TORONTO - Fortysomething is the new twentysomething -- at least judging by last night's end-of-tour homecoming for Kids in the Hall at Massey Hall.
The denouement of their Live As We'll Ever be tour was the best live performance I've seen them give since their days in the back of the Rivoli when Mulroney was PM. It was rude, crude, blasphemous comedy capped by flights of surreal pretzel logic and delivered with the kineticism of kids half their age.
From office wage-slave Kathy (Bruce McCulloch) going into seizures explaining to her best friend Cathy (Scott Thompson) her latest weight-loss regimen -- "tweaking" crystal meth ("You forget to eat for weeks, it's practically a diet in a pipe!"), to the "infomercial guys" (McCulloch and Mark McKinney) bouncing around the stage with novalike enthusiasm for their own weightloss product, the Gut Spigot, to a meaningless but fun dance number at the show's end, it was like the best Kids in the Hall episode you never saw.
Credit the workshopping of new material the Kids carried on in small rooms in L.A. last year. The return to top form dovetails with the return to their old method, and all but a few of the dozens of sketches they performed in the first of a two-night Massey stint hit the sweet spot.
It may have been Thompson's finest moment as gay lounge lizard Buddy Cole -- using "the book of Andrew Lloyd Webber" to analyze Christ, from his own perspective, as "a 33-year-old unmarried man who wanders the desert with 12 other scruffy men -- drinking a lot of wine and washing each other's feet.
"And c'mon, straight men don't have prostitutes as friends -- WE do. So what you have is a fag-hag in love with a gay best friend and a psycho (Judas) who calls the cops."
Religion was also the theme of McCulloch's turn as the precocious motormouthed kid Gavin, messing with the heads of two Jehovah's witnesses ("Is it a sin to pretend you have Tourettes just so you can swear in school?").
Yes, the favourites were there -- including McKinney's Chicken Lady (working a sex line with a hoser client played by Thompson) and the Crush-Your-Head guy.
But it was the "oh wow" flights of surreality that really panned out in a night of new material. My favourite was Foley and McDonald fighting over the latter's admission that he was having an affair with Foley's imaginary girlfriend ("You p----! I wish I'd never described her to you!").
Also somewhere in the Ozone was McDonald and Foley as a pair of drunks at last call, the latter of which has developed a time machine strictly for the purpose of "making 'last call' my bitch." The time machine becomes the prop for a series of comic "callbacks" involving a husband who wants more oral sex and Hitler.
It's hard enough to get comedy duos to reunite. But when a quintet of disparate personalities like this gets back together and manages to find its groove so resoundingly and with such freshness, it's definitely a surprise -- a hilarious one at that.
