Ashley Spurgeon is a lifelong TV fan — nay, expert — and with her recurring television and pop-culture column "And Another Thing," she'll tell you what to watch, what to skip, and what's worth thinking more about.
Thirty Helens Agree: You can’t judge a book by its cover. But you can, in many cases, learn a lot about a person based on their favorite sketch comedy show. Or at least make a few educated guesses. Do you love Monty Python? You’re probably older, probably British or an Anglophile, and probably a dork. Haven’t missed SNL in years? You’re very up-to-date on American pop culture, broadly familiar with contemporary political figures, probably under 40. Also: a dork. (All sketch-comedy fans are dorks; I don’t make the rules.) Key & Peele, Kroll Show, Chappelle’s Show, Portlandia: I could play this imaginary, subjective game all day.
My personal favorite? Kids in the Hall, and I don’t have to think about it. The Canadian sketch troupe’s (Dave Foley, Kevin McDonald, Bruce McCulloch, Mark McKinney and Scott Thompson) series aired from 1988 to 1994, and I first encountered it at the perfect time: early adolescence. Really, that’s the ideal age (for dorks) to “get into” any sort of comedy — your developing brain is still sweetly dumb enough to find ecstasy in the most puerile jokes (all the greats have poo-poo, pee-pee or vomit sketches), and the early-20-somethings who actually make the comedy are, from a junior-high perspective, worldly (though puckish) adult truth-tellers.
I loved SNL, but Kids in the Hall hit just right. I found it in reruns in the late ’90s, and KITH did almost everything right as far as longevity is concerned; I just rewatched the first four seasons (to whomever I lent Season 5, please just put it in my mailbox), and it holds up. One important reason why: It’s barely politically or pop-culturally topical. I think Elizabeth II might be the only real-world political figure parodied, and there is maybe one reference to Pierre Trudeau. Sometimes Madonna is referenced, and it spoils the 1990 Harrison Ford film Presumed Innocent. (His wife killed her!) It’s kind of Canadian, I guess? The phrase “The Ontario College of Art” is a punch line to quite a percentage of the live audience here — that joke is not for me. There are probably very specific observations on Quebec that elude me.
But with the exception of a handful of sketches where they play across race (big-time 2020 yikes), culturally, Kids in the Hall was pretty far ahead of its time. The most frequent academic/comedic kudos given to the show are typically in praise of how it deals with sexuality and gender. Thompson’s Buddy Cole is one of the most popular and endearing recurring characters from the series (here’s my favorite quote). There's also the fact that all five men created various female characters of different ages, backgrounds and perspectives, and not once was the joke, “This man is dressed like a woman!” or “Titties!”
But on this rewatch, it seemed to me that both of those aspects work so well because clear-eyed disenchantment (and sometimes disgust!) with current conceptions of masculinity kind of undergirds the entire enterprise. In fact, you can’t be on board with masculinity as practiced in the White West and be that queer and perceive women as, you know, independent-thinking human characters capable of acting and reacting to situations in absurdist and comedic ways. The Colin Josts of the world just do not have a Chicken Lady in them, and I think that’s a shame. Or maybe, even sadder, they do have a Chicken Lady deep down inside, and the chains of patriarchy bind her — I suppose these are the kind of profound psychological questions only comedy can answer. Do many male comics these days have a good attitude towards menstruation? If you are the female partner of one, please let us know in the comments. And I haven’t gotten there yet, but I heard menopause is like taking ecstasy and a rocket-ship ride, all rolled up into one.
The average Kids in the Hall fan, by and large, very likely thinks masculinity is dumb. But that’s a pretty deep undercurrent, and you should probably be pretty stoned and watching everything for the 15th time before you try to make these kinds of professional assessments. The most obvious reason why the show holds up is because it’s weird and funny. I have many, many favorite sketches that have nothing to do with anything, and they are very, very hard to find online. Our brave new world of instant access to everything does not include dozens and dozens of hours of Kids in the Hall, at least outside of Canada. Sketches come and go from YouTube all the time: Please take the time to enjoy “Bass Player,” “Three for the Moon,” and “Terriers” while you have the chance. If you thought the film Best in Show has the greatest terrier-themed parody song of the '90s, you’d be wrong — Best in Show came out in 2000.
The complete series on DVD is floating around out there for the low low price of around $30, which is a lot less than I paid for each individual season back 15 years ago. Please return Season 5.
