Ahead of his Unhinged visit to the Improv Centre, Kevin McDonald reflects on standup, the One Line Premise, and teaching funny
The ever-self-effacing Kids in the Hall star still finds his happy place onstage, whether he’s in a sketch, alone, or improvising with strangers
Unhinged with Kevin McDonlad. Photo by Kevin Patrick Robbins
The Improv Centre presents Unhinged with Kevin McDonald on August 24 at 9:30 pm; tickets are sold out
IT CERTAINLY ISN’T NECESSARY, but Kevin McDonald is apologizing to Stir.
“I didn’t meant to derail it again,” he laughs. “You were on the path to the interview, I’m sorry, keep going!”
So far our call has been a chaotic affair that began with McDonald's phone refusing to work. After switching to the landline, it’s a Day at the Races with the comic actor, one of the founding members of Kids in the Hall with his writing partner Dave Foley. He sounds pretty much like any one of his high-strung characters, and he provides a raucous conversation filled with cascading asides, quips, and looping digressions about Wes Anderson, the Dutch thriller The Vanishing, and his love of old country music. Eventually we get around to asking whether or not McDonald is comfortable being billed, per his upcoming visit to the Improv Centre on August 24 and 25, as a “legend”.
“I’m not,” he says. “I’m the kind of legend—I’m not really a legend—but I’m the kind of legend where somebody will get drunk at a party and say, ‘Well you’re a legend in Canada,’ and I’ll think to myself, ‘I’m the kind of legend who has to explain who I am when I’m crossing the border.’”
As it happens, McDonald has done plenty of border crossings, racking up credits in virtually every notable title from a certain magical era of comedy: Arrested Development, Trailer Park Boys, That 70s Show, MADTV, Friends, NewsRadio, and Norm MacDonald’s lamented sitcom A Minute with Stan Hooper among them. He’s still busy with TV and film work, including 2022’s rousing reboot of Kids and a recent appearance in the CBC’s Acting Good, but after moving to Winnipeg 15 years ago, around the time he made a welcome cameo in Guy Maddin’s Keyhole, McDonald was forced, as he puts it, “to go and make a living”.
“So one of the things was standup,” he explains. “And it was hard at first. If everybody in the club was a Kids in the Hall fan then I did well. But if I played famous clubs like in San Francisco, like the Punchline—I’ll never forget that—people come just for the club, and that was tough because I was sort of doing conceptual stuff. My heroes were conceptual comics like Steve Martin and Albert Brooks, Martin Mull, Andy Kaufman, so I was sort of doing Kevin McDonald, A Guy Who Was Bad at Standup, and if you were a Kids in the Hall fan, it was hilarious, but if you weren’t, then I was just an older gentleman having trouble doing standup.”
Of course, McDonald began his sketch-comedy career in theatres in the ‘80s with partner Foley. When I happened to interview fellow Kid Scott Thompson back in 2014, he confessed that he was happiest on stage. Is this true for McDonald?
“First of all it’s totally true for Scott,” he answers. “He hasn’t had a boyfriend for 20 years, and it’s becoming true for me. And not because my life is empty and lonely, but because I moved to Winnipeg so I had to do more. I tour two or three weekends a month doing comedy and teaching workshops and it really is the one constant joy and happiness. My family, I don’t think they’re home—they make me happy too—but you’re sort of in control as much as you can be when you’re performing in front of a hundred people, or 200 people if you’re lucky. If I’m lucky. It’s the same sort of thing that comics call Stage Health, where you’re a little sick, and you go on stage, it goes away, and as soon as you get offstage the stomach ache comes back. That’s the the same with any mental problem you might be having”—he chuckles—“or life problems, or any sadness, it all disappears when you’re onstage. It’s a Disneyland of your own making, whether you’re performing with your comedy troupe, or by yourself, or improvising with strangers.”
Speaking of, McDonald’s two-day visit to the Improv Centre will feature the show Unhinged with Kevin McDonald but also two soldout workshops, including a writing class built on the “One Line Premise”—a staple of comedy writing that was honed to perfection over the course of the Kids’ original five-season run.
“For us it was very common,” he say. “Not every sketch has a one-line premise, but it’s sort of our favourite thing to do. What if. What if a guy had a cabbage for a head? What if we told a Bible story but through Dr. Seuss verse? They’re exciting.” Giggling again, he adds: “I know it sounds corny, like I’m saying this stuff for the first time, but a premise is like a seed and the sketch is like the tree—I won’t say this at the workshop, I promise—and the seed and tree are two different things. But the work in-between is the least fun part. I do say this in workshops: my second best sensation is when the sketch that we worked so hard on, we do it onstage and it kills. The best sensation is the first time you think of the idea. When you’re walking your dog and you think of the idea. That’s the most exciting part of it.”
Even on the phone, much of McDonald’s humour comes from his habitual self-effacement. His specialty has always been manic weirdos and a kind of broad physical cartoonishness—think of the Kids classics “The To Do List” or “Never Put Salt in Your Eyes"—that can be traced back to his and Foley’s love for the anarchy of the Marx Brothers, WC Fields, and Brit pioneers like the Goons. “I would say this, and nobody ever agrees with me, even people who know who he is, but arguably Spike Milligan may be the funniest person of the 20th century. But he flew too close to the sun and was crazy,” he says. McDonald refers to himself as “just sort of a schticky vaudevillian”, but spend 30 minutes talking with him and you understand that he can’t help himself. Given what’s on the schedule for Vancouver, it raises the question: can you teach funny?
“You can’t teach anyone to be funny,” he replies. “You can teach someone to be funni-er. Vancouver was big for TheatreSports in the ’80s, we did TheatreSports in Toronto, and we were only there for a year because we started doing our own show, but a lot of people got big for a couple of months with the audience, and I could tell, or at least I think I can tell—because I’m all about whether the comedian is natural or not—I could tell that a lot of these improvisers who were getting popular with the audience, they weren’t natural comedians, they were technically good improvisers and they had sort of learned the tricks, but I would always say ‘I’ll give them two months till the laughs stop,’ and that always happened.”
You were always right?
“Yeah, I’m sort of pompous.”
(He’s not remotely pompous.) 
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