Kids In The Hall - Pilot Episode

Bruce McCulloch - not merely naked.

So we begin.

Where I personally begin with The Kids In the Hall is a hazy memory of my friend Joe's kitchen, sometime in the late eighth grade. Over glasses of a potent and absurdly thick instant iced tea, he casually asked me if I'd ever seen "the kids in the hall." I was baffled, so he clarified - The Kids In the Hall, a TV show "like Saturday Night Live." Sketch comedy, in other words. He'd seen it at his cousin's house, on HBO. I hadn't, and he went on to effusively describe a sketch we'll discuss in a later episode. It had a kind of nihilistic edge to it that I'll admit appealed to the fourteen year old me. I'd later learn that it really wasn't one of their best, but I was intrigued nevertheless. Unfortunately, it would be almost two years before I would actually see The Kids In the Hall, when I finally discovered that Comedy Central, then The Comedy Channel, was airing reruns of the show with some frequency. I became an instant and ardent devotee. I watched so much so often that by the time I left for college, in Canada where they were stars, I'd seen, or so I thought, every single episode multiple times. It really helped break the ice during those early drunken pub crawls. But I was wrong. I don't know if TCC only aired the season episodes or if they only broadcast the pilot once in a blue moon, but I never did see it until those university days, on some lazy Saturday afternoon rerun on CBC 6 in Montreal. And after that maybe once or twice. So watching this was almost a new experience for me.

The Kids' start off an amalgamate - Mark McKinney and Bruce McCulloch, first performing in The Audience in Calgary, make their way to Toronto where they join with Dave Foley and Kevin McDonald, already performing as The Kids In the Hall there. Soon after, Scott Thompson joins the group, and we have the final iteration of the most singular, memorable, and influential sketch comedy troupe North America ever produced. Okay, that may be taking it a little far, but it's worth noting that the consistency of the never-changing lineup distinguishes KITH from it's most obvious rivals, SCTV and SNL. They were a one-time collaboration, not a fluid revolving door of performers trying to fit under a stylistic umbrella. That is not to defame those institutions, or any like them. But I've always had a certain affection for the Monty Python-ish self-containment of KITH. Either way, none other than the aforementioned SNL's Lorne Michaels saw something in the Kids, and offered them a chance at a TV show in 1987. The result is this 1988 pilot.

We start off with a prototypical KITH quickie "cold open" sketch - Bruce McCulloch shouting off the millionaires scrounging through the trash in the alley behind his apartment. While the depiction of the super rich as alley cat nuisances is funny enough, really the most rewarding part of the sketch is simply the Kids' vision of "millionaires": yachting outfits and bowler hats and cravats. The sketch is over practically before it begins, and makes for a great flash of absurdity before the opening credits (and that wonderful Shadowy Men On A Shadowy Planet theme music).

The true opening sketch of the show is less inspiring. "Guys Watch Girls," a staple of the stage show, doesn't really work here. Conceptually, it's good: a trio of blue collar guys on the archetypal lunch break catcall passing women and brag to each other about all the things they'd do with or to them - all the chaste, respectful, gentlemanly things they'll do. It should work. It's a nice overturning of an old trope and as written would seem to become funnier as the "crude" guy talk becomes more and more innocent and strangely eloquent. The execution is off, however, and it comes really as no surprise that it's the infamous sketch that prompted Michaels to drag the Kids into his office and say, "I guess you guys don't want to have a TV show." The performances of McCulloch, Foley, and McDonald are stiff, their line delivery just a bit off. They don't seem comfortable riffing off each other, or indeed in their own skins. It's a good idea, but one that they pull off with more aplomb in a later season, once they've settled into a nice groove with each other and their own ideas.

I was surprised to see how many long term mainstays of the KITH began in the pilot. Next, we have Mr. Tyzik - the famous headcrusher - crushing his very first heads. He recurs throughout the episode, binding the scenes together. Unlike the show moving forward, his bits aren't their own animal, but rather he crushes the heads of characters we encounter as we go along. In this first scene, it is of course three blue collar guys. It's an interesting use of the character that they did not repeat, later moving Tyzik into his own spotlight and his own self-contained sketches. It provides a surreal cohesion to the proceedings here, though, both distinguishing the pilot from the series as an independent organism and also making one wonder if such an approach could have been a positive as the show progressed through the years. Otherwise it's, y'know, Tyzik. His interludes throughout are fun, funny, and laden with nostalgia.

