The Kids in the Hall was “a Canadian sketch comedy TV series that aired for five seasons from 1988 to 1995, starring the comedy troupe The Kids in the Hall. The troupe, consisting of comedians Dave Foley, Kevin McDonald, Bruce McCulloch, Mark McKinney, and Scott Thompson, appeared as almost all the characters throughout the series, both male and female, and also wrote most of the sketches.” (Source: Wikipedia)
I watched the series for the humor and more importantly, to see the males impersonating females – the same reasons I watched Monty Python's Flying Circus. I preferred Monty Python’s humor to The Kids in the Hall’s humor. However, when it came to female impersonation, there was no contest; I greatly preferred The Kids in the Hall to Monty Python.
Monty Python parodied women, whereas The Kids in the Hall femulated women. Their femulations were so good that they could pass among the civilians if they desired.
In his review of the Kids' film Brain Candy, Roger Ebert notes that the female characters in the film ‘are played “straight,” in the sense that we’re supposed to relate to them as women, not men in drag.’ Mia Steinle on Canonball blog observes that the troupe’s humour derives not from the fact that these are men in dresses, but rather that ‘situations involving women can be just as funny as situations involving men.’ For instance, the recurring ‘Kathie and Cathy’ sketches, featuring Bruce McCulloch and Scott Thompson as the titular secretaries, tend to work via character comedy, playing Kathie’s flustered giddiness off against Cathy’s sarcastic confidence.
This conforms to the views expressed by the various Kids in interview regarding the way they performed as women. Scott Thompson states that they were not ‘winking at the audience’ […] these were playing ‘real women’, not ‘drag queens’. Bruce McCulloch relates their ease of playing women to the fact that the troupe is composed of as he puts it ‘feminine guys’. Kevin McDonald corroborates this opinion by explaining that because he’s a ‘feminine guy’, it makes it easier for him to become a ‘masculine woman.’
What is interesting here is that the Kids position themselves in opposition to the strategies adopted by ‘drag queens’ who are assumed by them to be ‘fake women’. If Monty Python often adopted the same costumes – permed grey wigs, handbags, etc. –in order to represent types, the Kids’ costumes... are impressively varied. Strapless dresses; wedding dresses; jumpers; denim miniskirts; boots; t-shirts; pyjamas; waist-coats; trousers; the costumes often accentuated by subtle make-up techniques and convincing wigs.
The rhetoric the Kids adopt indicates that they place gender on a spectrum to be performed – thus it is possible for a feminine man to move a few notches to become a masculine woman – rather than a binary system under which gender simply flips between male and female. This rhetoric by which the Kids are keen to demonstrate that they play women as women would do often results in them positioning themselves against the notion of drag. Dave Foley interviewed by Fred Topel about (the Kids’ film) Death Comes to Town makes this clear: ‘We kept working with our makeup and hair and wardrobe to get it as far away from drag as possible. We didn’t want to look like drag queens and we didn’t want to look at (sic.) men in dresses.’
When, in Mother Camp, an older performer critiques a younger boy’s drag performance, for ‘looking too much like a real woman,’ this is a critique I can imagine the Kids embracing as a great compliment and solidifying their position against drag.
The five indented paragraphs above are from an essay written by Adam Whybray titled “‘I'm Crushing Your Binaries!’ Drag in Monty Python and Kids in the Hall.” I urge you to read the entire essay if you are interested in Monty Python versus The Kids in the Hall femulating; it is excellent.
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| Wearing St. John |
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| Bob Seagren femulating in a 1977 episode of television’s Soap You can view the episode on dailymotion. |
