Everyone likes to think that as soon as Lorne Michaels
returned to Saturday Night Live in
1985, the flailing sketch-show instantly got back on course with new blood like
Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey, and Jan Hooks, who helped make up the strongest cast
since the Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase, etc. days. Nope. First came a disastrously
experimental season in which quintessential eighties movie actors Robert Downey
Jr., Anthony Michael Hall, Randy Quaid, and Joan Cusack struggled to do what
the seasoned improvisers do. Michaels certainly got one thing right in his lame
return season: he hired new writers Mark McKinney and Bruce McCullough. This
opened up a working relationship that would lead to the show that would even
make Hartman, Carvey, and Hooks’s return-to-form Saturday Night Live look safe by comparison.
However, as John Semley’s new book This Is a Book About The Kids in the Hall makes perfectly clear,
Lorne Michaels did not poof The Kids in
the Hall into existence like some sort of improv fairy godmother. McKinney,
McCullough, Dave Foley, Kevin McDonald, and Scott Thompson had already been
sharpening their comedic blades on Canadian stages for five years before their
series’ 1989 debut. Semley traces their lives further back than that, revealing
some pretty unfunny stuff about alcoholic fathers, depression, and most
shockingly of all, Canada’s first high school-massacre, a horrific event Scott
Thompson survived. Whereas such experiences would have sent most people to the
shrink’s couch, these guys worked their experiences and issues into their
comedy and ended up with TV’s funniest sketch comedy show (with the possible exception of Monty Python’s Flying Circus). Even
reading descriptions of the “Hey, any of you guys ever beat up your dad?” or
“Screw you, taxpayer!” sketches made me laugh out loud.
Though he likes to crack wise, Semley himself isn’t nearly
as funny as his subjects, but he basically maintains an appealingly
conversational tone throughout that keeps the reading entertaining. The personal
and interpersonal troubles, network struggles, failures, and triumphs of The
Kids in the Hall make the reading absolutely compulsive.