Trivia / The Kids in the Hall

• Adored by the Network: Comedy Central aired reruns constantly in the '90s and the early 2000s, which led to their career-resurrecting live tours several years after the failure of Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy.
• The Cast Showoff: Bruce McCulloch is a rather good bass player, as seen in "Bass Player".
• Channel Hop: In America, the original series aired on HBO for its first three seasons, then moved to CBS for seasons four and five. The revived sixth season is exclusive to Prime Video, making this a case for Canada as well (where the original series had aired on the CBC).
• DVD Commentary: Some of the greatest ever. Highlights include an improv game during the closing credits of one "greatest hits" episode.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Several sketches were filmed exclusively for the U.S. and Canadian versions of the show, some of which to replace ones too much for the CBC, but fine for HBO. Several of the CBC sketches (Arumba, Why I Got Into Comedy, Kevin at the Movies) are not included on the DVDs, but some can be found online. Mark also had a monologue entitled Everyone's Friend which was not included on the pilot's DVD and has not resurfaced online.
• Queer Character, Queer Actor: Scott Thompson has been openly gay since the 80s, and his most famous character is the "alpha queen" gay socialite Buddy Cole.
• Real-Life Relative: Mark McKinney's brother Nick, who would later be a part of similarly-styled sketch comedy troupe the Vacant Lot, can be seen in a few sketches. The mothers of Kevin McDonald and Scott Thompson appeared as themselves in an episode.
• Reality Subtext:
  • In the "What If We Rape Kevin?" sketch, Dave Foley remarks that adults will be coming to their live shows to laugh and forget about their mountains of debt. Because of a lack of starring roles in the mid-90s and a particularly vicious divorce settlement, Foley owes his ex-wife half a million dollars in alimony and believes he'll be arrested if he sets foot in Canada again.^note He subsequently arrived at a settlement with his ex-wife (the payments he was obligated to make to her were based on his income when he was starring in NewsRadio, but didn't reflect his later drop in income after that show was cancelled) and he has since worked in Canada, although he's lived in Los Angeles for some years.
  • One "Steps" sketch, dealing with the topic of gay marriage, has Dave Foley's character Riley asking "Aren't we really just fighting for the right to be trapped in loveless marriages as well?" In the DVD commentary, after the line is said, Foley himself pipes in with...
    Dave: And some of us were trapped in loveless marriages at this point.
    Kevin [laughs] Yes. True story.
    Scott: Now who would that be?
    Dave: [sing-song] I can't remem-ber...
    Kevin: All of us.
  • Also in the DVD commentary, Dave Foley admitted that a fair amount of the sketches he wrote during the show's fourth season (1992-93) were meant as analogues to represent how tired he was of writing sketches. These particular ones tended to focus on Foley's characters being sick of their jobs and wanting to try something new, with perhaps the most notable sketch — the one that was playing when Foley admitted to this — being the "Career Crisis sketch, where he and Kevin play aliens questioning exactly why their Great Leader always assigns them to perform anal probes.
• Real Song Theme Tune: "Having an Average Weekend", by Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, who also contributed other music to the show.
• Technology Marches On: Canadian two dollar bills show up in the original run, which ended a year before the toonie was introduced.
• Un-Canceled: Twice. HBO originally had cancelled the original series after its first season despite positive reception, but walked back hard on their decision when Mark McKinney won a CableACE award^note think a cable television version of the Emmys, before the Emmys began including cable television for Best Actor in a Comedy Series, against favored nominee Garry Shandling, in 1990. Then, 26 years after its original run ended, Prime Video resurrected the series for a sixth season in 2022.
• What Could Have Been: When Lorne Michaels came back to SNL in 1985 after The New Show was canceled, all five Kids auditioned to be cast members for the 1985-1986 season. Bruce McCulloch and Mark McKinney would be chosen as writers, with Mark later becoming a cast member in the mid-1990s.
• Write What You Know:
  • Many of the sketches are based on actual Toronto culture, such as the "Steps" series, featuring archetypal gay men hanging out on the cafe steps in the Gayborhood, being directly based on the steps in front of the Second Cup on Church Street and Wellesley.
  • Dean, the King of Empty Promises, was based by Kevin McDonald on his own tendency to make promises and then forget about them, although Dean's unflappably calm mannerisms are based on those of Paul Bellini, the group's friend and sometime co-writer.
  • Mark McKinney based the racist anti-Serbian cab driver (also seen in Brain Candy) on an old landlord of his, and used one of his and Dave's old neighbors as the basis for both the Headcrusher and Billy Bicks (the "Please Please Please" guy from season five).

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