More is more for The Kids in the Hall

Catch three Kids out of the hall, but trapped in an airport shuttle together, and you still get a sense of what keeps them going.

Instead of letting their TV sketch show of the late 1980s rest in its cult legend, the five original members of The Kids in the Hall reconvene every few years to visit places such as Treasure Island, where they play Friday.

“The tour is a good excuse for us to be forced into a room together and forced to spend some time together and remember that we like making each other laugh,” Dave Foley says at one juncture.

Cars work too. Foley has put his phone on speaker and let his ride-sharing colleagues, Mark McKinney and Scott Thompson, jump in for some riffing, which ensures no serious answers will emerge from what’s left of a ride to a Chicago hotel.

Even three out of the five — with Bruce McCulloch and Kevin McDonald apparently in another vehicle — will remind you of the troupe’s strength in numbers. Each of the quintet has a solid career, but none reached the fame of Will Ferrell, Chris Rock or other “Saturday Night Live” superstars.

“The most difficult thing is pretending you have a very packed schedule,” Thompson quips.

McKinney piles right on. “It was particularly challenging to Scott to pretend that he didn’t need this professionally, financially and emotionally. To hit that note of indifference when we’re sort of arguing about what we’re going to do … he gets the best actor award.”

McKinney is part of an NBC pilot for “Superstore,” an ensemble comedy about employees of a big-box store. “I was legitimately busy, in development on a couple of TV shows, but the thrill of putting a loaded gun in my mouth was starting to wear off so I knew it was time to get out on the road again.”

“I had to pretend to be touring with ‘Body Worlds,’ as in the exhibit,” Foley says.

The sketch format of “Kids,” which aired first on Canadian TV from 1988 through 1994, resembled that of “Saturday Night Live.” But it was more akin to its fellow Canadian “SCTV,” from the northern branch of The Second City, in staging its sketches with subdued, cinematic detail that created a darker surrealism.

And then there’s that penchant for doing sketches in drag.

It’s the kind of comedy that doesn’t age once you get past the fashions and the phones, and creates a lingering cult following. The new tour includes favorite characters: Thompson’s introspective Buddy Cole, McKinney’s “head-crushing” Mr. Tizick.

But, as Foley notes, “the fact that we’re doing a lot of material that was not in the TV show cuts down on the amount of people doing the lines with us.”

“If they’re mouthing to a sketch they’ve never seen before because we’re doing it new on the tour, then they’re pretty damn good,” McKinney adds.

Foley has proven to be an insightful stand-up comic since 2013’s “Relatively Well.”

“The main difference is that touring with the Kids is a lot more fun,” he says. “When stand-up goes badly it feels really terrible, but when it goes great it still just feels OK.”

“And you’re alone,” McKinney adds.

“But The Kids in the Hall, even when it goes horribly it still feels pretty good, because I’m with the other Kids in the Hall,” Foley adds.

Simply put, “I think we all get kind of an itch to be The Kids in the Hall every few years,” Foley says.

“First off, we’ll be making each other laugh, and sometimes that will spur an idea for something to do in the future,” he explains. “But we also will talk about what we want to do as a group in the future. That’ll happen at some point during this tour. The 2008 tour spawned the miniseries we did called ‘Death Comes to Town.’ ”

The five also worked on the logistics of traveling light.

“Last spring we figured out (how to) take a show out on the road without having to travel with large video screens, set pieces and props,” Foley explains. “Our tour used to be two tour buses and an 18-wheeler out on the road. This tour we’ve tried to strip down to just a bunch of suitcases. Very much getting back to our early days. The audiences seem to like it just as much.”

The rare exception to the usual Kids in the Hall rule that more is always more.

Read more from Mike Weatherford at bestoflasvegas.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com.