And the mainstays just keep on coming. Next we have the first sketch featuring a trio of the Kids' best ever recurring characters, Fran, Gordon, and their son Brian. Not only were they a KITH institution, but they served as my own personal introduction to the troupe when I stumbled upon "Salty Ham" on TCC in that heady moment when I first learned that the legendary Kids In the Hall were now within my grasp. I was disappointed with myself to realize that I had no memory whatsoever of this inaugural sketch. I'd seen the pilot before, and while the memories were blurry, surely I'd have remembered THIS. This sketch easily stands out as the highlight of the entire pilot episode. It surprised me, given that the skit is really nothing more than a Scott Thompson monologue. Like others, I'd always sort of considered Thompson the odd man of the group and a bit of a diva. I liked him, but I've always had only so much patience for the Buddy Cole monologues, and some of his other recurring characters left me flat. However here, any doubts about Thompson's talent or his contribution to the group just seem laughable. His Fran is both wonderfully well rendered and perfectly executed. She speaks candidly to an unseen audience of her son Brian's (Foley) admission of his homosexuality, and the entirely predictable but deliciously embellished reaction, while McCulloch's Gordon lounges silently in a nearby recliner that is for some reason in the front yard. Her apparently self-aware lunacy and increasingly funny euphemisms drive the sketch forward wonderfully, instead of simply treading through the same joke over and over, and Thompson inhabits the character with a frightening totality. Throw in Gordon's alarmist fantasies of Brian with a swarthy gay man named Attila (McKinney) in a seedy bar, and you really do have a sketch comedy classic, and that in spite of it's six and a half minute length. The pilot is worth watching for this alone.

More classic characters follow, with the very first Cabbage Head sketch. Cabbage Head is another holdover from the stage show that came to TV. The sketch here depicts...well, it depicts Cabbage Head trying to get laid with a toxic potion of crude insistence laced with transparent pity, like all Cabbage Head sketches. It works, though. McKinney is in the zone as the alternately appalled and softened date, and McCulloch throws himself at his most unlikely stroke of genius with no shame. It demonstrates that the Cabbage Head character was one of those unexpected alchemies of stupidity and self assured execution that would always work. Okay, yes, it got old after awhile, but you can see here why it lasted so long.

Next, a one-off, a pretty good one in the vein of the Sarcastic Guy or the Tea Shop. Dave Foley plays a weepy friend begging a couch to sleep on from McCulloch's patient friend. As we progress, we come to the KITH first "cut-away reveal gag" in their words. Foley, we come to understand, is in a constant haze of tears and sobbing through every single mundane aspect of his life. The premise is simple and can't sustain itself for long, but doesn't try to. McCulloch's exasperated friend doesn't amount to much as a straight man here, it's really Foley's performance as a nonsensical comic conceit that makes the sketch work. There's really no holding back as we cut away to memories of him with his (now ex) girlfriend discussing the menu on their first date or making some extra coffee. It's ridiculous, but it plays well against the framing scenario of Foley's weeper trying to sob through an explanation of why the girlfriend kicked him out.

Next of course is the infamous "Rusty," where Bruce McCulloch's manchild son of Dave Foley's bottoned up mom character puts the moves on all her elderly neighbors. The main target is Thompson's Mrs. Wilson, a "ravishing" blue haired vixen that Rusty immediately sets his libidinous sights on. Whether forcing a session of agitated push ups or sleazing out lame come ons, McCulloch oozes perverse hilarity while Thompson is the perfect foil - creaking out various coy refusals. They banter about the pros and cons of a passionate coupling until Kevin McDonald's walker-bound Mrs. Beamish arrives to provide the punchline: Rusty's a GILF-loving cad. McDonald has little to do but delivers with the subdued agitation of an AARP member scorned. It's a great skit, although the cinder block construction of the set gives it a strangely stagey and artificial feel.

They segue from the "Rusty" sketch through a breaking-the-fourth-wall style conceit of simply holding the shot until Foley begins removing his wig and clothing, revealing a much more recognizable Foley beneath, in slacks and a shirt. He addresses the audience directly, introducing himself as Dave Foley, a man who, after doing "some volunteer dentistry for the river people of Botswana" could induce honesty in a person. A special power that consists almost entirely of raising your eyebrows at the subject until they begin to confess. To whatever. As Mark McKinney confesses to an unspecified crime up at "the mine." And then un-confesses, unable to explain what it is he is in fact confessing to. The sketch could work, but the very odd choice of having McKinney fall into a stereotypical near 19th century southern woman's cadence, along with fold-out fan, is weird and unnecessary. I'm not even sure where they were trying to go with that, the concept worked on its own. Lorne Michales apparently encouraged this sketch, but while the skit holds up thanks to the performances to the two leads, it ultimately feels like another clunker akin to "Guys Watch Girls" - a great idea might not always play. It's a funny sketch, but not great.

