TORONTO -- Mark McKinney is sitting near the stage of Toronto's Rivoli night club. It's a fitting venue for an interview about the new Kids in the Hall tour, as it's where the comedians' careers began.
As McKinney tells it, the beloved Canadian comedy troupe was struggling and on the verge of splitting up when they first started out at the Rivoli. They were performing their sketch material on Monday nights and audience numbers were critically low.
But the Rivoli owners believed in the fivesome -- which also includes Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald and Scott Thompson -- and gave them a crucial weekend slot.
"We were thinking, 'We'll do this and I guess we'll break up, because no one is showing,"' recalls McKinney.
"But then suddenly people showed and we hung on until we got scouted by Lorne Michaels and the 'Saturday Night Live' gang."
Toronto is also where the Kids filmed their subsequent sketch comedy TV series, which led to their own film and a slew of other showbiz opportunities.
It makes sense, then, that their latest tour also kicks off in the city -- this Thursday at the Danforth Music Hall.
McKinney says the North American tour will feature a mix of new and old sketches, including something with his Head Crusher character, which has always been a "fun end-of-show thing."
The vengeful character, who pretends to crush the heads of men in business suits using his index finger and thumb, was dreamed up with McDonald while they were broke and splitting a sandwich in Toronto's financial district.
"All these people in nice suits were coming in and I just started crushing heads and expressing my resentment," says McKinney.
The Chicken Lady, a randy human-fowl hybrid, is another of McKinney's most memorable characters.
He says she came out of a sketch McDonald wrote about a "circus freak who could make his nose bleed at will, but who was being badgered on his lunch hour by these kids who want to see it." When the circus freak refuses, he sends the boys to see the Chicken Lady.
"Parts of the Chicken Lady have disappeared," says McKinney. "I don't know where her feet are anymore, so we have to make them new.
"We make Chicken Lady claws by slow-drying hot glue out of a hot glue gun --I've kind of become an expert -- and then strategic placing of feathers so that hopefully some of them come off as you're stomping around the stage."
The last time the Kids in the Hall did a big tour was 2008.
They decided to do one again now simply because it worked with their hectic schedules.
"I dread it a little bit because we'll just get into the same arguments we've had since we were here in the late '80s," McKinney says with a laugh. "But creatively it's going to be a really good time."
What types of arguments?
"It's maybe a little bit more mellow than it was," he explains. "But when we give each other notes, we're the prickly men that we always have been, but it's good.
"It's always to the greater good, and I think the huge creative advantage of the troupe is that we have some sort of hive mind that fairly reliably makes the smartest, most creative, funny decision on creative stuff anyway.
"Business-wise, I think we're approaching moronical."
