Once upon a time, in a townhouse project in Cowtown, a teenaged Bruce McCulloch didn’t give a shit about anything.
Well, that’s not completely accurate. Back in the late ’70s, McCulloch – who would become one-fifth of the groundbreaking Kids in the Hall comedy troupe – gave a shit about a very limited number of things: fresh vinyl and the soul-rattling rock music etched therein; his friends, fellow outcasts all; girls in jean jackets; dodging his drunk dad.
Everything else? McCulloch was a proudly weird and all-out punk who didn’t concern himself with much beyond his own angst, as young drunk punks are wont to do.
But that punk of decades past might have a hard time reconciling his angry existence with this present one: that of an author, screenwriter, executive producer, actor, and comedy icon living the family life in a flash Beverly Hills mansion.
Though his credentials and list of accomplishments might suggest otherwise, McCulloch hasn’t turned his back on his punk roots.
It’s front and centre in his new book, Let’s Start a Riot: How a Young Drunk Punk Became a Hollywood Dad (HarperCollins; on sale Oct. 16).
It’ll be mined for television gold in the upcoming series Young Drunk Punk, which is currently filming in the same southwestern Calgary townhouse community where young McCulloch got up to no good.
And it’ll be given a voice later this month when McCulloch takes to the York Theatre stage for two performances of his one-man show, named (you guessed it) Young Drunk Punk.
So how would that young punk kid from Calgary view the Hollywood dad and husband he has become?
“I hope he would be both proud and ashamed of me,” says McCulloch on the phone from Calgary, where he was busy with camera tests for his new TV show. “As a young asshole, I was telling off everybody, and I was fearless and I was sort of an idiot, but also I wasn’t always trying to play nice. I think sometimes, as you get older, you get happier to be there and you try to be kind and I think that’s both a good thing and sometimes burning your bridges isn’t the worst thing in the world if you’re keeping defining who you are.”
While the new television series (inspired by, though not a direct retelling of, McCulloch’s adolescence) will stay in the 1980s, both the book and the one-man show jump throughout the decades – from childhood to fatherhood to Saturday Night Live and The Kids in the Hall – and lay out stories from McCulloch’s storied life that, though often surreal, are moving and somehow universally relatable.
The book – which grew from a series of short stories McCulloch wrote for a Calgary magazine – is an especially profound journey, punctuated by hilarity and gravitas.
We learn about the time his alcoholic dad attempted to get young Bruce to drive the car when he was too falling-down drunk to do so, and listen in as his stand-up material flops at a show at his daughter’s elementary school.
We discover that he’d stay in pajamas all day, every day, if he could, and about the singular joy he feels when he changes his socks in the middle of the day (we tried it; it does, in fact, feel pretty damn good).
We read a poem he wrote called “Angie, the HIV Unicorn.”
There are ample passages about McCulloch’s spouse (referred to in the book as Pretty Wife), too. We learn that misguided strangers regularly believed her to be pregnant long after she gave birth. We’re taken into their arguments, bad dates, and couples therapy.
And apparently Pretty Wife is A-OK with this kind of exposure – even though McCulloch admittedly takes literary license throughout the book for the sake of dramatic impact.
“As she says, when she married me, she signed up for this,” says McCulloch. “I try to be respectful, but you’ve got to be savage and you’ve got to be honest, and the funniest thing has to win, or the most truthful or the darkest or whatever that is.”
Though his wife and kids were fair game for literary license, he chose a different tactic when writing about his fellow Kids in the Hall.
“We’ve never done a Kids in the Hall book, or an autobiography on the Kids in the Hall, even though we’ve been asked,” says McCulloch. “I just wanted to make sure I portrayed them as the savages they were, but I wanted to take care of those guys, too.”
Of the Kids, McCulloch says that Mark McKinney has read the book, and “he couldn’t have been more effusive about it. He’s always been one of my greatest fans, and as I started writing stuff, he’s one of the first people who said, ‘that would be a great TV show, that point of view.’”
In the television series, McCulloch will play Lloyd, the manager of the townhouse community where the titular punk lives. “He’s a lot of dads, a composite of the characters I’ve done on Kids in the Hall, although a little more grounded,” says McCulloch, who is also executive producing the show.
But he claims Lloyd isn’t McCulloch’s dad. “My dad was a darker figure, far too dark for TV,” says McCulloch.
And somewhere between promoting his book and filming his new series, McCulloch will bring his one-man show to Vancouver.
There’s a key difference between those beloved Kids in the Hall live gigs (which still occur when schedules permit) and McCulloch’s current one-man show. “The Kids in the Hall, it’s about all of us, and we illuminate the stupidity of the world around us for an hour or two,” says McCulloch.
“But with [Young Drunk Punk], it feels like the audience and I are one in a different way, because they’re not cheering for the songs that they know of mine. They’re listening to this guy that they may have known from TV who’s older now too or who had kids too or has to go to couples therapy, too.”
McCulloch’s performed one-man shows before (you might have tried and failed to get tickets to his sold-out run at the Firehall Arts Centre this past spring), but this one feels different than the others – at least, it does for its star.
“I think other times when I’ve done one-man shows in my life, I’ve just wanted to do really well, and I feel in my heart this message of outsiders, whether you have kids or don’t have kids, who fucking cares, there’s some sort of for me humanist feeling doing this show that people connect to that makes me want to do it all the time.”
