McKinney was born in Ottawa, Ontario, the son of Chloe, an architectural writer, and Russell McKinney, a diplomat. Because of his father\'s career, he did a lot of travelling when he was young. Some of the places he lived while growing up were Trinidad, Paris, Mexico, and Washington, D.C. He also attended Trinity College School, a boarding school in Port Hope, Ontario. For a short while, McKinney was a student at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where he was a political science major.\n', '

He started performing comedy with the Loose Moose Theatre Company in Calgary, Alberta. There, McKinney met Bruce McCulloch. Together they formed a comedy team called "The Audience." Eventually, McKinney and McCulloch moved to Toronto, and met Dave Foley and Kevin McDonald, who were in the process of forming a comedy troupe. Along with Scott Thompson, who joined after coming to a stage show, and producer Lorne Michaels, The Kids in the Hall was formed in 1985. Notable "Kids" characters played by McKinney include the Chicken Lady, Darill (pronounced da-RILL), bluesman Mississippi Gary, and Mr. Tyzik the Headcrusher, an embittered Eastern European who pretended to crush the heads of passers-by between his thumb and forefinger.\n', '

Afterwards McKinney joined the cast of another Lorne Michaels sketch comedy show, Saturday Night Live in the middle of the 1994-1995 season (season 20) as a repertory player. McKinney survived the cast overhaul that occurred at the end of season 20 and stayed on SNL until the end of the 1996–1997 (season 22). During his time on SNL, McKinney had six recurring characters (some of note include Ian Daglers from "Scottish Soccer Hooligan Weekly", Melanie, a Catholic schoolgirl, and Lucien Callow, a fop often paired with David Koechner\'s fop character Fagan) and twenty-seven celebrity impersonations (some of note include Mel Gibson, Barney Frank, Al Gore, Paul Shaffer, Mark Russell, Jim Carrey, Lance Ito, Tim Robbins, Steve Forbes, Wolf Blitzer, Bill Gates, and Ellen DeGeneres).\n', '

Return to Mark McKinney Autograph Profile