Kevin McDonald is bringing his very personal one-man show, Hammy and the Kids, to Winnipeg this weekend.

“It’s one of those great one man shows about their drunk dads,” the comedian said with a laugh over coffee last week.

The self-described “least popular Kid in the Hall” has a history of putting his personal insecurities on display.

“During the first season we started to get fan-mail. Bruce [McCulloch] would get letters that would say ‘Bruce, you’re such a sexy dark poet I love you, let’s have sex’ and Dave [Foley] would have fan letters that would be like ‘You’re so cute, can I marry you?’ and I would always get fan letters that would be like ‘Kevin you seem like a nice guy, can you tell Dave that I love him?’” the 47-year-old joked.

He describes his one-man show as follows:

“It’s really about my twenties, my drunk dad and trying to make it with the comedy group that is generally known as The Kids in the Hall.”

McDonald first tackled his experience of growing up with alcoholism in a Kids in the Hall sketch titled “Daddy Drank,” in which Dave Foley comically played McDonald’s father waking him up at night while drunk.

“This is an hour-and-twenty-minute version of that sketch,” joked McDonald.

McDonald explained that although Foley’s version of his father seemed overtly comical at the time, much of his lines in that sketch were real things that McDonald’s father said.

“See my dad, he didn’t know that he was funny, though he said things that were really funny, but he didn’t have that sense of irony to know that. He was just funny by accident.”

McDonald first performed the show in February 2007 at the UCB Theatre in Los Angeles, where he has resided since 1996. He’s since taken it to Calgary, Vancouver, New York and Iowa City.

McDonald also reunited with the four other members of The Kids in the Hall over the summer to shoot a new mini-series, Death Comes to Town, for CBC.

“We play like four or five characters each. It’s part murder mystery, part everything,” McDonald said.

The Kids in the Hall, whose show Spin once called “the most subversive material ever performed on television,” will be taking a less crass approach when they return to the airwaves this January.

“There’s one disgusting thing in it. But mostly it’s less crass, like Brain Candy [the troupe’s 1996 movie] was less crass because we were writing a story. Don’t blame CBC if it’s less crass, they would’ve gone with whatever,” McDonald explained.

“There’s one thing that will be very offensive to many, many people,” hinted McDonald.

As for Hammy and the Kids, McDonald said that he is excited to try it on a Winnipeg audience.

“An audience is like one big fat guy, and Winnipeg’s a fat guy whose laughter you have to earn. There’s no easy laughs in Winnipeg.”

Published in Volume 64, Number 11 of The Uniter (November 12, 2009)