Amazon Prime. For those of you who are new to this and weren’t lucky enough to grow up with it, The Kids in the Hall was a sketch comedy show that ran from 1989 to 1994. The subtle and not so subtle hints and digs at society are playfully imaginative and make you think whilst making you laugh. The chemistry between the characters is flawless and with their fearless wit, it takes skill to pull off this type of comedy as an actor. There are some sketches that are cringey and might miss the mark, but all comedy is subjective, and it will probably make someone out there laugh. Technically, this season could be classed as the 6th season of the show, just with an over twenty-year gap, which makes it even more impressive.

After 27 years, the sketch troupe returns with the original cast intact, accompanied by the poignant documentary history “Comedy Punks.”

Buddy Cole (Thompson) gives a young friend a tour of old and closed gay bars and bath houses, which spins off in a direction there is really no way to describe in a family newspaper, though as is generally the case with the series’ sexual material, it is not crude or gratuitous or there for an easy laugh, but essential to the concept or the characters. As they have since their Toronto stage days, the men sometimes play women, which is not the point or meant to be funny in itself, but merely a way to introduce female characters into their comedy. There is nothing the aging comic can do, of course, but continue to try to be smart and good; it helps to be a little outside the norm to begin with, to be willing to leave people a little disturbed, to privilege satisfaction over success. Rhythms change; what was once surprising can become stock; you won’t get anywhere in that business reminding people of Bob Newhart, or Steve or Demetri Martin. Young fans who signed on for “Schitt’s Creek” might not all respond to what Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara (who makes a cameo as a “friend of Kids in the Hall” in the new series) did on “SCTV,” if they even bother to look. (It’s “ Spinal Tap,” among other things.) There are scruffy beginnings, playing to audiences that number in the low dozens; the overnight success that takes years to build; the ecstasy of fame; the sputtering of the old spark as individual ambitions and opportunities arise; dissension, alienation; and revived interest leading to reunion. Sometimes it’s a matter of personal history and creative connection and knowing how it all works — or, like muscle memory, not having to know how it works — and because there is a special joy in getting the band together.

There are very few rules to Kids in the Hall, but one of them is a hostility to over self-analysis”

If we ran into a beat in a sketch that wasn’t working—we were all there and we could literally rearrange the furniture if we needed to make something work. There are very few rules to Kids in the Hall, but one of them is a hostility to over self-analysis. The new intro is one of my favorite pieces that shows how we connect ourselves back to the original. But I do know that I still have ideas and the Amazon show is an experiment of what happens when you bring back comedians. A lot of the strongest comedy voices are in narrative animation. We’ve done a number of tours that were a lot of fun, but we got bored and decided we wanted to write new material. One of the reasons we went for a revival was the combination of flavours from a Bruce sketch, Scott sketch, David sketch, Kevin sketch and a me sketch that gets packed into a half hour, and gives it its essential brio. I was lucky enough to be the first person to peel off my clothes in the troupe. Well, you’d have to ask one of the other guys. Now, the Kids are at it again with a fresh Prime Video season of twisted absurdist situations, self-deprecating jokes and deranged characters that will renew your faith in reboots. Their antics caught the attention of Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels who went on to produce the beloved TV show The Kids in the Hall—running on cable and network TV until 1995. In the mid-eighties, five comics banded together on the stages of Toronto’s clubs to deliver some of the most unhinged sketches the public had seen at the time.

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