"Bruce is claiming territory that deservedly is mine, which is that I'm the most modest Kid in the Hall," Mark McKinney jokes of Bruce McCulloch. "He hoards everything shamelessly!"

Feigned animosity or modesty aside, the Kids in the Hall are tight. When the legendary Canadian comedy group (whose show of the same name ran from 1989 to 1995) hit the stage of New York City's Town Hall Friday night, it was their first U.S. reunion since 2008 and marked more than 30 years since McKinney, McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Dave Foley, and Scott Thompson first came together. They're now making their way through stops in the rest of the country.

"We've never broken up," McCulloch says. "We've never stopped. I will only stop being in the band when they put me in the ground. I think this is what we started doing—performing, being in front of people, watching how weird ideas take flight, and being with our brothers—and as we get older and have had our asses kicked with life or the industry, we've come to realize how sweet a thing being able to perform together is."

Though Kids in the Hall began in 1984, it gained momentum after the guys were sent to what amounted to almost comedy boot camp by producer/SNL comedy kingpin Lorne Michaels. McCulloch says it made the Kids ready for primetime. "Lorne wanted to get us away from Toronto where our fans were," he says. "We were performing for tourists at 6:30 at night at Carolines. It was a shitstorm. I think, from that, we turned to each other. But Lorne didn't have the creative control he has with SNL, where he picks the running order and the sketches. He more gave us a space. I think he saw we were fairly formed and that we'd work hard. We did and it really paid off."

In their new tour, McCulloch says, the Kids combine new material with old gags "we have to dust off." In honor of the return and to take a look back, we asked the Kids themselves to choose their top skits, with commentary from Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, and Mark McKinney.

1. King of Empty Promises

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McCulloch: "I think that's one of the funniest things Kevin has ever done. That was one of those ideas I wished that I had thought of. The reason it's so great is that in some way it's Kevin doing a version of Kevin. It always struck me as hilarious."

McKinney: "That's probably my absolute favorite of Kevin's sketches."

2. Salty Ham

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McCulloch: "It's something I wrote together with Scott. Him doing his mom and me doing my dad. It was the first time I thought I did a really visceral character thing. There are no jokes in there, but it's funny somehow. We were doing it on tour, and I realized I could easily do it another hundred times in my life."

3. Love and Sausages

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McCulloch: "It's one of our sketches that is lauded now. The first cut of it was 11 minutes long. But you couldn't cut any of it. I think it was one of our coolest style or surreal pieces. I wanted to be a filmmaker, and that's what they do, right? Make stuff look Eastern European. There was, again, no joke. We were just going into a weird world we'd created. I wish we had done more of that."

MacDonald: "I think this sketch was important because it showed that we didn't always go for a laugh every second."

4. Headcrusher (Hospital)

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McKinney: "Headcrusher hit right away and it was kind of like, 'Oh, wow!' We'd never had that. It was at the very first screening of the very first taping of our special for HBO. It actually took a while for the audience to find us, and we were in fact canceled at the end of our first year by HBO. But there used to be these things called the Ace Awards and we got a bunch of nominations for the awards, and then I won for Headcrusher. Somehow Lorne was able to engineer that into us getting picked back up. So I was on to do a couple more Headcrushers even though I didn't really feel great about some of them. But then I remember when the hospital one came I just felt really great about the character again. We were learning how to use the camera, which we didn't really know our first year. We were learning angles and cutting and narrative compression, all these sorts of things that just made the comedy better and what we had in our heads. It was sweet-funny, which is weird for the character. It was something that I created back in our club days. Kevin and I were having lunch and we were broke. I think we were splitting a sandwich. We were feeling really poor, and we were having lunch in an area of Toronto called Bay Street which is kind of like Wall Street, so there were a lot of people in very expensive suits all around us talking loud, and I just started crushing their heads, like, 'You think you so good? I crush your head!' And we immediately thought it was really funny."

5. Sex Girl Patrol

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McKinney: "I did Sex Girl Patrol for a number of reasons. It was very free. And I liked the music. We got a guy who was the voiceover guy for a local indie television station. He had this famous basso voice, and I love the song. It's one of my favorites because on that one, I came up with the title before the Kids TV show when Bruce and I were writing for Saturday Night Live. When we got back to Toronto, I started thinking it would make a funny B-movie parody. But I learned a lesson. It's very hard to do a B-movie parody. The thing that makes a B-movie so great is that it's not very good actors honestly trying their very best. That's what makes a great B-movie. And I think, in a way, they're unmockable. But the sketch was a lot of fun. And I love the deus ex machina ending of the evil preacher getting killed by a caveman."

