Sunday, May 18, 2008

The perfect birthday present - KITH

Wow. Last night I spent the night with 5 funny guys, Dave, Kevin, Bruce, Mark and Scott. You might know them as the Kids in the Hall. YEAH! I am such huge fans of the Kids - I can still remember the day we stumbled across them on the CBC TV network back in the day. Sketch comedy at its weirdest and most outrageous. So when I found out I was going to see them live on my birthday......... I damned near wet my freaking pants.

The show was supposed to start at 7pm, but their tour bus got caught up in the mountain passes on the way from Vancouver, so it was delayed 2 and a half hours. No matter. When the lights went down and the familiar theme song, "Having an Average Weekend" by Canadian band Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet came up - I had an out of body experience. Then we settled in for almost 2 hours of envelope pushing fun. Many recurring characters appeared on that stage, with some familiar material, some new stuff. Buddy Cole (played by Scott) explained his theory on why Jesus was gay. Bruce and Mark pranced around the stage as goofy showroom salesmen selling a spigot you attach to your fat American gut and drain said fat to power your SUV. Gavin (played by Bruce) greets the Jehovah's witnesses at his door and lets them in only to bore them with the endless list of weird or useless facts rattling around in his little boy-head. Gavin was always one of my favourite characters. Kathy (Bruce) and Cathy (Scott) the secretaries from AT&Love meet for lunch, where Kathy explains the secret to her fabulous figure is none other than "tweeking" with crystal meth. Dave and Kevin fight over Dave's imaginary girlfriend - this had some seriously clever twists. A classic sketch, where Bauer [correction] one of Scott's characters calls for phone sex and gets hooked up with the Chicken Lady (Mark). There was also a funny sketch involving a time machine belonging to Dave, which (as many clever comedies do) made its re-appearance in other sketches that Dave was cast in. Including the BJ for your B-Day sketch, where Dave's 'wife' asked why it was alright that he only got a BJ once a year on his birthday. Dave then gets out of bed and uses the time machine to...... yep, you guessed it - 'celebrate' his birthday again.

The show closed out with Mr. Tyzik (Mark), the Head Crusher, crushing various audience member's heads (using a video camera so you could see the crushing on the screen behind him), then turning to the other members of the troupe, mocking the recent careers of each member, after which he promptly crushed their heads before turning the crushing fingers onto himself.

1 comment:

John Manzo said...

Yep, superb show and well worth the wait! Couple things- the Gavin sketch is an old sketch that was a modified a bit for stage but it was from the series. Second, that wasn't the Bauer character, who had huge dreds as you may recall, but the character who Mark's "vampire" tried to give a blow job to and who ended up being the sole audience member on the Darcy Pennell show. This was also an old sketch- loved seeing the "egging" though!