The Kids Are More Than Alright

An Amazon Reboot could have crushed your spirits; instead, it's CRUSHING YOUR HEAD

“Don’t I know you from Superstore?”

Imagine for a second if, one evening during the Edmonton Oilers’ present NHL playoff run, Wayne Gretzky and Marc Messier were to suit up, lace their skates and, in taking to the ice, were not only to score just as many points as they used to in the prime years of their young adulthood, but were actually to show such comfort in and mastery of their new, older bodies that they unlocked a fresh level of excellence? The new season of The Kids in the Hall is like that.

A 2022 streaming-service reboot of the legendary late 80s/early 90s sketch comedy series seems on the surface like a perfect laboratory experiment in disappointment. To begin with, the Kids have gone from that noblest of mass communications tools, the public broadcaster, to the sulphurous sleekness of Amazon Prime; the geniuses behind “Screw You, Taxpayer!,” brought to you by the company that says “Go Fuck Yourself, I Refuse to be a Taxpayer!”.

But even if the show were being produced and distributed by a college radio co-operative, the proposition feels risky. Sketch comedy sensibilities expire faster than almost any other kind; Richard Pryor and George Carlin stand-up albums and specials from the 60s and 70s still thrill twenty-first century audiences, while watching John Belushi as a samurai merely leaves one feeling mystified as to how the guy even got on television. Sketches like Monty Python’s Dead Parrot don’t live on so much as they are celebrated (rightly) as great works even though they can no longer thrill us the way they initially did — if only because everyone who did sketch afterwards tried to do it like Monty Python’s Dead Parrot.

The first clue that the Kids in the Hall reboot might not be an embarrassment lay in the fact that their original series never aged out. I think this has something to do with what can only be described as a pickling process, reliant on acidity. Python were smart, silly, and surreal; the Kids were smart, silly, surreal, and uncanny — they had a vinegary weirdness that made them impossible to metabolize or domesticate. You can build a big dead parrot statue in a park or buy a Spam t-shirt for your dad; there are not and will never be any monuments to a chicken-human hybrid who feeds her dates her own eggs or masturbates to the point of combustion. When the men in Python dressed as women, people laughed because boys aren’t supposed to wear dresses, and their voices aren’t supposed to be that high; when the men in Kids dressed as women, people laughed because holy shit, maybe gender was a fluid concept and the world’s most confident and authoritarian people actually had no solid ground to stand on. The Kids in the Hall were subversive, but not so much in the easily-imitable, therefore ultimately reproducible and tameable manner of punk rock, but like jazz (only not jazz flute!).

One of the little miracles of 2022 is that none of this genius — none of it — has dulled even remotely in the 27 years since the show went off the air. The Kids have produced not a new series but just a shortish, 8-episode new season of the original — The Kids in the Hall, replete with the surfer-cool strains of Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet over an opening credit sequence of lovingly compiled images of misfit Toronto — that stands flush alongside any other season they produced, without taking refuge in nostalgia or losing itself in a loop of self-reference.

In the sketch troupe’s heyday, they were an avatar of the hip, white Anglo, male segment of Generation X — today, they’re the same, but Generation X means something different. In the 80s and 90s, it was a group of youngish adults lost in the long shadow of the Baby Boomers, marked by a greater cynicism and ironic sensibility than their predecessors, possessed of late Cold War fears fuelled by all the nuclear terror and none of the fresh post-WWII confidence of earlier times. Today, they (we; I’m born in what is usually considered the final year of Gen-X births, 1980) are a small hinge generation between two massive and highly polarized ones, at war with each other over values and resources, the Boomers and the Millennials. Gen-X tends to be more critical than the former about the glowing self-assessment of Western social mores, but more enthusiastic than the latter about traditional liberal sensibilities such as freedom of speech and the right (sometimes even the responsibility) to offend.

The new season of Kids fields a number of Gen-X sensibility sketches: Cathy & Kathy send the final fax; Buddy gets the Queen to dedicate the last standing glory hole as a historical site; the Eradicator, an ultra-competitive balaclava-wearing squash player wakes from a 20 year coma, leaves the hospital with his Walkman, and is horrified to discover that his squash league is no longer keeping scores. But there are also a group of vigilante middle aged men who begin prowling the neighbourhood because ‘something just isn’t right’ (a neighbour threw out a perfectly good television when he got a new one), and bond over ‘just feeling’ that the news is lying to them; and there’s Dave Foley as a cheery morning deejay in a fallout shelter who plays one cheerful song (1971’s ‘Brand New Key’) over and over again while he stares blankly into oblivion between bouts of on-air prattle. The Kids haven’t abandoned their generational sensibility — but they have acknowledged that their generation is in a different place now. Then there are the simply sublime and surreal flights, such as a Victorian moustache enthusiast who keeps giving his calling card to people who then commit grisly murders, or Kevin MacDonald facing off against Eddie Izzard over lukewarm bathwater. But even here, the awareness that the Kids are now much more fulsomely grown is at work.

MacDonald’s bathwater sketch is one of at least two in the new season featuring full nudity. Far from gratuitous, the use of nudity (we see MacDonald nude twice, Foley nude once; full frontal nudity in one of the scenes, including jumping up and down) is the key clue to why the new season works so incredibly well. From the opening moments of the first episode, all five players are revelling in the physical changes they’ve taken on in the nearly thirty years since their last season. There’s less hair, and when it’s there it’s whiter or more silver; there are some wrinkles and crow’s feet; bodies are thicker and more puckered and all look, as of course they ought to, about three decades older.

But rather than being the occasion for retreat, some kind of misplaced new modesty or hesitation, all five of the writer-performers seem eager to lean right into whatever comic potential lies in the humility and humanity of age. One of the reasons the Kids in the Hall have always been cool is because they never tried to be cool while they were being funny. These are not guys trying to re-create their salad days or do a victory lap; these are guys encountering and creating something new, as brilliantly as they ever have.