The aggressively stupid, dryly

intellectual world of Paul Bellini

When The Kids in the Hall offered a man in a towel as a prize to audience members, little did viewers know that the somewhat plumpish trophy was Paul Bellini, an unseen but vital member of the one-hour weekly comedy show’s writing staff.

Invented in his living room

Without his help, jesting characters like Buddy Cole, the tinseled Toronto bar owner, would not exist as they do now. ‘Characters like Buddy were virtually invented in my living room,’ Bellini explains. He and Scott Thompson, well-known cast member and a friend, often worked at fleshing out their unparalleled characters. ‘The work that Scott and I were doing was very unique. We got into a system where he’d come over to my house and we would set up a circumstance and basically build a character. I would shoot the whole thing on video and then we would watch and watch and watch it, laugh at our jokes and boil it down into monologues.’

How it all began

But how did this man get to work on this popular show produced by New York-based Broadway Video International, which airs on cbc and is now in its second year on cbs?

It all began at the Rivoli, a cafe and club on Queen Street in Toronto, where The Kids in the Hall comedy troupe used to perform live. A younger Bellini could often be found sticking around, waiting for Thompson, a friend since York University student days.

Posters

‘I started by doing posters. I still have most of them,’ recalls Bellini. ‘Scott would commission me to do a poster and I’d get free admission (to the show). My one resolve was that I would never pay to attend a Kids show, so I always made sure I’d get some kind of work. My sister’s boyfriend had a video camera; I’d borrow it and go to the Rivoli and tape their shows, which were very sloppy, funny, improvised messes. So I got to know them gradually.’

Determination

It was Bellini’s determination to work with the troop, even without credit or pay, that eventually got him a place with the crew. ‘When it came time to do a tv show, I was elected to be their assistant. I was very pleased, very honored, but I was a terrible assistant. It became apparent that if I was going to be kept on the show they’d have to find me another job.’ So they did.

When the group was commissioned to do a second season, they decided to hire writers, and even though he was a complete novice, Bellini was drafted.

One could easily assume he fell into this field through contacts and luck, but Bellini disagrees. ‘From when I was a very young child I was always a writer. I wrote short stories, I’d enter contests. I always used to say, `I want to be a journalist.’ I wrote for several student newspapers, I edited three yearbooks in high school – I was always kind of inclined in that direction.’

After four years on the air, the jokes are still funny and the ideas fresh. But where does all the material come from? ‘From anywhere, everywhere, from people you know, from dreams, from just the ability to do a certain voice. It’s always different because they’re character comedians. Once a character is established, a lot of what the writers do is try to think of different situations to put that character in. Most of it is exploring (the character).’

And so we get back to Buddy Cole, one of Bellini and Thompson’s most popular creations. ‘It was very hard, at least in the mid-eighties, to put a gay character in front of a straight audience. One of the only ways to do it was to make him a lisping stereotype. What we wanted to do was make sure that lisping stereotype had something funny to say. We became very concerned with monologues being tightly written, very dense, packed with jokes and ideas. And the way to do that was to improvise for three hours and then take the best five minutes,’ says Bellini.

‘Almost immediate hit’

Unsure of how the audience would react to this character, the outcome was surprisingly pleasing. ‘I think the initial reaction was quite good because the first monologue was about going to Baghdad, Iraq. It was all about remembering a romance, so there was nothing really appalling in it and it was almost an immediate hit.’

Packed with gay-themed and other unconventional material, censorship became a great concern to the group, especially in the u.s.

‘Became uptight’

‘It was cbs that became very uptight about what they put on the air, for the wierdest reasons too,’ says Bellini. ‘I remember at one point they were worried about a Simon and (manservant) Hecubus scene because one of their sponsors, Procter & Gamble, had been under fire because their symbol is a little moon with a star and someone said it was like a devil worship affiliation. They were worried that the evil, evil Kevin (McDonald, one of the Kids who plays an inept `lord and master of the pit of ultimate darkness’) stuff was going to somehow reflect badly on them. There’s a lot of nutso thinking in America when it comes to broadcasting.’

According to Bellini, cbc used to censor much of their language until Thompson revolted against the corporation for airing The Larry Sanders Show uncensored. ‘I remember Scott was enraged that cbc would have the nerve to bleep our show and yet air an American product uncensored.’

U.S. popularity

Unlike other Canadian comedy troop shows like codco, Four on the Floor and The Royal Canadian Air Farce, The Kids in the Hall has achieved North America-wide popularity. Bellini reflects on why that is so. ‘Initially, the idea, not our idea but I think Lorne Michaels’ idea, was a show that could export to the American audiences.

‘They also wanted us to cover American cities. Instead of saying `Toronto,’ we’d say `Cincinnati.’ It became apparent to us, almost immediately, that we didn’t have to do that. We didn’t have to pretend to be American. And the show still sells. I mean, we were on hbo for three years. We have been on Comedy Central for about two years now.’

Bellini says other Canadian comedy shows can’t export on this level because their material is too regional or topical.

The youth of the cast may also play a small, intentional part in the show’s success. ‘It’s kind of like the marketing of Menudo or The Bay City Rollers. They were cute when they were young and girls wanted to see them,’ says Bellini. ‘I mean, if you saw our fan mail, you’d be freaked. Some of them are written in crayon. When the fan mail first started coming in, I thought it would be stuff like, `That was a stimulating approach to transsexualism.’ No, it’s, `Dave (Foley, another of the Kids) is cute. Is he married?’ I immediately realized, this is our audience.

‘Smartness’

‘We want to bring smartness to comedy. Mark’s (McKinney, another Kid cast member) phrase was, `The Kids in the Hall are aggressively stupid on one side and kind of dryly intellectual on the other, the best of both worlds.’ Kind of like, the Three Stooges meet Monty Python. We try and explore the whole spectrum without doing things like parodies or impersonations.’

Bellini finds mimicry extremely funny but their goal is to write stories based on characters and relationships.

‘Parody is easy. Parody is taking a movie like The Abyss and set(ting) it somewhere else or do(ing) a Polish version. It’s simple. I think we’re snobs. I think we just don’t want to stoop that low. We always try and explore our characters, and if we can’t explore them, we kill them.’

Less parody

Bellini feels Saturday Night Live would benefit from doing less parody and more joke development. At a certain point, repeating ‘…you put your weed in there…’ ad nauseum, ceases to be funny, he says.

Last season, Saturday Night Live aired a sketch called ‘The Gap Girls’ in which male cast members were performing in drag, a trademark of The Kids in the Hall. ‘The first time they did that, I remember we felt really ripped off. You can’t phone them up and say, `you ripped us off!’, but it seemed to me like they actually were doing the `Extreme scene,’ where Mark is a neurotic redhead girl and Scott’s sort of like a gay-club kid. It seemed to me that the Gap Girls were a simple distillation of our Extreme scene.’

Despite the heavy competition from the u.s., like Saturday Night Live, the success of The Kids in the Hall continues to grow. (As does Bellini’s: due to his recurring spot-the-Bellini-in-a-towel performances, Bellini now has a Timmins, Ont.-based fan club said to rival the Kids’ Toronto following.) When asked what he will be doing after The Kids in the Hall, Bellini is stumped: ‘You really can’t say. Even next year is hard to figure out…’

anthony alaimo is a second year media writing student in the Radio and Television Arts program at Ryerson Polytechnic University in Toronto.