Dave Foley, it shouldn’t be surprising, is funny even in the context of an interview. The comedy veteran has enjoyed leading roles across a number of projects over the years, but his breakout work definitely came as a member of The Kids in the Hall, the iconic Canadian troupe he founded alongside Kevin MacDonald, Bruce McCulloch, Mark McKinney, and Scott Thompson.
The Kids in the Hall has existed in various forms, most notably as a five-season sketch comedy series, and in the years since the show’s end the men have reunited semi-regularly to collaborate on other projects or perform together live. Now, they’re reunited for eight new episodes of hilarity, both drawing on the past to some degree, while also showcasing no shortage of laugh-out-loud original ideas.
In this interview, which you can either watch above or read below, transcribed and edited for clarity, Foley tells Consequence what led to the Kids making their return on Amazon Prime Video. He also breaks down why the new episodes feature a more cinematic look, the origins of the star-driven “Friends of Kids In the Hall” segments, why the show is now pretty upfront about being Canadian, and how he feels about the show’s continued use of male performers dressed as women. Spoiler alert: His answer to that last question includes mention of both Plato and cyborgs.
I want to start off just by asking about the process of coming back for these episodes. How long ago were those conversations happening and what was it like to actually get back on set?
Well, in 2018, I started bugging Broadway Video, reminding them that 2019 was gonna be our 30th anniversary, and lying to them — I said, oh, all the Kids are interested in doing something. [But] I hadn’t talked to anybody. [Laughs]
So then Broadway Video started to get interested, and I started reaching out to the rest of the Kids in the Hall and saying, come on, let’s do something. We didn’t really know what it would be when we first started talking, and it gradually came around to the idea of doing a new series of sketch shows largely inspired by the fact that we went on one of our live tours.
We had done a tour of entirely new material which is, you know, commercial suicide. It’d be like, you know, the Rolling Stones just touring their new album. But we decided that was what we were going to do. So we did a whole tour of just nothing but brand new material, and then we did a tour after that was half new material and half old stuff. We realized we still had sketch ideas, and we had written some sketches that we thought would be really fun to film and then thought, well, let’s see if we can get someone to pay us to write a bunch of other stuff.
And so Prime Video eventually agreed to give us money — because they had to get rid of some. They were having an unhealthy congestion of money. It was almost like a blockage of the arteries. That’s why [Amazon founder Jeff Bezos] builds the rockets. It’s not that he’s interested in space. It’s just, if they don’t get rid of money, they’ll eventually just suffocate.
It’s a very serious concern.
Yeah, no, you can’t have that kind of money just lying around. It’s very dangerous.
It’ll just spontaneously combust.
So we relieved some of their money congestion and wrote a bunch of new sketches and and it was fun. Which was nice.
