Kids in the Hall: Reunion Tour May Lead to More

The new Kids in the Hall reunion tour has been a pleasant surprise for me. I had enjoyed their previous post-television tours in 2000 and 2002, and I didn’t know a new tour had been planned until I saw an ad for their show at the Wang Theatre for April 17. I reviewed that show for the Boston Globe (you can find it in today’s edition here), and spoke with them backstage at the Wang afterwards.

It was a mellow, friendly atmosphere backstage, or, more appropriately, in the mazelike basement-level dressing rooms under the Wang. Mark McKinney, Bruce McCulloch, Dave Foley, Kevin McDonald, and Scott Thompson were winding down after a little over an hour and a half of new sketch comedy, with a few old favorite characters like Thompson’s Buddy Cole and McCulloch’s Gavin thrown in. The not-quite-sold-out but sizeable crowd had reacted warmly and enthusiastically to everything, old and new, and there was a palpable sense of gratification amongst the Kids, possibly even a sense of relief that they had been welcomed back so readily.

The Kids had reunited last year for the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal, and had been kicking around the idea of getting together again, but never quite found the time. Earlier this year, they finally found a break. “The writer’s strike did the impossible and freed us all up for a week,” said McKinney.

Rather than just dust off old sketches from the television show or previous tours, the Kids set out to write as much new material as possible. According to Foley, this meant doing a series of surprise club shows in L.A. on short notice. “It was an exercise to see if we could write a 90-miute show in three days,” he said.

Again according to Foley, they were surprised both by how well they wrote together and how much they enjoyed performing together. The new sketches were strong, and there were a couple new short films, most notably an odd, lewd bit about “carfuckers,” that hit the mark (McCulloch, who has been busy directing the sitcom Carpoolers, mentioned he has been working the Russo brothers, of Arrested Development fame, on some film shorts). Everyone seemed to agree that there is some momentum building, which should mean another project of some sort when the tour ends in June, most probably a film.

Right now, somewhere...

It's a strange world out there. And while you sit here reading, right now, somewhere...

* The Pope is looking at his watch and saying, "Sheesh, look at the time."

* One of your relatives is thinking about how much of an asshole you are.

* A fat, naked man is sitting in front of his computer fantasizing about Japanese cartoons.

* Someone is watching a VHS copy of Mariah Carey’s Glitter, and loving it.

* A powerful world leader is tapping his toes to the Toby Keith song playing in his head trying to look like he is paying attention to a meeting of his chief advisors.

* Your parents are listening to Poco and making out on the couch.

* Boston city planners are thinking of what to do when the Big Dig becomes outdated.

* New parents have settled on the name Eugene for their first born, setting forth a chain of events that will either lead to indictment or a career in folk music.

* A Hollywood executive is planning a Saturday morning cartoon based on Brett Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho.” Elsewhere, another executive is making plans to bring “Straw Dogs: The Musical” to Broadway.

* Your doctor is listening to P-Funk, staring at the office aquarium, smoking a big fattie.

* Your cat is humping your favorite bed pillow.

OC-Ed: Late Night Humor vs. Democracy

The topic of Michael Crook’s A Funny Guy blog over at TheLedger.com – “Does Political Comedy Undermine Democracy” – was preposterous to me when it came up on my Google alert. It seemed like one of those inherently flawed questions that people like me in the media often ask to try to get provocative answers and stir up some kind of debate, which is usually about as nuanced and useful as a metal geek slap fight over VH1’s “Top 100 Guitar Solos of the 80s.”

But it turns out, the premise was neither Crook’s not Stevenson Swanson, who wrote the article for the Chicago Tribune that Crook reprinted for his blog. The idea actually belongs to University of Iowa professor Russell Peterson, who has written a book called Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy into a Joke. Peterson, the story notes, tried his hand at stand-up comedy in the early 1990s and has also worked as a political cartoonist. And there are a couple of interesting side notes to his premise.

