The children in the room have aged. Their comedy did not.

There are a few covers and calls: The head crusher returns, as does the self-proclaimed squash game threat the Eradicator. Buddy Cole makes particular sense when he’s become an elderly gay royal – the way, Thompson said, he imagine the character decades ago – and Thompson’s two iconic queens reappear in a sketch in which Her Majesty dedicates a risque monument to Buddy’s beloved former bathhouse.

Sometimes the new tracks lean too obviously on aging gags, like a pain skit about 60-year-old strippers. (There’s a fair amount of nudity in the season, more lucratively deployed in other segments.)

But the most surprising thing about the season is how hard it tries to evolve children’s comedy and take it in new directions. It’s not just the “The Kids in the Hall” the band would have done had they stuck around for a sixth season in the 1990s. (They briefly reunited for 2010’s “Death Comes to Town,” a comedy series made, the documentary notes, when Thompson was seriously ill with cancer.) If the five were once gleefully riotous children, they have become comedic gentlemanly assassins.

Some of the best sketches, whether silly or wild, have a horror tinge to them. Foley plays a morning radio host five years after the apocalypse spinning Melanie’s earworm in 1971 “Brand New Key” over and over again, his optimistic crackle contrasting with his dead eyes. A Shakespeare aficionado wants his bust of the Bard to come to life, and it does – horribly, because it has no arms or torso.

And in the dreamy, expressionistic dream “Flags of Mark,” McKinney fantasizes about his devoted friends using flags – depicting him riding a dolphin under a rainbow – to find himself in the middle of a masked, unrestrained crowd. face as his disembodied face floats above them, laughing at their devotion and distress. It’s an amusing portrayal of selfishness and a sort of book ending of McKinney’s famous character: he doesn’t crush your head, his head crushes you.

Unfortunately, often lately seeing your favorite comics last for years means seeing them turn into cranksrepeating themselves and lamenting that no one can To make a joke more. But for the most part, the band coped with aging well — maybe because they were always a bit ahead of their time, maybe because their comedy still had more than the usual memento mori quotient. (The end credits from the original series, after all, had buried the quintet in a mass grave.) Even punks get old. But you never stop being a child.