Dave Foley

The thing Dave Foley does is look harmless while being anything but. In The Kids in the Hall he played a polite axe-murderer, a manservant called Hecubus, Bruno Puntz Jones, a Quebecois sex worker named Jocelyn and one of the Sizzler sisters, and what joined them was a boyish, unbothered sweetness laid over something sour. He is not a clown. He is the man at the edge of the sketch keeping his voice down while the others shout, and the joke is usually that he is the worst of them.

The career has two long chapters and a lot of visiting. He left a Toronto school at 17 for stand-up, met Kevin McDonald at Second City improv classes, and in 1984 their partnership merged with others into the troupe whose series ran from 1989 to 1995. He had only a limited part in the film reunion, Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy (1996), because he had already gone to NewsRadio (1995–1999), where the part of news director Dave Nelson was written for him, down to the coffee habit. There he was the calm centre of a chaotic office, which is the sketch persona run through a sitcom: still the quiet one, still slightly off.

Pixar is the third chapter and the one the reader can click through to. He is Flik, the lead ant in A Bug's Life (1998), and our review called the character the film's weakness: a decent, flustered sort with no edge and no wit, less interesting than Julia Louis-Dreyfus's Atta and far less fun than the villain. We kept waiting for the dry Foley to turn up under the flustered one, and he never did, because the part had no room for him; a hero who cannot be sarcastic about his own colony is a hero with nothing of Foley in him. The relationship with the studio, through John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton in the early days, has been a long one, with Flik cameos in Toy Story 2 and Cars and a small turn as Terry in Monsters University (2013), which we liked at 72 without having cause to mention him.

The rest is the troupe reuniting and touring from 2000, a stand-up special, Relatively Well (2013), and television work including Young Sheldon and Danish Graves in the fifth season of Fargo (2023–2024). There is also The Wrong Guy (1997), a comedy-thriller he co-wrote, produced and starred in, which has gathered a cult following since and which he still speaks of with pride. Not all of the film work has been kindly received, and It's Pat (1994) was generally disliked.

If you want to know what he is for, start with the sketches, not the ants. The films we have reviewed show what happens when a performer whose gift is irony is asked to be only likeable, and the answer is a very pleasant voice coming out of a character nobody remembers.