The TV landscape tends to feel pretty dismal when “Saturday Night Live” is the only sketch comedy game in town. And often that’s the case. Over its four-plus decade run, it certainly has outlasted so many others — from “SCTV” to “In Living Color” to “MADtv” to “Key & Peele” and more — but that doesn’t make it the funniest or most creative. Just the longest standing. Which brings us to the return of “The Kids in the Hall” on Amazon, and it’s as if the clouds of gloom have parted to make way once again for their particularly sunny sense of the absurd. Even with “SNL” head honcho Lorne Michaels as executive producer, this '90s-era staple somehow always felt smarter, more playful, humanistic and better observed than “SNL.” And yes, funnier.
Back with new episodes after more than 30 years, this version of “The Kids in the Hall” stands out for another reason. Bruce McCulloch, Mark McKinney, Kevin McDonald and Scott Thompson are in their 60s. Dave Foley is almost there at 59. Sketch comedy tends to be a young person’s game. Just the wig-ery of it all. And yet here are five guys well past their supposed prime just ripping into the form as if they never left.
And in a way they haven’t. They broke up as a group sometime after the release of their 1996 film “Brain Candy” — the intense pace of their original show meant the work was no longer fun, and by that point they didn’t particularly like each other either — but sometime in the 2000s, they reconnected and started doing live shows again and their instincts as writers and chemistry as performers remains as wonderfully ridiculous as ever.
