If anyone has proved laughter really is the best medicine, it's Kevin McDonald.

Without a steady dose of yuks running through his system, the Canadian comic might have never made the transition from troubled kid to Kid in the Hall -- never mind build the strength to tell his tale of growing up with a drunk dad in one-man show Hammy and the Kids.

"It's completely therapeutic," McDonald says of his latest project from his L.A. home. "It's one of those things where I feel better about myself and my father and our relationship, but not because anything big happened during the show. Just doing it a lot, saying it a lot -- what's the next best thing to talking to him? He never apologized or admitted that he was a big drunk that ruined our lives. But saying it every night, I sort of get an understanding about it."

After performing Hammy and the Kids in New York and Montreal, McDonald is bringing the tragicomedy to Winnipeg's Gas Station Theatre tomorrow as a sort of "acid test" before taking it elsewhere around the country. The idea for the show -- something McDonald wouldn't have dreamed of doing before his father died in 2004 -- came to him three years ago at L.A.'s Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, where he answered an interviewer's questions about growing up with an alcoholic dad.

"All these anecdotes were getting huge laughs," he says. "The next morning, I woke up thinking, 'Why not do this one-man show about me being in my 20s, bouncing back between my dad and about trying to make it with the Kids in the Hall? And then once I finish doing it I'll never have to say those stories again. They'll be dead.' That was very attractive."

Before he hit it big with Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Mark McKinney and Scott Thompson, McDonald was an overweight class clown who holed up in his bedroom.

"Everything happened around 12," he says. "My father officially became a drunk. I realized I needed glasses. I got asthma. I started taking allergy shots. And my mother was overprotective and I started staying in a lot, watching TV, and I became chubby.

There was a fast-food dish at the time called Chubby Chicken. That was my nickname at school."

The weight, unfortunately, couldn't hide the pain his father's drinking was causing -- and, apparently, his father couldn't hide much of anything.

"The first year it was my mom saying, 'Your father's not feeling well today.' And after that I realized he was either dying because he was so sick every night or that stuff that was on his breath was alcohol, and those bottles he was getting worse at hiding were something he was drinking. My dad liked vodka. He was a salesman, and the myth is if you drink vodka you can't smell it on your breath. But he drank it so much, you could smell it out of his pores."

While his younger sister became "an angry teenager," McDonald found a funnier outlet for his agony, becoming the school jokester and having the players on his hockey cards act out sketches he wrote.

That led him to Toronto's Second City Training Centre in the early '80s, when he formed a duo with classmate Foley -- and the two joined forces with the rest of the Kids in the Hall.

"I remember it was a powerful feeling to be part of a group, even though we were funnier offstage at that point than we were onstage because we really hadn't gotten our chops yet," he says. "It just felt like we could rule the world. It felt like there was something special brewing underneath. And because I came from a broken family, it sort of felt like a family. It's hokey psychology, but it's probably true."

McDonald dropped 60 pounds -- using what he calls "the depressed diet" -- before KitH hit airwaves in 1988. Running for seven years on CBC and from 1989 to 1995 on CBS and HBO in the U.S., the Monty Python-inspired sketch series ("Monty Python are The Beatles of comedy and the Kids in the Hall are the Duran Duran of comedy," he says) gave birth to his alter egos: The King of Empty Promises, creepy Sir Simon Milligan and a wild-haired Sizzler sister. He also started a running gag about being the troupe's least popular member, and even tackled his father issues in an all-too-real sketch called Daddy Drank -- a clip of which appears in Hammy.

"There's a hunk of that sketch about when he was drunk and he came into my room and said, 'How many girls called you today? Zero? How many girls called you yesterday? Zero? You know, zero times zero equals fag!' That's true that he said that."

Finding the humour in personal situations is something McDonald has focused on since KitH -- which might explain why he has spent less time in the spotlight than his co-stars since they went on hiatus after their 1996 movie Brain Candy (they reunited for tours in 2000 and 2008, and their new CBC miniseries, Death Comes to Town, is slated to air in January).

"I said no to a few movies that I probably shouldn't have," says the fortysomething, who appeared on sitcoms like That '70s Show and lent his voice to Disney's Lilo & Stitch. "None of them were hits. It's just that I was being too careful and I could have gotten in the game more. I probably should have said yes to a few more things."

McDonald would rather star in self-penned projects that mean something to him -- hence Hammy and the Kids, an 80-minute romp that he says has made audiences laugh and sometimes cry.

"My favourite kind of art of any kind is when it's personal. I love The Beatles, but when John Lennon started writing about himself and what he was going through with Yoko in his first solo album, that was more important to me. I love (KitH's) Flying Pig, but doing a scene like Daddy Drank, that's more important to me because it's about something that I can relate to. And if I can relate to it, being a human being on this planet, then other people can relate to it."