Look out for the chicken lady: Kids in the Hall bring reunion tour back to Canada
WINNIPEG — Men dressed as women. Jokes that skewer religion. A sex-crazed chicken lady.
About 1,600 Kids in the Hall fans roared their approval at the Burton Cummings Theatre on Sunday night as the envelope-pushing comedy troupe made the first Canadian stop on their reunion tour.
Scott Thompson, reprising the flamboyant Buddy Cole character he made famous on the Kids' television series, got some of the biggest laughs of the night when he tried to make the case that Jesus was gay.
"He's a 33-year-old unmarried man who wanders the desert with 12 other bachelors. They're drinking a lot of wine and scrubbing each other's feet," Thompson said.
It's the type of joke to be expected from a troupe that once re-enacted Christ's crucifixion to a Dr. Seuss-style rhyming narrative.
At their worst, the Kids rely on shock value for laughs. One bit on the current tour involves what may be politely described as an unnatural relationship between men and automobiles. The gag never moves beyond gross-out visuals.
But at their best, the Kids display the absurd, Monty Python-esque humour that first brought them to attention two decades ago. In one new sketch, Kevin McDonald and Dave Foley fight over an imaginary girlfriend, and the arguments become more preposterous with each breath.
"Every time I imagine she's not with me, I can't stop thinking about her," McDonald said.
"We should just let her decide," suggested Foley.
The Kids also include Mark McKinney, whose characters include a sex-crazed woman who walks and clucks like a chicken, and Bruce McCulloch, whose repertoire includes a young boy who chats so much, he scares away Jehovah's Witnesses.
The Kids scored a big hit with their TV show that ran on the CBC from 1989 to 1995 and continues to air in reruns. Their first reunion tour ended in 2002.
They had always planned to reunite again, and the recent writers' strike in Hollywood gave them some free time by putting some of their current projects on hiatus.
Although fans of the show still refer to their favourite sketches, the Kids were determined to avoid becoming a simple nostalgia act by writing new material for the tour.
"We did a previous one-off in San Francisco where we had more old material, and then we went 'nah, we don't like it'," McCulloch told The Canadian Press before the show.
The result is that characters such as McCulloch's Kathie, a naive, gossipy receptionist, now talks about losing weight by doing crystal meth - a modern drug the 1980s Kathie would not have known about.
The Kids are no longer kids, of course. They're all in their 40s, with grown-up responsibilities, so the new tour is largely devoid of offstage mayhem.
"You know, I have kids now, and it's not like I can just go and get drunk in Austin for four nights in the same way as I could probably a few years ago," McCulloch said.
"It's just like 'oh, I have to have a hotel with a treadmill."'
"But we're loving being around each other because it may not happen again."
Having already played several American cities, the Kids in the Hall bring their show to Coquitlam, B.C., Calgary and Edmonton next month, and have two dates scheduled for Toronto in June.
