"Anything that was perverse and silly would be Kids in the Hall"
About this Quote
“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.
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.
Quote Details
| Topic | Funny |
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