I reference The Kids in the Hall a lot. Most of the time people don't know what the hell I'm talking about, or they say, "Oh, that's that dumb crushing your head thing" and I cry, "There's so much more to it than that, you prick!"

I won't go into how brilliant and ahead of it's time KITH was, and I'm not going to yak about all the great stuff they’re doing now and how they're still hilariously funny 20 years later. I am, however, morbidly enamored with one very specific reoccurring character played by Mark McKinney, an entity known simply as Darrill. While there were a number of wonderful KITH creations ranging from subtly genius to batshit crazy, Darrill is a person I feel I could run into in real life. Not only that, but he's a person I fear I will end up on an OK Cupid date with. He's intelligent, but it's ruined by the fact that he's bereft of self-awareness and social instinct. ("It's pronounced Der-rill!") Men almost instantly want to beat him up while women try to figure out polite ways to get away from him.

Darrill always wears a peculiar outfit – a button down shirt or turtleneck and some sort of ornamental bolo tie, paired with the thick glasses and of course, the ponytail. The magic of television has frozen him in time wearing this strange getup. The Kids in the Hall premiered in the late 80s, and it's also Canadian so I guess that explains some of what's going on there. When I went back and watched Twin Peaks last summer I was impressed at how farty the clothes were, too. It's just odd because I was alive during that time; it's not like seeing people wear poodle skirts or bellbottoms. I mean I pretty much wore the same thing every day, a stained Ferngully t-shirt and stretch pants with smiley faces on them, and I was totally cool with that, but I certainly didn't notice adults looking weird. Although I suppose in 20 years we'll look back and laugh at how everybody's pants were so goddamn tight. I also noticed something odd a few years ago when I watched the 1990 TV movie of Stephen King's It – the character of Bill Denbrough (played by Richard Thomas) LOOKS EXACTLY LIKE DARRILL. Same hair, same bolo tie, everything! And he's supposed to be the hunky hero in It, so he's like Bizarro Darrill.

Over the course of The Kids in the Hall, Darrill appears in a total of 11 sketches, many of which show his failure to impress the ladies. His television debut was a sketch called "Excellent Dinner" where he is on a blind date with Amanda, played by the lovely Kevin McDonald. Darrill immediately makes things awkward by commenting how the food on the menu "Not exactly in the cheap zone." When she decides to have the fish he remarks, "So we're going to feast on our cousin from the sea, how exciting!" Things go downhill when Amanda runs into her ex who says he "misses her body," and then they proceed to leave the restaurant to go bang.

In "Daydreaming," Darrill is on another date and he learns what daydreaming is, because previously he thought that it meant that you listen to "The tiny oompah band in your head," which is followed by terrible headaches. Here we get another one of Mark's morbid brain tumor jokes – they crop up a few times in his sketches. Then Darrill is part of the Big Brother, Big Sister program, where he fails miserably at mentoring an 8-year-old boy. Darrill's idea of entertaining a kid is taking them to an antique shop to talk to a creepy old Swedish man. He reveals here that he is 28 years old and possibly still a virgin. He is also beat up by children.

Later in the show Darrill destroys yet another romantic evening by forcing his date to listen to Mozart, then Darrill is a contestant on the foreign game show, Feelyat!, then Darrill is a bad waiter, and Darrill teaches people how to paint with their inner child. He also has a cameo in one of Bruce McCulloch's sketches about a steamy love affair.

However, my favorite Darrill sketch is the one where we get to meet his mother, played by Scott Thompson, through a flashback to his childhood in Belgium. This time he's managed to lure his date, played by Dave Foley in an outfit I would totally wear today, up to his room to "look at his etchings," one of which, of course, is of his mother. This worries his female companion:

"A lot of the men I've dated have been Mamma's Boys."

"Well then you won't be disappointed in me, I'm the original Momma's boy - a real tit clutcher!"

The scene then goes into a flashback that pretty much explains why Darrill is the way he is. If you only watch one of the sketches mentioned here, I recommend this one, it is probably the weirdest.

I recently saw The Kids in the Hall live and they were just as crazy and fantastic as always. However, I was little disappointed that Darrill didn't make an appearance. When I saw them back in 2001 they did a sketch where Darrill was a guidance counselor who was dealing with Gavin, Bruce's strange little kid character, who shows Darrill a picture of himself eating a rat with a hobo. It warmed my heart.