You may have seen this Kids In the Hall clip making the rounds recently, because Dave Foley, sitting in a studio in Canada in the ’90s, bears an eerie resemblance to a number of television pundits who existed only in embryonic (or radio) form at the time. He even ends the sketch by emphasizing the word “FOX!” But what it really shows is not that the Kids anticipated the future, but that they were satirizing the state of TV punditry at the time. Maybe things haven’t changed so much after all.
I get the feeling that part of the Kids’ inspiration for that sketch was this Monty Python bit, but the Kids’ version is better; with the obvious exception of Gilliam (who didn’t perform that much), the Pythons were always at their weakest when playing Americans. (Whenever any of them did an American accent, their regular style sort of fell away and they wound up doing the corniest, most obvious routines about war-mongering generals and film producers with lots of yes-men, the kind of sketches you’d see on any U.S. variety show.)