6. Comfortable

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McCulloch: "It's a suburban sketch that we are doing on this tour because I lobbied for it. It's basically the perversion of the pretense of normality. It's one of those sketches that starts on a slow burn and keeps going. It's not filthy, but it gets dirty. It gets to where you can't believe they're doing it, but they're doing it. Often I'd be sitting backstage listening and thinking, 'Oh my God, how am I going to follow this sketch?' It's great to really take your time and build to something. You don't open on a huge laugh generally. You start something and just go from there, and that's more satisfying."

McKinney: "We're still screwing around with the ending, because there's so much intense sex action happening on the dining room table. It's one thing when you can cut away from it on TV, but we're still trying to find the balance to get to the ending where my character blurts out some innocent little white lie and then pays the social price. We're still kicking around the ending for that. I think we may have found an ending for it, but you'll have to come see us to find out."

7. Cabbage Head

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McCulloch: "In that period where we were tapped by Lorne, we did come up with Cabbage Head and Headcrusher after about six months of being unhappy and unproductive. For me, it was one of those things where I'm putting my stuff on the list with a bold idea and performance. The genesis of it was not being outrageous. I consider myself a feminist. The genesis was how I couldn't believe how my beautiful then-girlfriend couldn't be in a restaurant without assholes hitting on her. I flipped the script on a kind of feminist notion, and it became a quite misogynist sketch. But I loved what it became and just how weird it was."

8. Dr. Seuss Bible

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McCulloch: "It was from a title I came up with, which I did a lot. I don't remember that they wanted it to be censored in the U.S., but that's what I'm told. We had also done Naked for Jesus right before that, which originated as a stage sketch where we'd walk out naked. Now there are a lot of cameraphones. I loved the crucifixion machine, which one guy had to handle alone. It was a huge machine and afterward I took it home with me, and it was gigantic. It filled up the entire atrium of the building of a woman I was living with. I ended up leaving her and leaving behind my crucifixion machine."

9. Chicken Lady (Homecoming)

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McKinney: "Chicken Lady Homecoming, I think, is the most fun Chicken Lady sketch. Everybody was involved in it and it had a really good premise and ended with a twist. It was a really fun time to explore the character. I love when Bruce is thrown into a room blindfolded, and Scott is being the vulgar stepfather. But everybody's great in it. Dave, with his line, 'I suppose I should leave you alone so's you can kill it' and me playing my own father, a guy who's actually fucked a chicken! So I like it. It's dense and funny. The genesis was another happy interlude with Kevin. He had written a really funny sketch where he was playing a circus freak who can make his nose bleed at will. He's gone into therapy and is now putting up boundaries so he doesn't have to work on his lunch hour. He's being badgered by these kids to make his nose bleed, and he's obviously been in therapy and is saying, 'I do not have to do this, I'm my own person, I have a right to enjoy my lunch hour.' Finally, the kids get him so upset that his nose starts bleeding. And he starts screaming at them to go see the Chicken Lady. When we presented it somebody said, 'Should we see the Chicken Lady?' I said, 'Let me take a crack at it.' I put together the costume and I found myself in the costume and the voice came. When the voice came, it was a really good voice, and it started telling me everything I knew about her, and everything that everybody else now knows about her."

McCulloch: "I think there's something about watching Mark and the way he inhabits a character that is unbelievably unique. Chicken Lady came to him, he rehearsed it, and then for a long time he drove around all crazy because he wanted to rehearse what a chicken would bawk like. But I think it came out of him fairly formed and I think it's one of his best things."

10. Citizen Kane

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McKinney: "Dave and Kevin have about five of these which are just perfect little mechanical premises. They do one on the current tour called Imaginary Girlfriend and it's just unbelievable how good they are. They're the most Pythonic sketches, in a way, because they have a really good layer of absurd, but they're also just smart and well-executed. I'm talking about the writing, never mind the performance. And they enjoy each other so much. Citizen Kane is especially funny because everybody's had that argument taken to the nth degree."

Jeff Slate Jeff Slate is a New York City-based songwriter and journalist who has contributed music and culture articles to Esquire since 2013.

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