Amazon.com
Who's the cutest boy on death row? That's the burning question asked by five giggling teenage girls hanging out in a bedroom with a handful of black-and-white mug shots spread out on the floor. Thing is, all the girls are played by middle-aged men; they all appear in the photos; and their imitation of a peculiarly thoughtless kind of sexual obsession among adolescents provides a weird thrill of recognition as well as a chuckle over its outdated excessiveness. But that's the m.o. of the Kids in the Hall: to mock stereotypes at the same time as they perfectly inhabit them.
The Canadian comedy troupe had a TV show from 1989 to 1995 on both HBO and the CBC. Four complete and unedited early episodes are collected on The Best of the Kids in the Hall. They all follow the same format--a short skit to get viewers' attention (such as "It's a Fact: My Uncle Tony Can Spit Real Far") followed by longer skits, some with continuing characters, punctuated by instrumental breaks (courtesy of the band Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet) and monologues by the various cast members: Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, and Scott Thompson.
The video introduces a number of familiar KITH personages: the Headcrusher, a lonely man who lurks in public places and pretends to squash people's heads between his thumb and forefinger; the Chicken Lady, a mutant who likes male escorts; Cabbagehead, a cigar-smoking sexist pig who tries to get laid by means of pity over his deformity; Buddy Cole, the cigarette-smoking, martini-swilling, lisping barfly whose homocentric monologues make queens scream. But perhaps the funniest (and longest) of the skits involves the retelling of scenes from an Italian movie starring Francesca Fiore and Bruno Puntz Jones, whose bad accents--and eventual invasion of the bar where the retelling takes place--epitomize the perfect blend of the clever and the chaotic that only the Kids in the Hall can pull off. --Robert Burns Neveldine
