By Andreas Kessaris for Curtains Up! (@AKessaris)
“…I realized that, even though I had been a young a**hole, I was right. No one should ever go to Drumheller.”
-Bruce McCulloch (from Let’s Start a Riot)
In 1988 a void existed in broadcast comedy/variety, with SCTV long gone and Saturday Night Live just beginning to become watchable again. Times had changed. The iconoclast stars who made a name for themselves on the aforementioned programs had moved on to movies; their outlandish comedy was now the norm, and they were now absorbed into the establishment. When The Kids in the Hall television show debuted on the CBC (and on HBO in the U.S.) it was the beginning of a sort of renaissance. There was something special about those five young men: They were fresh, edgy, and cool. And they had attitude. It was almost as if they didn’t care if you thought they were humorous or not; they were going to do it their way! Dave Foley, Mark McKinney, Kevin McDonald, Bruce McCulloch and Scott Thompson became Canada’s answer to Monty Python.
Since going off the air in the mid-nineties, members of the legendary troupe have separately tried their hands at a number of different endeavours, to varying degrees of success (truly The Kids in the Hall was their “first, best destiny”), and occasionally reunited for Kids in the Hall live tours, as well as projects like the feature film Brain Candy and the miniseries Death Comes to Town (also with varying degrees of success).
Now Bruce McCulloch, the eccentric, diminutive actor, writer and director behind characters like the verbose Schoolchild Gavin, Cabbage Head, and the Flying Pig, has turned his experiences into the new book Let’s Start a Riot: How a Young Drunk Punk Became a Hollywood Dad.
Make no mistake: Let’s Start a Riot is not a structured memoir or serious autobiography, but rather an uneven, loosely structured series of stories, ideas, poems, musings and anecdotes about McCulloch’s personal life and career.
McCulloch’s style is not unlike that of a television and film comedy writer. The sentences are short and simple and the narrative, which for the most part lacks any real flow or pacing, is peppered with sardonic one-liners that at times make for frustrating reading, especially because the author is intelligent with interesting things to say, and he has some original observations. Writing like that may work in scripts or on the comedy stage, but one expects more in a book.
That being said, Let’s Start a Riot is for the most part an enjoyable read (I was never really bored or disinterested), and the book contains several good punchlines and payoffs, with numerous funny passages that made me laugh out loud, and the occasional honest, memorable one that made me think.
Overall Let’s Start a Riot is a decent effort and does have its moments, but would be of limited appeal to anyone who is not a fan of The Kids in the Hall or McCulloch.
