How Bombing at 'SNL' Helped Make 'The Kids In the Hall' a Hit

Twenty-eight years ago this month, American viewers were introduced to The Kids in the Hall when HBO aired the Canadian comedy troupe’s one-hour special/pilot, which led to their eponymous sketch series debuting the following summer, in July 1989.

In his new book This Is a Book About the Kids in the Hall (out now), John Semley tells the tale of how Dave Foley, Mark McKinney, Scott Thompson, Bruce McCulloch, and Kevin McDonald became cult-comedy heroes — and the battles they fought along the way.

In the juicy excerpt below, we pick up the story after Saturday Night Live came calling to scout the buzzy young troupe in Toronto and… broke them up: McKinney and McCulloch went to New York to become ill-fated writers for Season 11 of SNL, Foley starred in the 1986 Canadian comedy High Stakes, and McDonald and Thompson joined the Second City touring company (where, in one defiant act, Buddy Cole was born).

Saturday Night Live’s eleventh season was one of the most troubled in the show’s long, gasping forty-year history. Following season ten, Lorne Michaels was rehired by NBC executive Brandon Tartikoff. Michaels had taken a year off following SNL’s fifth season, believing the program would be put on hiatus without him. He was wrong. NBC hired Jean Doumanian, and later Dick Ebersol, to oversee the show. When NBC threatened to cancel the show following the 1984–1985 season, Tartikoff arranged a stay of execution — on the condition that Michaels returned to produce the program.

With Michaels back at the helm, SNL’s eleventh season was expected to be a sort of return to form. Yet Michaels insisted on totally overhauling the show. He packed out the repertory cast with fresh Hollywood faces like Joan Cusack, Robert Downey Jr.,¹ and Anthony Michael Hall. Also among the new hires were Randy Quaid (who had distinguished himself as the dopey Cousin Eddie in 1983’s National Lampoon’s Vacation), a relatively known stand-up named Dennis Miller, and improvisers Nora Dunn and Jon Lovitz. As McKinney puts it, the cast was “a little light on the tried-and-true comedy guys.”

The ratings — and reviews — were so lousy that the show tried to make a joke out of it. One episode saw Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola guest-starring as himself and attempting to “fix” SNL. (He turns out to be lousy at the job.) The season finale ended with co-host Billy Martin (manager of the New York Yankees) lacing the stage with gasoline, as if the show itself was going to be burned to the ground. After the flailing season, not even noted fan Brandon Tartikoff was convinced that the show had any life left. He threatened to cancel Saturday Night Live. But Michaels managed to stay his hand.

Even though the cast was relatively wet behind the ears, comedy-wise, the writing staff was stacked with talent. Beyond veterans like James Downey and Al Franken (who’d returned to the show after a long absence), SNL’s eleventh-season writers’ room was filled out by Jack Handey, Robert Smigel, future Daily Show correspondent A. Whitney Brown, future Larry Sanders Show and Seinfeld writer Carol Leifer, and George Meyer and John Swartzwelder, who would go on to write for the most memorable seasons of The Simpsons. “It was the best writing staff ever,” McKinney says. “Like, ever.”

Unfortunately for them, greenhorns McKinney and McCulloch had a hard time getting sketches on the air. Beyond the frustrations of writing material for actors who weren’t the greatest comedians — a problem faced by many Saturday Night Live writers at the time — something just wasn’t clicking between the two new Canadian transplants and the rest of the writing staff. “When I went to Saturday Night Live, I thought I’d find all these amazing voices, the most amazing comedians of a generation,” says McCulloch. “And they were all funny. But they weren’t the Kids in the Hall. They didn’t speak the same language as me. They didn’t get me. And I didn’t really want to be them.”