We go from here to "But Do You Love Me?" - an upending of an almost Tennessee Williams-esque pairing of Foley and McDonald as a lovestruck couple that aren't in love. At least from Foley's end. As he flits from each flowery evasion to the next, Foley's hero slowly brings us to the unavoidable conclusion, he doesn't love his partner at all, doesn't even like her, holds her in contempt. The comparison to a nearby tree illuminates his inability to even love her for the sum of her parts: "Icky icky tree! I hate that tree!" The sketch tries too hard to maintain a formal language throughout its execution, hemming in the dramatic formalism it's overturning, and it doesn't entirely serve the skit. It might have been better to allow the language to break down in tandem with its apparent emotional arc. Hard to say. It's still a funny sketch.

I don't want any previous statements about Scott Thompson to color any analysis of our next skit, because, let's face it, it is a major cultural milestone: the very first Buddy Cole monologue. On the show anyway. It's a fairly typical - in fact prototypical -Buddy Cole monologue. Thompson's all-too-obvious-alter-ego-flamboyantly-and-of-course-are-you-some-kind-of-fool-unapologetically-gay doppelganger opines over a love affair in the then (and now) topical locale of Bagdad. It's funny but not revolutionary. Yet, again, my mind is drawn toward the openning sketch, "Guys Watch Girls," and the rift that exists between virtually any television show and its pilot, between confidence and uncertainty. Thompson's fuzzy black hole of narcissism is long and indulgent, but provides a much needed boost of self-assurance to a production that flits back and forth between conceptual genius and executive esteem. Once again, Thompson steals the show in a simple display of confidence.

"Naked For Jesus" more or less speaks for itself. One part PSA, one part recruitment video, Bruce McCullough's film short concerning the plight, lives, and crusade of those who get and remain unclothed for the one and only son of The Lord represents another highlight of the pilot. It's the kind of surreal McCullough sketch that transcends context. This isn't a satire of religious fanatics or a critique of fundamentalist influence in North America. They're just naked. Naked for Jesus. A number of bare asses are in eveidence here, including Kevin McDonald and his girlfriend at that time. It's fun.

And finally, there's Reg. A man more graceful on two blades and a sheet of ice than any other. It's the kind of sketch that makes you think about the fragility of human life. Because they killed him. All five Kids participate here, in this classic sketch in which they play old friends reminiscing about the old days and the good times they spent with their good friend Reg, before they brutally murdered him and buried him in a shallow grave up by the tracks. Remember? It's a simple defiance of expectations setup, but as with all things KITH related, it comes down to the details. For all intents and purposes, the sketch plays like the private wake of a group of hometown friends after the death of an integral member of their tribe. Slowly but surely, the details come out in brief anecdotes and vague proclamations: they had strangled him with piano wire and buried his corpse in a shallow, unmarked grave. Originally a three-man performance between Foley, McDonald and McCollough, it was expanded for the show to five men, bandying about the various memories.  It's yet another stage show transfer, a favorite during the tapings and one they put forward at Comic Relief and Radio City Music Hall, "to crickets." It deserves better than crickets.

And we end with Tyzik. McDonald was told to come up with an ending, and he created this, a final, tying-off sketch in which the Headcrusher wanders out of the park, bitching. It's not much, but as with all the Tyzik sketches in the pilot, it provides a glue, binding the show together as cabbage head, the couple from "Do You Love Me?", and the first ever appearance of Thompson's Danny Husk wander by. And that's that.


Stray Observations:

• My apologies for the lateness of this review. The winter was a little hectic and every time I had time and inclination both to sit and write any of these, I'd get cut off at a crucial moment. The first half of this was written months ago. I can guarantee that the LEGIONS of you who have been waiting with bated breath for rev's Kids In The Hall reviews will not have to wait quite so long for subsequent reviews. Thank god, I've averted a riot.
• McCulloch does not make an appearance in the bonus features, nor is he part of the commentary. A little cantankerous, as far as I can tell from the hints given by the rest of the cast. It's unfortunate, I'd have liked to hear his input, even if his reasons for declining to participate are sound.
  
• See you soon for the Season 1, Episode 1 milestone