You can read the piece yourself on the Tribune site here, or, if that link stops functioning, at Crook’s blog here.

To be fair, I haven’t read Peterson’s book, so you’ll have to take any criticism of his premise with a grain of salt. But if his thesis has been presented correctly in the Tribune article, Peterson believes that late night comedians are a threat to the American system of democracy because they promote the belief that it makes no difference who you vote for, that every candidate is equally bad, and there’s no point in engaging in the process.

"I really do think that this sort of belief, that it doesn't matter, is one of the most damaging beliefs that a democracy can harbor,” Peterson is quoted in the Tribune as saying, adding later, "I don't think comedy invented that belief, but it's one of the most important avenues through which it is expressed."

I was about ready to tap out at that point. Certainly the rampant corruption at the presidential level on down for the past twenty-five years and the general disrespect that politicians show for each other and sometimes their own office has to be the more pressing problem here.

Watergate, Iran-Contra, the Lewinski affair, and the current administration’s bumbling of everything from the so-called “War On Terror” to the hiring and firing practices at the Attorney General’s office – the list is long, inglorious, and stretches back to around the time I was actually conceived. I love political comedy, especially the hardest hitting stuff by firebrands like Barry Crimmins and Bill Hicks and the above-the-fray perspective Mort Sahl is still offering, if you can catch him. But as much as I admire someone who can connect with a solid swing of satire, these people are generally only pointing out the damage politicians have done to themselves.

In that respect, if you are going to blame comedians for undermining democracy, you have to put them fairly far down on the list of the indicted, with the politicians themselves first on the list, and anyone who actually tells us what they’re doing second. It’s like arresting a guy for arson when he calls 9-1-1 about a burning building.

But that’s when the story got interesting. Apparently, part of Peterson’s thesis is the idea that late night comedians are helping to create an indifferent attitude toward the system because they are not dealing with substantive issues. In other words, their very inertness makes them dangerous.

Stevenson summarizes the idea thusly: “Political comedy, at least as it's practiced on the Leno, Letterman and O'Brien shows, tends to focus relentlessly on personality flaws, such as Bush's verbal gaffes or former President Bill Clinton's skirt-chasing, instead of on questions of political policy.”

This is the difference between topical comedy and satire, which is not often discussed, since it is admittedly a bit of comedy nerd hair-splitting. But there is a difference. Some comedians have gotten credit as satirists simply because they told a blow job joke about Bill Clinton or dared to call George W. Bush dumb. The jokes might be funny, depending on the skill of the particular comic, but they don’t tend to delve too deep into the details.

According to the story, Peterson finds Leno and Letterman are going for cheap laughs, and gives a bit more credit to Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, and Stephen Colbert for bending more toward the satirical. There’s a decent argument there, especially considering that Leno and Letterman, both on network television, have a much larger audience to please than Stewart, Maher, and Colbert, whose shows air on cable. Leno has professed a sort of fast food philosophy to writing for the Tonight Show (you can find the exact quote if you can find his 2004 appearance on Inside the Actor’s Studio), and when you’re in a ratings war, you’re going to have a hard time doing anything edgy or potentially alienating, a concept to which the Tribune article also alludes.

But even if you accept the premise that the glib nature of Leno and Letterman’s topical humor make for lower standards, it’s a tough leap to say that makes them dangerous. And it’s a bit of a logic puzzle, at least in terms of Peterson’s argument, to think that the more satirical comics are less dangerous than more inert comics because they might actual damage a politician’s reputation in the minds of their audience by dealing with more substantive issues. Start picking at details like that, and suddenly you’re trapped on M.C. Escher’s stairmaster.

Ultimately, it’s a classic straw man argument. If late night television disappeared right now, democracy wouldn’t suddenly regain its buoyancy with a flood of informed participation. I’m fairly sure that’s not Peterson’s argument, but if not, what could possibly be filling all those pages in a book called Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy into a Joke?

I’ll report back if I get my hands on it. If anyone has read it, please comment on this post and let us know what you think.