Kevin McDonald stars in the one-man show Hammy and the Kids

“Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“An alcoholic.”

On the phone from his home in Los Angeles, Kevin McDonald is trying to demonstrate that writing jokes might not be his particular forte. Despite being an alumnus of one of Canada’s most iconic comedy groups, The Kids in the Hall, and placing his uniquely flustered, bleating voice on film and television work including Lilo & Stitch, Invader Zim and That ’70s Show, the art of the punchline is still beyond his reach. “I don’t know if I could write a joke if my life depended on it,” he admits.

On the other hand, the joke might almost be punchy promotional copy for his one-man play, an autobiographical comedy titled Hammy and the Kids, playing at the High Performance Rodeo. After an initial run in Los Angeles and a follow up performance at Just for Laughs in Montreal, McDonald is set to recount his experiences as a burgeoning Canadian comic actor and the child of an alcoholic father — a monologue spun from material that hasn’t always made the show an easy sell as a comedy. “The show’s all-out comedy, but when the audience saw the sad parts they cried all the way through it,” he recalls ruefully. “By the third show I had it the way it is now, but it was really the first two crying audiences that helped me tighten it up.

“I guess they enjoyed it on one level,” he adds, “but how can you enjoy crying for an hour?”

While McDonald is a longtime member of the Writers Guild of America — currently on the picket lines in support of former “Kid” Bruce McCullough’s Carpoolers, for which McDonald is also a writer — Hammy and the Kids is his first stage performance that goes beyond sketch comedy. Appropriately, however, the show isn’t the first time that McDonald has made comic fodder of his alcoholic father, the titular Hamilton “Hammy” McDonald. Kids in the Hall fans may recall McDonald brightly explaining that “daddy drank!” while a belligerent Dave Foley blurts out that, as far as dating goes, “zero plus zero equals fag!” In fact, the sketch was borrowed directly from McDonald’s youth and now enjoys a second life in Hammy as a kind of self-plagiarism.

While the particular story that inspired “Daddy Drank” didn’t strike McDonald as funny until Foley pointed it out, McDonald explains that a lot of those same memories were — weeping audiences notwithstanding. “I always did sort of see the humour in it,” he says, noting that one of the archetypes for children of alcoholic parents is the clown. “One [type] is the hero who does well in school. That’s not me. Now I know I’m just an archetype,” he adds. “My show’s my best therapist.”

Continuing the therapy, McDonald has continued to cull his biography with a tentative script about his mother, sister, first wife and current girlfriend. “It’s called The Women that I’ve Ruined,” he explains.

The germ of his first play had been in McDonald’s mind for years. Having never written for theatre beyond sketch and improv, McDonald knew that a self-produced show was a chance to create the kind of commodity that wouldn’t be subject to some of the less-than-kind audition and script pitch experiences he’d encountered. “No one would say no to that,” he says of the show.

It was an opportunity with Los Angeles’s iconic Upright Citizens Brigade a year and a half ago that brought together the stories he’d been telling for 20 years into a cohesive whole for the first time. With the company doing a series of interviews, talk show style, McDonald found the beginnings of his play in front of a live audience. “I went onstage with this nice guy named Carl in front of 200 Kids in the Hall fans, and for an hour he asked questions,” says McDonald. “I gave my stories, got a tremendous amount of laughs, and the next day when I got up I realized I had something.”

The result was a blend of his childhood and young adult experiences as the child of an alcoholic father combined with becoming what he modestly calls “the minor success that we are.” From his weight issues before the Kids in the Hall were broadcast to an encounter with his father in a hotel room while the troupe was writing their first and only feature film, Brain Candy, the play journeys through a life intensely affected by both his father and the growing success of the troupe.

Ironically, McDonald was once expelled from the theatre program at Toronto’s Humber College because of his limited range, excelling only in comedy and improv — the very characteristics that made him essential to the Kids in the Hall. Now, in addition to writing, he’s broadening his repertoire, much to his own chagrin. “Also, unfortunately, there’s some songs,” says McDonald with characteristic self-deprecation, adding that it was McCullough who suggested the additions. “There’s also some bad dancing, not really choreographed, which I know will get laughs.

“Don’t promise your readers good dancing,” he insists. “The audiences don’t seem to mind that I can’t sing, they seem to forgive me, so I think I’m OK.”

As a performer, McDonald’s skill has always been in uncovering humour, from the bizarre non-sequiturs and high-flying absurdism of Kids in the Hall to finding the laughs in his own history. As his initial, tear-wrenching performances in Montreal show, it’s not always easy work. But even if his singing, dancing and joke-writing skills aren’t quite up to snuff, McDonald is certainly going to try. “Alcoholic,” he says when pressed for another attempt at improvising a joke. “If I keep doing it, by the ninth time it’ll be funny.”