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Kid in the (Vanier) Hall

When the cosmic names of Canadian comedians is written in the stars, Bruce McCulloch's name will be somewhere near the top. In a nation known almost as much for comedy as it is for hockey, that's saying something significant.
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Bruce McCulloch and Atticus Mitchell appear in a scene from shown in a scene from the television show Young Drunk Punk.

When the cosmic names of Canadian comedians is written in the stars, Bruce McCulloch's name will be somewhere near the top. In a nation known almost as much for comedy as it is for hockey, that's saying something significant.

Of course the Kids In The Hall is what he's known for best, that quintet of comedians who dominated the sketch comedy airwaves in the 1990s in the same way Monty Python, Royal Canadian Air Farce and In Living Color once did in their times and places.

But McCulloch also has a notable presence in culture far beyond Kids In The Hall.

As a film director, he was at the helm for movies like Dog Park (starring Natasha Henstridge and Luke Wilson), Stealing Harvard (starring Jason Lee and Tom Green) and Superstar (starring Molly Shannon and Will Ferrell).

As a writer, he worked on Saturday Night Live and Carpoolers, for example.

As an actor, he has appeared in numerous television shows and film projects, some of them his own and some of them the work of others.

His latest success is the TV series Young Drunk Punk, a comedy show about growing up in suburban row-housing in Calgary.

"I literally filmed it in the old townhouse I grew up in," McCulloch told The Citizen during a phone conversation from his home in the Hollywood Hills. "I was sort of observing what I would call the acid years from Grade 7 to when I moved out after high school. It was fascinating to be back in the community I'd been in and also to play the dad to my theoretical son, and what that meant. I think sometimes people render dads like they are these jerks, and our dads are all troubled, but they are just as lost as we are, and I think when you're young you don't realize they are giving advice that they are just kind of making up. That's kind of what I wanted to do with that character and that thing, and now that I have children of my own it is easier to think 'what were my parents like?' and 'what would that be like?' and we're all just people. You know?"

McCulloch has been a lot of people. He's been new-wave rocker Tammy, he's been annoying factoid boy Gavin, he's been a talking cabbage and a flying pig.

The sketch comedian has almost no personification borders.

"I think I write sketches better than anything else," he said.

"It's funny, I've taught writing workshops and I find it easy to do that for film scripts or television scripts but I have a hard time even describing how you write a sketch, I think because it is a weird little idea that has to be true to itself. And it can be one minute or five minutes.

"A good sketch is like a pop song: it kind of moves and then ends, and all your weird ideas can be in there. You don't have to ask yourself 'would the character really do that?' And it's fun."

It's both a solo and a group activity. With SNL and Kids In The Hall both, there was a lot of collaboration over sketch scenarios, and a lot of times the ideas thrown on the table were ones each writer cooked up on their own.

Even describing that process turned into a multi-character sketch when McCulloch explained.

"I loved, always, the gunslinger approach. Which was: Whattya got? Whattya got? You holding something? 'Well, I've got one little idea.' Or you're just staring at each other, and nobody's got anything, but then this idea will come up."

So, as you can plainly see, the life of a successful working comedian is really the end result of being a successful working writer.

That's especially true for what McCulloch is doing this week in Prince George. Yet another facet of his storied career is standup comedy, and he'll be doing his latest one-man show at Vanier Hall on Friday night.

"I got in trouble because I did a show in Los Angeles last night and I did a piece where we auctioned off the naming rights to our dog and the highest bidder was the KKK. It was a pretty funny piece, but my daughter didn't understand that it wasn't true," he said, some real empathy seeping out of his famously deadpan voice.

He has computer files full of joke ideas, sketch notions, concept nuggets for TV shows or movies.

He pulls them out as needed, like the dog-naming auction. The pressure of the moment dictates a lot of his creative process.

"Yeah, interesting you should say that," he said. "There is nothing like the focus of doing a live show. I'm juggling four different TV projects, but there is nothing like the day and night of a show. It's so special."

There was a recent reunion tour of the Kids In The Hall, but it didn't come to Prince George.

He joked that he was the first to come here on his own but the others (Dave Foley, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, and Scott Thompson) would have to do the same, so we'd get the Kids one by one.

He did not rule out another reunion tour, however. In fact, he said he essentially expected it.

The inspiration and enjoyment of the Kids comes in waves for all of them, he said, and he was just waiting for the next wave.

There weren't any personality conflicts or Kids fatigue for any of the cast members, just a desire to keep life fresh.

For McCulloch, there's a new TV show concept he's just sold to a subsidiary company of NBC, and he is enjoying a musical comedy exercise he's been doing with Craig Northey (of rock band The Odds) that has been suggested they turn into a tour. He is busy and in a creative flow.

That spills out on the stage of Vanier Hall on Friday night at

7 p.m. Prince George comedians Mike McGuire (the evening's emcee), Virginia O'Dine and Jonathon McMillan will also be involved, as will tour-wide opener Brian Connelly.

Tickets are available at Studio 2880 and online at the Metro Comedy Circuit page on Facebook.