Flashback to 1990, if you will. I believe I was a sophomore in high school. The Stars hadn't moved to Dallas yet, so I hadn't started my hockey phase...so my friends and I had other things to do to occupy our time. ONe of our past times was to make sketch comedy videos. We thought we were hilarious. Sometimes we were, most of the time, we were not.
One of the reasons we wanted to do sketch comedy so bad was because we had discovered, deep in the night on HBO, this obsecure Canadian troupe called Kids in the Hall. I am sure that there are some of you out there who have heard of them, but I am still surprised that people have no idea who they are. It was a group of 5 guys who started being funny, and didn't stop. Probably the most well known of the group would be Dave Foley, who starred in the sitcom NewsRadio and was the main ant in Pixar's A Bug's Life.
We LOVED these guys. Watching KITH was a can't miss opportunity, even if it came on at midnight on Saturday. They epitomized everything we wanted to be as a sketch comedy group. I have fond memories of gathering around my friend's TV (he was the only one with HBO) and breathlessly waiting for our Kids to make us laugh.
Flash forward to 2012. With the new onset of digital streaming devices, we now have a Logitech Revue with GoogleTV in the bedroom. This allows me to watch Netflix streaming, which gives access to an endless amount of entertainment. This includes access to every single Kids in the Hall episode made. So, as the days go by, I have been progressing at a clip about one episode per day. I just started season 3.
I still have my favorites:
The Eradicator
Sarcasm
You Need a Mortician!
Having said that, I do need to get to the overall point of this post: There were some PHENOMENALLY bad sketches mixed in. Stuff that would make you scratch your head and wonder how an idea like that ever got legs, let alone make it on the show. It wasn't just unfunny...it was uncomfortable with how bad it was. Weird thing is, I don't remember it at all. The good sketches tend to stick with you, and I guess you just forget about the bad ones. If you have Netflix, watch pretty much any episode from Season 2 and you will see what I am talking about. The shows were downright terrible. I guess they can't all be hits, but I was surprised at how bad most of the sketches were. I think it gets better...maybe they just had a sophomore slump they had to break out of. Writing and performing a weekly sketch comedy show can be incredibly taxing, and maybe that just caught up with them.
And if you were wondering, my favorite has always been Kevin McDonald. I wish he had gone on to do better things. I loved him.
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