Preview and Interview: Kevin McDonald's Hammy and the Kids at Out Of Bounds [Comedy]

What made you decide to do a one man show about this?

Well, one night in 2006 -- I remember years -- Do you know Carl Arnheiter from UCB? He does this thing where he goes to different Upright Citizens Brigade theaters in New York and LA, and he interviews comedians like David Cross or Bob Odenkirk or Carrot Top. I'm making up Carrot Top. What he does is he brings you in front of a live audience, and he asks you questions for an hour. It's called The Inside Joke. Anyway, he got me there, and for an hour he asked me questions. He asked me a lot about my dad. He asked me a lot about Kids in the Hall, and for the whole hour I got a giant amount of laughs. And basically I was telling stories that I've been telling for 20 years. Then the next night, again, I think I woke up at three in the morning, though I probably woke up at eight in the morning, and I thought, "Wow, those stories always get laughs, and I'm tired of saying them. What if I did a one man show, organizing those stories together, getting sort of a story-behind-the-stories, and then I would never have to tell those stories again. My dad had just died, so I could tell them now. Thankfully, my dad had died. So I could tell those again. That day I started writing a one man show. It was sort of based on that Inside Joke interview I did with Carl.

Has writing and performing this particular show affected your processing or dealing with all that past history?

It's funny, because I had gone to a therapist before that, and you feel a little better. Then a few months later, you forget about it. Doing this all the time, it feels like I've totally dealt with it. I don't know if that's true, but it feels that way. I feel that he's laughing at it, and that we're both laughing at it. It feels like it doesn't matter anymore, and the pain can't affect me anymore, the pain of having an alcoholic dad. And I made a show out of it. I make a little tiny bit of money from it, more than I make a creative expression out of it. And I don't want it to affect me adversely anymore. I think the show has helped me get towards that path.

In 2008, the Kids in the Hall did a tour, and you guys opened that tour with a video sketch where the group is thinking of new ideas and they decide to rape you. Is that sketch related to your show?

[laughs] That's a good question. It actually isn't. It was just an idea that Bruce [McCulloch] had. He called me one day a couple years before that, and he told me about it. And I laughed my head off. That's when, for a couple of years, we were meeting every 4 or 5 months in Los Angeles to work on new material, because we wanted the tour to be new material. So he told me that and then for a while it looked like we weren't going to get together to do the tour. So he formed his own troupe, a Bruce McCulloch troupe. He had so many sketches he wanted to get out of his system. So he did a thing but he made it rape Bruce because it was him and 4 or 5 other people. And it was kind of funny, but I always thought in the back of my mind, Bruce isn't that funny to rape. I'm funny to rape. And then we did get back together to work on the tour. We would write new stuff Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday and perform Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Then at the end of two or three years we'd pick the best stuff. One particular week we were a little light on sketches. So I said to Bruce, "Remember that rape Bruce thing? Why don't we do that?" I didn't say rape Kevin. I didn't want to be an ego maniac. "Rape me, I'm the star!" So we start rehearsing it and then, during rehearsal, Dave [Foley], not even knowing the history the sketch, says, "You know what? it gets funnier if we rape Kevin." I'm just a funny guy to rape, I guess. So Bruce says, "Oh, that's funny, it was originally rape Kevin." And Dave says, "Oh yeah, Kevin's the guy we have to rape." I don't want to use that word so much.

Fair enough. What are some of the differences between when you guys are writing the original series and writing for that tour and Death Comes To Town?

I was going to say the writing process has evolved over the years, but it hasn't really evolved. It's just changed due to different circumstances. For example, in the mid 80's, when we were just a stage troupe, what we would do is come to the theater on rehearsal days. Each of us would have an idea, we'd tell the idea and if people didn't hate it, we'd rehearse it over and over until it was written. We never wrote anything down, we just basically wrote it through improv. And then when we got the TV show we couldn't do that. We had to have scripts and props and wardrobe, hair and make-up, and know what to do. So they introduced us to this new thing called computers and we had to actually write down the scripts. And then we started writing in groups of one or two or three. Dave and I wrote together a lot. Bruce would write with Mark [McKinney] sometimes, Scott wrote by himself. And then we started hiring more friends to write with us. I would write with Norm Hiscock. Sometimes Norm, Dave and I would write. Brian Hartt would write with Bruce, but very rarely was it more than three people. Then when we did Brain Candy, we were, all five of us, plus Norm Hishcock, in the same room. It was horrible. We could hardly turn the page unless we all agreed on the previous page, and we never ever, ever, agreed on the previous page. As I say in my one man show... So it took forever. It took fifteen months, and when we started filming, we still didn't have the last act, which was really hard and slow.

But now, Bruce has experience. He had an ABC show that he created, Carpoolers, a few years ago. He's been in charge of TV shows, so Bruce was in charge of Death Comes to Town, and basically he and I, between the charts, sort of wrote it. Scott was in there for a little bit, Dave and Mark were busy, but at the end, they put their two cents in. But basically Bruce and I -- with Bruce still being in charge -- sort of wrote it with every one's input, and that was the easiest and the quickest way to write it. I think it's really good, and I know in my heart of hearts, the best way to get Kids in the Hall stuff is to get all five of us together in units to groups. We're old men now, and we're still trying to figure out the correct process to write movies and sketches. We've got sketches down. We know how to do that. But the story process -- I think it's some meeting in different groups of two and three.

Is there anything in particular you're looking to do while you're in Austin this time around?

Uh, what's the famous street where all the cops are?

Sixth Street.

I'm bringing my girlfriend and my guitars. We're gonna go up and down Sixth Street and listen to some bands. I know what happens I'm in the back. I'm enjoying a Tex-Mex band, I go, "This is really good." Then some person from Austin recognizes me and says, "Oh man, this isn't a really good Tex-Mex band, they were good twenty years ago when they weren't trying to be a Tex-Mex band." And I say, "Well, basically I'm from Toronto. It's Tex-Mex to me."