Venerable T.O. comedy troupe Kids in the Hall never really went away. They’ve pursued solo projects, many to great success, but they’ve managed to stay friends, and as a result, we get treated to fantastic reunion shows somewhat regularly. One of the many fantastic pleasures of life in Toronto.
I opened up a club in Montreal recently, and having need of a knock-out performer to open it up, I called upon Kid in the Hall Dave Foley. Wait, you say, is he even a stand-up? The answer is yes. Foley started out as one, way back when he was 17, at Yuk Yuk’s in Toronto.
You might say he’s gone back to his roots. Things haven’t been so smooth for Foley over the past decade or so. After the hit sitcom News Radio, the good offers just dried up. He found himself in a series of low-budget films, jobs taken to meet child support payments calculated at his megawatt career high. He hosted a poker tournament TV series. “I don’t even play poker,” he told me.
To make matters worse, he couldn’t even work in Canada while his child support lawsuit settled. The police would have arrested him the minute he crossed the border. It took a few years before his legal wranglings were settled and he could accept work in his home country. But then, slowly, things started to turn around. He started doing stand-up again and put a lot of attention into the crafting of an act. A lot of actors doing stand-up simply try to milk their fame until something better comes along. But Foley put real work into it, developing risky, intelligent material that often got him into trouble in clubs, especially in the Bible belt. Foley is an outspoken atheist. His material isn’t so much anti-religion as pro-science. Still, there’s a lot of squirm-worthy bits that would make any person of faith uncomfortable.
His show begins with a playful dissection of gender roles based on the misconception that many people have of Foley, assuming he is gay. The Kids in the Hall flirted openly with cross-dressing in the series. There were no women in the group, and Scott Thompson cast a long queer shadow. It’s one of the more revolutionary things about the sketch troupe, but it led to some comical confusion in Foley’s life that he shares with audiences.
The long closing bit is a controversial take on the last taboo word. The racial epithet that got Michael Richards in so much hot water a few years ago. Foley would probably criticize me for not using the actual word in this column, which is the point of the bit.
There’s a collective gasp in the audience when he throws the word around so freely, but he’s obviously no racist. He’s using the word to expose our hypocrisies in dealing with race, language and liberal guilt. It’s a shocking piece in the best way.
Foley has a new sitcom coming out on CTV, a comedy about a PR firm. What they call a “workplace sitcom” in the tradition of News Radio. The show, Spun Out, just might put Foley back where he belongs. He’s one of our best comic actors, and he deserves to be in a hit show. I only hope he won’t abandon his stand-up when it happens.
Post City Magazines’ humour columnist, Mark Breslin, is the founder of Yuk Yuk’s comedy clubs and the author of several books, including Control Freaked.
