Ready or not, the Kids are back.
The TV landscape tends to feel pretty dismal when “Saturday Night Live” is the only sketch comedy game in town. And often that’s the case. Over its four-plus decade run, it certainly has outlasted so many others — from “SCTV” to “In Living Color” to “MADtv” to “Key & Peele” and more — but that doesn’t make it the funniest or most creative.
Just the longest standing. Which brings us to the return of “The Kids in the Hall” on Amazon, and it’s as if the clouds of gloom have parted to make way once again for their particularly sunny sense of the absurd. Even with “SNL” head honcho Lorne Michaels as executive producer, this ‘90s-era staple somehow always felt smarter, more playful, humanistic and better observed than “SNL.” And yes,Back with new episodes after more than 30 years, this version of “The Kids in the Hall” stands out for another reason. Bruce McCulloch, Mark McKinney, Kevin McDonald and Scott Thompson are in their 60s. Dave Foley is almost there at 59. Sketch comedy tends to be a young person’s game. Just the wig-ery of it all. And yet here are five guys well past their supposed prime just ripping into the form as if they never left."The Kids in the Hall" are back, doing sketch comedy in their 60s. From left: Bruce McCulloch, Scott Thompson, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney and Dave Foley. And in a way they haven’t. They broke up as a group sometime after the release of their 1996 film “Brain Candy” — the intense pace their original show meant the work was no longer fun, and by that point they didn’t particularly like each other either — but sometime in the 2000s, they reconnected and started doing live shows again and their instincts as writers and chemistry as performers remains as wonderfully ridiculous as ever. Amazon has a two-part documentary about the group as well, called “The Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks,” which traces their Toronto performing origins through the show’s heyday to the collapse of their collaboration, and it pairs nicely with the show’s reboot. Four of the group’s members grew up in the suburbs. McKinney, though, was far more urbane as the son of a diplomat, which somehow, the documentary notes, made him the de facto group representative in the eyes of Lorne Michaels, which is a revealing detail about how Michaels operates and the pecking order he seems to require from the talent he oversees.The original “Kids in the Hall” ran for five seasons on HBO before ending in 1995. The new episodes on Amazon are presented as Season 6 — picking up where they left off, more or less — and if the first episode feels overly self-conscious about their age and long absence from TV, you can understand some of their nervousness about stepping back onto a television terrain that looks much different from the one they’d left. Maybe that’s why they didn’t film in front of a studio audience this time. Maybe that’s why Foley and McDonald get fully naked — the camera lingering for long,time — to shake off the cobwebs and say: Here we are, not even pretending this doesn’t feel weird. The bit didn’t make me laugh so much as admire the “oh, screw it” energy behind it, far more than the addition of interstitials called “Friends of Kids in the Hall,” featuring well-known names such as Catherine O’Hara and Pete Davidson, who don’t interact with anyone but simply look into the camera and riff for a few moments. It feels sort of pointless and panicky, as if “Kids in the Hall’' needed to connect themselves to “better known” comic names of today. They don’t. They really don’t.There are a handful of returning characters from the ‘90s: The fussy, giggly office workers known as the Cathys; Thompson’s inimitable out-and-proud Buddy Cole; Mark McKinney’s “I’m crushing your head!” loner. There are also sketches that make you wonder if these men feel out-of-step with concepts such as microaggressions or workplace toxicity. A man wears clown shoes to the office and is accused of appropriation by the clown community. A Zoom meeting devolves into a group sex scene — skewering the
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