'The Kids, now around 60 years old, are still obsessed with absurdity and the inevitability of endings. If anything, they’re even sillier and darker than before.' kvanaren writes on the 'almost miraculous' Kids in the Hall revival
Photo: Amazon Studios What is funnier, ultimately, than the slow march of time toward inevitable death? The Kids in the Hall, the wildly influential Canadian sketch-comedy group that began in the ’80s, have known this from the start. Death, Kids member Dave Foley says, is “inherently funny, because it negates everything else. Death is the one thing that should remind you that absolutely everything else about life is absurd.
Amazon Prime Video does not set this one up for success, either: The revival series is accompanied by a hagiographic two-part documentary on the group , which is the source of that Foley quote about the hilarity of death. The documentary is thorough and full of good context for KITH’s subversive influence, but it’s tough to walk onto a stage after a hard act to follow, and it’s even more tough when that hard act is your past self.
But the new sketches manage to surprise amid the wash of familiar allusions. In one, a pinnacle of trivial gross-out weirdness, McKinney plays a strange Shakespeare-obsessed man, an asocial guy who seems primed to be the butt of a joke about fandom, or not fitting in, or intense hobbies.
One of the most obvious of these is a sketch in episode five, in which McKinney plays a power-mad villain insistent on gatekeeping people’s ability to make doo-doo jokes, but there’s also a crack at the Kids having sold their souls to put this series on Amazon. Even better, more subtle and proudly weird, is a sketch in episode four called “The Patrol,” in which McKinney plays a median American white guy who just can’t stop noticing that small things just aren’t how they used to be.
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