Kids in Hall Tickets

The Kids in the Hall is a name of famous Canadian sketch comedy group. The group was formed in 1984, and it consisted on comedians like Dave Foley, Kevin McDonald, Bruce McCulloch, Mark McKinney and Scott Thompson. They had a television show ran from 1988 to 1994 on CBC in Canada, and 1989 to 1995 on CBS and HBO in the United States. Sid Caesar had been a cause of the name of the band, who played worse than expected in one of his shows, had been attributed as the kids in the hall. It was a reference to a group of young writers hanging around the studio.

Bruce McCulloch and Mark McKinney was already working together doing Theatre sports in Calgary. During the same time, Dave Foley and Kevin McDonald were performing around Toronto as The Kids in the Hall (KITH). The two pairs had a meeting at Toronto in, and they began to perform on a regular basis KITH. The group had its final form with the addition of Scott Thompson in 1985. As Bruce McCulloch and Dave Foley appeared in the series named ?Anne of Green Gables' during the same year.

Not long afterwards, the Kids broke up for a short time when scouts for Saturday Night Live invited Mark and Bruce to New York to become writers for that show, Dave Foley made a poorly received movie debut with High Stakes[1] and Scott and Kevin worked with the Second City touring group. They were reunited in 1986. After SNL's Lorne Michaels saw them perform as a troupe, plans began for a TV show. In 1987 Michaels sent them to New York to what was essentially a Comedy Boot Camp, and in 1988 their show began airing on CBC Television. It was subsequently picked up on HBO in the United States in 1989.

The show had a relative link with the more reminiscent of Monty Python's Flying Circus, despite having the adult viewing label. The show was quirky or surreal, utilizing drag, with very few celebrity impressions or pop culture parodies. There was a recurring celebrity impression of Queen Elizabeth II, played by Scott Thompson. There was another of a recurring character of a man, played by McKinney, who pretended to crush people's heads from a distance with his fingers. McKinney had also played as a Chicken Lady, a half-lady, half-chicken who spoke in a shrill voice, moved in chicken steps, and could be easily excited in a sexual way. There were sketches of pigs and the aliens serving several jokes of the people and the human anatomy.

Most of the sketches of the group had been written by, Scott Thompson. The show was also renowned for its reflection on youth subculture of its times, and for incisive sketches about big business and family units.

The Kids often had appeared on the show in their real life personas rather than as characters, and their most of the sketches dealt directly with the fact that they were a comedy troupe producing a TV show. In an example, Kevin McDonald announced in one of the episodes, that he would be thrown out of the show by his colleagues, if the next sketch was not successful.

The main highlight of the show was their monologues. Scott Thompson's Buddy Cole monologues are the best known; the other members had also performed many memorable solo pieces as well. Like McCulloch satirizing American cultural values with a mock-ironic speech praising the American lifestyle, Foley as describing himself as a horrible doctor. The show was started from Canada, and its contents were edited slightly at times for American tastes in one respect like the sketches mocking religion were sometimes cut down or removed, the material from other episodes was added to complete the half-hour of the show.