By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Sun-Times
December 6, 1991
“I crush your head. I crush your head. You’re a flathead!”
So cries the Head Crusher, a Brylcreemed loser in plaid pants and thick glasses who whiles away his days air-pinching victims’ heads between his thumb and forefinger.
Without his dork outfit on, comedian Mark McKinney almost is unrecognizable to those who know him as the Head Crusher. Tall, slim and good looking, McKinney laughs about the role that has helped his comedic troupe, the Kids in the Hall, win both mainstream laughs and critical kudos.
“Everyone says I look nothing like him, but I think we are a lot alike physically, which is pretty sad,” McKinney said. “We’re both really geeky.”
Not.
These Kids get mash notes from fans who are enamored with more than the way the men execute pratfalls. Young, witty and irreverent, the Kids in the Hall have groupies back home in Canada, where their series “The Kids in the Hall” is taped. The comedians will kick off their third season at 11 p.m. tonight on HBO. New episodes will be shown every Friday night at 11, with reruns airing throughout the week.
Their skits are both funny and disturbing and touch on subjects that would frighten most network sponsors: There’s the Chicken Lady (the love child of a farmer and his hen), who runs phone-sex lines. The Cabbage Head is a cigar-smoking would-be Don Juan who uses his leafy head to get pity dates. And there’s Simon, a high-pitched, unsure Satan, and his cherubic manservant Hecabus. These Kids are not quite all right, but they’re funny as anything.
“We got a lot of our ideas for skits from the days when we were really broke,” McKinney said. “(Fellow Kid) Kevin (McDonald) and I would be like, `You get a dollar and I’ll get a dollar and we’ll go sit in a restaurant until they throw us out.’ One time we were in a place full of yuppies, and I started crushing heads because I was angry that they had money and I didn’t. That became the genesis for the Head Crusher.”
The son of diplomat parents, McKinney recalled growing up in the expatriate community of Paris “as a short, skinny Canadian kid amongst all these milk-fed American kids.” He dropped out of college, hooked up with fellow troupe member Bruce McCulloch and performed avant-garde comedy, which included several skits done in the buff.
Before the Kids were given the go-ahead to develop their series for HBO, McKinney and McCulloch spent a creative internship as writers for “Saturday Night Live.” (Both shows feature Lorne Michaels
as executive producer.)
And while learning what kind of comedy worked in the United States, the comics developed characters who would show up on their show several years down the line, like Darrell (pronounced Do-Ril), the ultra-polite Eurotrash cocktail party fly who wears a tiny ponytail and a tight smile.
“We learned a lot just by living in New York, but we ultimately didn’t change our comedy to fit the States,” McKinney said. “I think when you start making really calculated moves like that, you just lose your edge. And trust me, we don’t have much edge to work with anyhow.”