McCulloch even had a hard time getting commercial spots he scripted on the air. In one spot he pitched to George Meyer, a group of thirty middle-aged women named Helen assured prospective viewers that Saturday Night Live was better than ever. “He just didn’t get me,” McCulloch says. “You know, ‘Thirty Helens agree that Saturday Night Live is better than ever!’ Like why wouldn’t you use that?! It drove me nuts.” McCulloch later reworked the idea for The Kids in the Hall. The recurring segment, “Thirty Helens Agree,” saw a group of Helens standing in a farmer’s field, sharing their agreed-upon opinion on something fairly ordinary: that Hawaii was better before, that pens are good, that coleslaw deserves a second chance, and so on. “Thirty Helens Agree,” a bit not fit for a Saturday Night Live promo, became something of a hallmark of The Kids in the Hall, summing up the troupe’s effortless blending of the banal and the surreal.

Otherwise, McCulloch and McKinney mostly wrote jokes for characters like Jon Lovitz’s preening Master Thespian or Nora Dunn’s vapid daytime talk-show host Pat Stevens. As instructive as their work writing on the series was, and as fun as it may have been for two guys from Canada to be backstage at SNL, mingling with Madonna, it wasn’t the Kids in the Hall. Still, taking a break from the troupe may have been necessary, providing the perspective needed for them to really appreciate what they’d had back in Toronto. Absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that. McCulloch is frank about his and McKinney’s prospects on the show. They failed. Simple as that. “Mark and I did not succeed there,” he says. “I gained fifty pounds because I got drunk and ate cheesecake and stared at the screen. But I realized how important the troupe was to me.”

Meanwhile, back in Toronto, McDonald and Thompson weren’t feeling much better. Like their two troupe-mates called up to Saturday Night Live, their move to the Second City’s touring company was something of an uncomfortable promotion. Sure, they were technically rising in terms of station. But they were forced to do the kind of comedy they had no real interest in doing, the kind of comedy the Kids in the Hall stood in stark contrast to. “We did not fit in at all,” McDonald tells me. “We were round pegs in a square … something. I don’t know the saying. I was a square, and something was round, and we didn’t fit in with the Second City culture.”

“We are born rebels,” says Thompson, a bit more defiantly. “We wanted to change things. I guess we felt that Second City had gotten stale.” Thompson had a particularly difficult time adjusting to life in the touring company. Part of the problem was the format. As Thompson says, it was stale. They’d tour Canada, performing old sketches at conventions or motorcycle clubs. (Thompson was once reprimanded for stripping during a gig at a biker bar.) With the success of SCTV, Second City stopped taking as many chances. Instead of creating new characters or bits, the members of the touring company were forced to do a “John Candy character” or a “Martin Short character” or an “Andrea Martin character.” Scott Thompson had little patience for such rigidity. And yet, necessity being the mother of invention, it was this inflexible format that birthed his most famous, and enduring, character.

During one of his very first shows in the touring company, Thompson was asked to do a character originally played by John Candy. Annoyed at the idea, Thompson performed the sketch while affecting the mannerisms of an extremely effeminate, campy gay man. He would sashay back and forth across the stage, speaking in a catty lisp. “That’s when Buddy Cole was born,” Thompson remembers. “It had nothing to do with the sketch, nothing to do with the lines. I just thought, ‘I’m going to play him really effeminate.’ And they hated it. The thing was, I was an asshole. It wasn’t a correct choice. I just wanted to do it.”

Certainly, it sounds like an asshole move. But, just as McCulloch likes to call himself a prick, there’s something endearing about it. It wasn’t just that the Kids in the Hall were learning that they were better together and they needed one another to make themselves better. It was also that nobody else was able to stand them. As Foley once put it, “We liked ourselves more than we liked anyone else. And no one liked us — we were thought of as ‘that unprofessional group that jerks off onstage.’”

Imagine being in the Second City touring company when Scott Thompson angers a biker bar by stripping naked onstage. Or working as a senior Saturday Night Live writer, furrowing your brow at the suggestion that having thirty women named Helen agree to something is inherently hilarious. Even if they were ruthlessly competitive, and even just straight-up mean, the Kids in the Hall needed each other.

¹ Widely regarded as the worst hire in the history of Saturday Night Live.

Excerpted from This Is a Book About the Kids in the Hall by John Semley. © 2016 by John Semley. All rights reserved. Published by ECW Press Ltd. www.ecwpress.com