Comedian Bruce McCulloch, right, an executive producer of Canadian sketch comedy series, The Dessert, with the show’s co-creator Shane Cunningham.Supplied
Less than one minute into the sharp new Canadian sketch comedy show The Dessert, two men on a park bench are shown kissing passionately. Nothing scandalous here – it’s 2023.
One of the executive producers attached to the Crave original series is Bruce McCulloch, a member of the illustrious Kids in the Hall troupe, which had a self-titled sketch show on CBC from 1988 to 1995. Would casual homoeroticism been cool back then?
“Sure,” McCulloch says. “I think I kissed Scott Thompson as many times as I kissed my wife. In fact, I believe I kissed all the guys.”
But that was different. The kissing characters back then would have involved one of the Kids playing a woman. “Oh, you might be right,” the 62-year-old Edmonton native allows, speaking on a Zoom call recently.
We live in a different era today, obviously. Where The Kids in the Hall was carried over the air, The Dessert is streamed, beyond the reach of Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications censors. Full frontal nudity happens in The Dessert, just as it did on last year’s one-season revival of The Kids in the Hall carried on Prime Video.
And where the five Kids are all white men, the cast of The Dessert (Shane Cunningham, Isabella Campbell and Jillian Smart) is more diverse.
The story of the Kids in the Hall, a band of five bass players
One of the more subtle differences between the two shows, however, is the length of the sketches. A typical Kids show featured eight of them. But in the first episode of The Dessert, 11 sketches are squeezed into 20 minutes at breakneck pace. “They’re frenetic,” McCulloch says of The Dessert creators Cunningham, Jonathan Popalis and Mike Veerman. “That’s just the way their brains work.”
It is the way most everybody’s brains work today. Such things as theatre, pop songs and baseball games are shorter now, and attention spans are narrower. “I call it TikTokification,” says Cunningham. “We kept that in mind. We didn’t want to hang around too long with the sketches.”
The result is a punchy blitz of often edgy comedy that includes (but is not limited to) bathroom humour, Robert De Niro laughs, banana-peel fun and vasectomy gags. The show, which bears the influence of Netflix’s I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson and, yes, the veteran McCulloch and the rest of the Kids.
“I grew up watching them,” says Cunningham, 40. “Before them, I thought you had to be silly, like Jim Carrey and Robin Williams. The Kids in the Hall made me realize you don’t always have to be begging for laughs to get a laugh, and that sometimes you don’t even need people to laugh at all.”
McCulloch was brought to The Dessert by another of the show’s executive producers, Max Kerman, lead singer of Hamilton-based rock band the Arkells. Though McCulloch downplays his role in the series – “I try to lead from behind,” he says – Cunningham calls him the “Rick Rubin of comedy,” a reference to the American music producer and longhaired mystic.
“Bruce’s notes helped reshape the show,” Cunningham says. “He’s got the magic touch.”
The Dessert's Jillian Smart and Isabella Campbell.Supplied
Not that McCulloch can create anything out of thin air. Mentioning a possible Kids in the Hall movie, he suggests the problem of financing it could be solved by crowdfunding. “It would allow us the freedom we want,” he says.
Crowdsourcing for seed money is a relatively new development in the filmmaking business. It certainly was not available for the Kids when they made 1996′s Brain Candy, which The Globe and Mail just named the fifth greatest Canadian comedy ever made. It bombed at the box office, though, and the Kids battled with the film’s distributor, Paramount Pictures.
More immediately, McCulloch is touring his one-man show, Tales of Bravery and Stupidity, and taking part in the upcoming adult animated comedy series Paralegal. One of Paralegal’s creator is Tim Blair, a collaborator of McCulloch’s on the 2019-2022 CBC sketch series TallBoyz.
Later this month, McCulloch revisits the old Kids in the Hall haunt the Rivoli club in Toronto for two nights of comedy with the Kids’ Kevin McDonald.
The through line for all this?
“As I get older, I’m just trying to find reasons to be with the people I love,” McCulloch says. “And the best possible way to do that is to create something.”