The secrets to long-lasting friendship aren’t inane things like honesty, love or loyalty: it’s the truly meaningful gestures that count, like the assurance that if you’re hung over, you can always vomit in your best friend’s mouth. This is true friendship. This is the friendship shared by Kenneth Hotz and Spencer Rice of Showcase’s hit TV series Kenny vs. Spenny, a reality-style show that sees the men engage in ridiculous, vengeful competitions that usually result in pain and humiliation each week.
Watch Kenny and Spenny face off in our exclusive video interview.
“There’s nothing that you can do about it,” says Spenny about his life-long pal. “You grow up with someone, your fathers are best friends and he’s in your life. He’s like the brother that I never wanted.”
“I thought you were going to say herpes,” Kenny riffs, referring to the thing that he supposed Spenny never wanted.
“No, I wasn’t going to say herpes,” responds Spenny. “That is friendship to us.”
For the past three years, the two Toronto natives have been testing the boudaries of that friendship on their off-kilter reality-contest series. As a serious case study for the behavioural patterns of the male species, Kenny vs. Spenny is a program that provides considerable insight into man’s competitive nature. To determine who is the dominant male, the duo put themselves through the rigour of gruelling challenges that test their endurance and their sanity. On a lesser level, it’s about two guys putting the stinking corpse of a dead octopus on their heads to see who can stand it the longest. Whoever loses, is subjected to a cruel humiliation dictated by the winner.
“I like to do something disgusting in every single episode,” notes Kenny, whose professed hang-over remedy is vomiting in Spenny’s mouth, although he actually hasn’t done it yet. “But it just turns into this nightmarish blur of hell that we’re trapped in.”
This season promises to be the most outlandish yet. While the past two seasons have found Kenny and Spenny competing to see who can drink more beer or who can live in a van the longest, this season will feature the highly anticipated “Who can produce more semen?” contest. A trial of cornucopian proportions that may have made Kenny vs. Spenny’s old home at the CBC blush, but is right at home on its new network, Showcase.
“This season has some of the worst experiences of our lives,” says Kenny. “We did the Qigong competition, which is the ancient art of weight lifting with your testicles. [I lifted] one of those old 1954 TTC double-decker buses no problem. We also did ‘Who could stay homeless the longest?’ which really sucked. Living under a bridge for a week? That was brutal.”
But, despite the many tribulations that Kenny and Spenny put each other through (during the course of this interview, Kenny threatened to jump over the hotel’s third-floor balcony at the prospect of yet another of Spenny’s many diatribes), their relationship is solid as a rock.
“The one thing that could break up this friendship,” says Spenny adamantly, “is Showcase cancelling the show. We’re hanging by a television show at this point. If this show gets cancelled, I will never see Kenny again … if I’m lucky.”
“There are some things on the planet that are just meant to be,” affirms Kenny. “And Spenny and I being friends are meant to be, much like the Titanic sinking or Hitler shooting himself. We’re meant to be.”
The third season of Kenny vs. Spenny premieres on Oct. 19 on Showcase (9:30 p.m. ET/PT, 10:30 p.m. MT).
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