“The hard part,” Kevin McDonald answers, “was trusting that it would be funny.” It’s Friday afternoon, and the Kid in the Hall is a ball of hyper energy, answering questions with an unnatural speed, stringing together words without pause, and beginning new sentences two-thirds a of the way through their predecessor. He’s holed up in his Chelsea hotel room for the moment. Later in the evening—half-an-hour after the already late start time of 11—he’ll be taking the stage to perform his one-man, one-hour musical comedy show for Sketchfest 2009, Hammy and the Kids. At the moment, however, McDonald diving deep into the genesis Daddy Drank, one of the more memorable—and arguably one of the best-loved—sketches of the Canadian comedy troupe’s five year-long self-titled television series. “That day in the office, in 1990, we were writing, and Dave Foley, Norm Hiscock, and I, and we didn’t have any ideas, so I started telling a story about my dad, where he came into my room and said, ‘Kev, how many girls called you today? Zero? How many called you yesterday? Zero? You know what zero times zero equals? Fag!’ They laughed and Dave said, ‘You know, that could be a sketch.’ I thought that was crazy, but we wrote it up.”
The comedic depth of the tale, McDonald explains, wasn’t immediately clear that day in the writer’s room. “I told the story because I thought it was mildly funny, but to paint it up and call it a sketch, was odd for me.” Foley adopted a fake mustache and a business suit and a tumbler perpetually half-full of hard liquor. McDonald’s took the role of the narrator—playing himself really, recounting stories of his father drunkenly staggering into his bedroom late at night, with the aforementioned anecdote serving as the centerpiece, Foley’s character tacking on the tag, “Think about it, ya’ little mathematician.”
It was the manner of catharsis that required the laughter of a studio audience to embrace. “Ever since they laughed once, I see humor in it,” explains McDonald. “Pain funny is more funny, because everyone can identify with it. Everyone knows someone in their lives who’s a drunk, or if not a drunk, has similar attitudes. You laugh deeper when you feel it.”
It was funny enough—along with a seemingly endless supply of retroactively comedic abusive father stories—to become a Kevin McDonald conversational mainstay, and, eventually fodder for a one-man show. “Carl Arnheiter from UCB came to LA a few years ago,” adds McDonald. “He does interviews if you’re a minor celebrity and he interviews you. It’s called Inside Joke. I said all of my stories that I’ve been saying for years—half about my drunk dad and half about the Kids in the Hall. And the audience laughed again—surprisingly. And the next day I decided that I’d been boring people so long we these stories, why don’t I just end it and do a one-man show, and I won’t ever have to do them again. “
The math joke pops up again in Hammy and the Kids—a show named for Hamilton McDonald and the troupe that made his son a self-proclaimed “lower case ‘g’ level celebrity”—quickly rehashed, in the off-chance that anyone present in the packed midtown Manhattan improv theater doesn’t know every KITH sketch by heart. The star of the show isn’t the chubby little Canadian asthmatic cowering under the blankets during Daddy Drank, however. It’s the grown up McDonald, the McDonald who was one-fifth of one of the most popular sketch comedy troupes of the late-20th century. It was the McDonald who, with the help of fellow kids, would turn the tale of an abusive drunken dental care-pedaling father into fodder for one that troupe’s more memorable moments.
That McDonald still can’t really sing, of course—and neither can the one playing him. “I have a guitar, and I know enough chords that I can write the bad songs that are in the show,” he explains to me. “I’ll be moving around. It’s probably slightly more entertaining to see my spastic body move around as I try to sing songs than to see my spastic fingers try to hit the strings correct. And it’s really hard. F is a hard chord.”
McDonald sings and jokes about his experiences. And, when a moment becomes to real and the spectators at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater don’t chuckle, he smiles and says, “Well, it was funny in the mid-90s.” That does the trick. All of this jumping and singing and monologuing and joking is all prelude to a pivotal moment—an important week for Hammy and the Kids and curly-haired McDonald in the eye of both concurrent storms. “It ends with how much trouble we had writing [Brain Candy], when at the same time my dad locked himself in a hotel room and was, as he said, ‘drinking himself to dead.’ I had to deal with that and we were having trouble coming up with the end of the movie. It all leads to that.”
If, as McDonald explains to me, the hard part is trusting it will be funny, coming up with the ending has to be a photo finish second. And like Brain Candy, Hammy and the Kids offers no easy ending for anyone, because, well, life never does. But as always, McDonald offers and laugh and song to take us home.
