Parenting & Family Quote by Kevin McDonald

“Anything that was perverse and silly” is Kevin McDonald’s tidy mission statement for Kids in the Hall, and the phrasing matters. He’s not describing a brand of random weirdness; he’s describing an editorial filter. Perverse suggests a deliberate tilt against the expected moral posture of TV comedy - not evil, just gleefully misaligned. Silly keeps it from becoming preachy or self-important. Together they sketch the troupe’s sweet spot: jokes that feel like they wandered off the approved path, then wave back from the bushes.

The intent is both aesthetic and defensive. In the early-90s North American sketch landscape, “edgy” often meant macho provocation or shock for its own sake. Kids in the Hall’s perversity was softer, stranger, more theatrical - men playing women without the punchline being “a man in a dress,” characters trapped in petty obsessions, sketches that ended on discomfort instead of applause lines. McDonald’s quote positions that as a conscious choice, not a byproduct of being Canadian or “alternative.”

The subtext is a quiet refusal of normalcy as comedy’s default setting. If mainstream sketch comedy sells you a world where everyone is legible - gender, status, desire - Kids in the Hall thrives on the opposite: people who don’t scan correctly, social rules that don’t stabilize the scene. Calling it “anything” is the flex. It implies the show was a container big enough to hold impulses other rooms would sand down, and confident enough to let the audience feel a little implicated for laughing.