Kids in the Hall's Kevin McDonald delivers his delightfully oddball stories at Edmonton's Grindstone Theatre

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Continuing an impressive wave of collectible comedy Pokemon, Grindstone Theatre caught and deployed its third Kids in the Hall member over the weekend — the beautifully oddball Winnipegger Kevin McDonald.
It was a hilarious and strangely informative time, with McDonald centred at four events: two four-hour comedy workshops and a pair of narrative stage shows.
“I am a sketch comedian about to attempt stand-up comedy,” the 63-year-old unconfidently explained in Grindstone’s sold-out black box Thursday night. “But still, I am one of the Kids in the Hall.”
Following Scott Thompson and Bruce McCulloch at the last two Grindstone Comedy Festivals, bug-eyed, siren-voiced McDonald often assured us he was the troupe’s weakest link with no memorable shtick characters.
I’d disagree with the first part and the so-very-evil Sir Simon Milligan pops into mind — but?the alluringly weird Montreal-born comic’s palpitating self-flagellation is a key part of his charm.
Analyzing the audience as he saw it into casual, hardcore, and not-at-all fans of the TV show (to whom he apologized), McDonald noted that if Monty Python was the Beatles of sketch comedy, the still-occasionally-active Kids are something in the neighbourhood of Duran Duran. Wild boys!
Moving into an impressive display of disgusting neck skin stretching to show off his age, he declared, “I have become an accordion.” He told tales of the upward climb to first capture, then maintain, a place in comedy’s mainstream — the original show running from 1989 to 1995 on CBC, with that brilliant, nudity-filled 2022 revival season on Amazon Prime.
“We decided to make a comedy about depression,” McDonald said of the troupe’s 1996 theatrical release, Brain Candy. He explained their business plan was “cost $8 million, gross $3 million,” though it still had its fans — including one stumble-drunk hoser on Yonge Street who couldn’t remember the film’s actual name, bellowing his enthusiasm for more “Brain Cancer.”
The crowd laughed hard as McDonald did impressions of Siskel & Ebert reviewing the movie, Siskel loving it and Ebert refusing to talk about it.
(Ebert actually went on a vicious tear after which his cohort asked him, “Roger. Roger! What happened to your sense of humour?” Indeed.)
McDonald told a number of funny bits about living with and annoying Scott Thompson. Other highlights were from the Muji notepad, including him making fun of stand-up comedy, saying, “Commercials are bad!” in that high wail and — speaking of Torontonians, though he lives in Winnipeg now — “We talk about Whyte Street all the time,” in a perfect proof of concept that they sure don’t.
One of the funniest anecdotes had McDonald explaining that to move to the States, as he did for a while, one had to take an AIDS test, one of the rare rooms where everyone recognized him.
Then, totally randomly, who walks in but fellow Kid Bruce McCulloch seeking the same, which had the room agog and whispering.
Overall, McDonald pulled us straight into the finest displays of his various neuroses and also got a big laugh describing first meeting “a wonderful woman named Lorne Micheals,” who produced the show as a side hustle for which everyone there was thankful.
In such an intimate space, it was a pleasure to be reminded how, like the other four, McDonald was such an essential ingredient in that Kids stew, his particular twitchy persona sticking out like one of those long-exposure photographs of a person steadfast in a whirling crowd.
And now the question lingers: who’s coming to Grindstone next — Dave Foley or Mark McKinney?
Gotta catch ’em Hall!
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