Kids say the darndest things

For my birthday, the Admiral got me a box set of all five seasons of Kids in the Hall on DVD. I had almost forgotten what a great show that was. I'd also forgotten (or didn't realize before, since I was pretty young when the show originally aired) how progressive it was. As I watch it now, it doesn't seem scandalous, but I think that in the late 80s there weren't that many places on TV where you would regularly find cross-dressing and openly gay characters. At the time I just thought it was funny, but now I realize that they were really pushing the envelope.

Another really cool thing (and the reason I'm telling you about it) is that we ran across a sketch with a fat-positive (or at least an anti-anti-fat) message. The transcript is here and there's a video here. The setup is that Kevin is hitchhiking, and Dave picks him up and proceeds to hurl all sorts of nasty anti-fat insults at him. Part of the absurdity of the sketch comes from the fact that Kevin isn't even remotely fat (though part of the background is that apparently in real life he really was fat and lost a bunch of weight). The insults are also hilariously over the top, like when Dave says, "Boy, am I hungry. You know, I guess I haven't had anything to eat in about, uh, an hour. You ever done that? You ever gone a whole hour without eating?" But the best part is at the end when Dave gets fed up and orders Kevin to "drag your cavernous stretch marks outta my car," so Kevin gets out and then Dave says, "God, I hate fat people. I hate what it says about their personality." It's such a great send-up of anti-fat rhetoric, and I think it's really interesting that these guys were in touch with this stuff 20 years ago, before things got quite as nasty as they are today.