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The Kids and the Hall in their younger days, from left, Scott Thompson, Bruce McCulloch, Mark McKinney, Dave Foley and Kevin McDonald,Erik Christensen/The Globe and Mail

Kids today.

"People now tend to do things with the available technology," Mark McKinney says. "They'll text if they're going to be two hours late to rehearsals. It's courteous – it's a level of courtesy the troupe never really enjoyed in its time here."

When McKinney says "here," he's referring to the Rivoli, the famed club and restaurant on Toronto's Queen Street West, where the dark comedy of the Kids in the Hall troupe caught its groove and was discovered in the mid-1980s. We're sitting on the front patio, chatting a lot about then and now. The Kids will open a North American tour this week with four shows at the Danforth Music Hall, more than 30 years after the group originally came together.

"We get along better than ever," the 55-year-old Ottawa native says. And that is in reference to the well-known fractious nature of the Kids in the past. The filming of the 1996 feature Brain Candy produced enough inner-group drama that the troupe broke up after completion of that (strange and underrated) movie. Since then, occasional tours have served to help knit the fabric of the Kids back together.

The new revue – a more polished version of 2013's appropriately named Rusty and Ready reunion – will feature sketches new and old, with revisits from well-known characters such as McKinney's head-crushing misanthrope and his awkwardly orgasmic female fowl.

So, the question, why is the Chicken Lady crossing the road? Drumstick please … "There's nothing else that gives me the same kind of thrill," McKinney says, wiping a bit of potato and ham soup from his chin. "And know that we're old enough to realize what a luxury it is to have a comedy troupe that you get to do this thing with, it's fantastic."

Answering a question about the early days, McKinney goes on a bit – about the Kids always wanting to impress each other first and foremost, about the game of creative one-upmanship they played as writers, about the path to stardom being "grey and foggy" back then. "Did I just ramble way off topic?" McKinney then says, re-establishing eye contact. "Did you ask me what time it was?"

It is 2015.

The current tour poster shows the five comedians – Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, David Foley, Scott Thompson and McKinney, the tallest member – all swallowed whole by ironic turtleneck sweaters. These are middle-aged men. "We are dry cleaning our cabbage heads and girdles," McCulloch tweeted earlier this year, upon the tour announcement.

The Kids in the Hall television series ran from 1988 to '94, when the guys were thin, weird and hungry. (Weren't we all?) McKinney, greying, bespectacled and sensibly apparelled, is no longer any spring chicken. The old characters and sketches, however, have aged well, given the non-topical nature of the material.

(That the Kids' material wasn't ripped from the headlines doesn't mean the group wasn't reacting to the absurdities of its time. Coming off the conservatism of the Reagan era and compared with unadventurous network fare such as The Cosby Show, the Kids' HBO-and-CBC-carried surrealism was automatically fresh and edgy. "Our stuff wasn't out there yet," McKinney says, "but it seemed obvious to us that it should be.")

If their comedy has aged gracefully, there is the question of the troupe's drag characters. "It's a little harder now," McKinney admits, sharing his spring rolls with his publicist and interviewer. "I could pass when I was 27. I was a good-looking blonde."

McKinney still gets noticed, though. Fans approach him, asking for their skulls to be squashed, he says. If he is no longer turning heads, then, he is crushing them. Minds are blown in the process – Kids will be Kids, after all.

The Kids in the Hall play Toronto, April 23 to 26; Hamilton, April 27; Calgary, May 18; Edmonton, May 19; Vancouver, May 20; Winnipeg, May 22; Ottawa, May 24.

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