Hot Docs '22: Director Reg Harkema on Comedy Punks, and which Kid in the Hall is like Danzig
By Jim Slotek
Director Reg Harkema is one of those people who can say they saw The Kids in the Hall in the back room of a little Queen St. Toronto bar called The Rivoli.
Unfortunately for him, we’re not talking about the ‘80s, when the unknown quintet of off-kilter and quirkily transgressive sketch performers was practically a local secret, sandwiched on the marquee between rock bands and poetry slams.
Harkema (Super Duper Alice Cooper, Monkey Warfare), used the storied club as an interview backdrop for his documentary The Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks (part of Hot Docs 2022). The idea was to interview the Kids - Bruce McCulloch, Dave Foley, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney and Scott Thompson – all together, so they could contradict each other’s version of events like Rashomon.
McKinney, Thompson, Foley, McDonald and McCulloch at the club that gave birth to the Kids.
“I’m jealous of anybody who saw them back then. You were so lucky,” Harkema says when I mention I was one of those early audience members.
“I grew up in Vancouver, but I was definitely part of that Gen-X generation of Canadians who found them on the CBC. I’d just come through two decades of Christian indoctrination and churchgoing. And homosexuality was bad and gays were evil, and having (Thompson’s signature character) Buddy Cole make me laugh my ass off made me question everything I’d been taught. Like, how am I supposed to hate this dude?”
And then there are sweetly-delivered scabrous classics like the Kids’ Dr. Seuss Crucifixion (an outtake of which is included in Comedy Punks). “Yeah, that was a tough one. We didn’t get into it, but apparently there were CBC crew members who refused to work on that sketch. And that sketch didn’t show on America on HBO.”
Harkema’s choice of the Rivoli had more to do with his experience as a rock documentarian. “It really was like filming a rock doc,” he says. “The guideline for me was a comedy troupe-as-rock-band for sure. Even the little details like the drum and cymbals and stuff I carefully placed behind them,” he says with a laugh.
Reg Harkema
“To add to the rock band vibe, I asked questions in the interviews like, “If Bruce was a rock star, who would he be? If Scott was a rock star…”
So, which rock star would McCulloch be? “The Kids settled on Lou Reed or Danzig. My editor cut a whole sequence - this two-minute sequence from (the Kids’ feature film) Brain Candy - where Bruce plays a rock star that’s clearly modeled on Danzig.”
Beyond the rock doc template, Harkema saw a love story, a polyamorous one at that. “Dave ran with that. His quote is actually in our trailers now. ‘Yeah, The Kids in the Hall IS a love story – the four worst people you could ever be forced to love for 40 years.”
It’s a telling comment, since the movie spends time on the then schism that occurred between Foley and the Kids when Dave joined the sitcom NewsRadio, just as production was underway or Brain Candy. That production saw Foley’s trailer placed blocks away from the other Kids’.
“Dave was very open about the whole friction between him and the troupe during Brain Candy. In the initial cuts of the film we actually kind of glossed over it, because it seemed full of weedy details that I thought would make the audience go to sleep.
“But, Dave - and Amazon as well in their notes - were kind of insisting on us building that story, and my editor found a very dramatic way to say it. Drama sells.”
The doc, a prelude to a reboot KITH series that’s going to run on Prime Video starting May 13, is based on One Dumb Guy, the book about the troupe written by Paul Myers. Myers and producer Nick McKinney (brother of Mark) took on the search for an appropriate director.
“I had conversations with Paul and Nick for a while and I was wondering, ‘Are they too weirded out that my name is Reg?, because that’s like that sketch where the Kids sit around and talk about murdering their buddy Reg.
“But they had seen Super Duper Alice Cooper and loved that, and I just seemed to vibe well with them, better than the other people they talked to at least. I didn’t ask who those other people were,” he says, laughing.
Once he had the job, he realized he’d inherited a goldmine of footage and photos going back to when the Kids were, well, kids. Of particular interest to fans are video of and around those early Rivoli shows, and even earlier scrub-faced footage from Calgary’s Loose Moose Theatre (McKinney and McCulloch) and Toronto’s Theatresports (Foley and McDonald).
“Scott went to York University with Paul Bellini (Kids’ writer and fan favourite), and Paul was a film student. And he had a camera and he filmed and filmed and filmed. The archive producer on the show was my wife Cindy Wolfe and as the project started to roll she’d reach out to people on certain (fan) groups.
“So, there was a snowball between Paul’s stuff and people coming in and Mark McKinney as well from the late ‘80s and Broadway Video (Lorne Michaels’ company, which produced KITH) gave us a lot of interstititals.”
The result exceeded expectations. “This Kids in the Hall thing was never supposed to be a feature film, it was a two-part docu-series, but then it got into South by Southwest.
“And now the reaction to it is like… never mind the reaction to it being better than anything I’ve directed, it’s actually better than anything I’ve ever worked on.”
CLICK HERE to watch Bonnie Laufer’s interview with The Kids in the Hall’s Bruce McCulloch.
CLICK HERE to watch Bonnie Laufer’s interview with The Kids in the Hall’s Dave Foley and Mark McKinney
The Kids in the Hall is now available on Prime Video.