Most comedy audiences aren’t used to hearing disgust and genuine anger from Scott Thompson, a cheerily polite member of the Canadian sketch comics The Kids in the Hall. Off and on since 1984, the troupe has featured old friends Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, and Thompson doing their level-headed best to poke fun at gender and social norms, pop culture and cultural pop. And with their Canadian-ness—and no matter how critical the Kids have been—no one imagined Thompson as anything but a happy-go-lucky social sketch commentator.
Even Thompson’s daring yet improvisational takes on the hokey home truths of Queen Elizabeth II (Canada’s regal matron) and his TKitH-born gay lounge lizard character Buddy Cole have fed willingly thrilled crowds heaping spoonfuls of comic sugar to make the medicine go down smoothly. But with the censorship hassles of 2022’s Kids in the Hall series returning to Prime Video, the troupe—and Thompson in particular—is pissed and unwilling to carry on smilingly and politely.
With this month’s TKitH showcase at San Francisco’s Sketchfest featuring scenes “they wouldn't let us do,” and Thompson’s dangerous Buddy Cole “King” solo soliloquy—a trouble-making live show that Thompson will tour across the United States starting in February—all hell will break loose, and a new Thompson will emerge. “I’m used to ruffling feathers and getting myself in trouble, but this time I promise I’m going way too far,” says Thompson.
Along with laughing about his recent television role in Netflix’s spy action-comedy series FUBAR with Arnold Schwarzenegger (“I am truly proud that I was able to make Schwarzenegger cry during one scene,” says the comic with a mad giggle), Thompson was happy to go down memory lane about his time playing the Queen on the first anniversary of her death (“You have to be born with the right genetic mix and come from a monarchist family, let alone the fact that I looked like her”) and all things Kids in the Hall. Guided by a personal-as-political aesthetic that forever steered him and the Kids from literal sociocultural finger-pointing humor, Thompson says that he and the crew focus on people and human nature. “Political humor dates badly…all the rest of it is window dressing.”
“Once we got together again, we realized that there’s no way out—you only leave in a coffin. The Kids in the Hall are for life, like the mafia.”
As a forward-looking comic artist, returning to Buddy Cole’s lizardy antics and The Kids in the Hall’s fold is hardly a return at all. “It was a return for the fans, but we, as a troupe, never broke up,” says Thompson. “We might do things on our own, but we never separated. And once we did get together again, we realized that there’s no way out—you only leave in a coffin. The Kids in the Hall are for life, like the mafia. There’s never any arm twisting to get us to do things together—our chemistry is extraordinarily rare. And [since] we went through that period where we thought we wanted to destroy it all, the Kids now spend every one of its waking hours trying to keep it all together.”
Equally rare is the Kids’ singular “rock-band-like” takes on power, gender, and sexuality (“We never play women as funny unless the character is humorous”) that made it into the most recent reboot of its “old-school sketch comedy aesthetic” on Prime. The only problem with the 2023 iteration of The Kids in the Hall’s program was that Amazon attempted to shape the tone and tenor of their new streaming show. “What unites us as a group is that we were arrogant—we never allowed ourselves to be shaped by outside forces,” he says. “We weren’t very Canadian about all this, for sure.”
“I performed a magic trick where I took all of my anger, gave it to Buddy, and—in an alchemical way—turned that loss into a victory. It made me stronger.”
Despite political comedy being a dead end to Thompson, he’s something of a firebrand. Thompson and his boyfriend, director Joel Soler, created a satire-rich documentary in 2000 based on footage the filmmaker smuggled out of Iraq. Uncle Saddam poked fun at the soft home life of Saddam Hussein and his family, one at odds with his hardened dictatorial savagery. Thompson wrote the film’s narration and within a month of Uncle Saddam’s release, Thompson and Soler's West Hollywood home was firebombed after its outside walls were covered in red paint, dripping like blood.
Still, no role or character of Thompson’s is more un-Canadian than Buddy Cole. Handsomely pomaded, regally dressed, and spinning witty aphorisms as a juggler would plates, Thompson-as-Cole’s idea of speaking truth to power stems from the fact that as “a character, no one ever took him seriously…he could say anything. Being underestimated is a superpower.” Despite his colorful manner and sartorial display, Buddy hates pretension and loathes pomposity. “Even though when I become Buddy I disengage myself from what I’m doing, emotion can get in the way of thinking. Buddy is much smarter than I am in a weird way,” says Thompson of his LGBTQ+ creation, one “with a very gay voice” born out of one of the actor-comic’s past relationships in Canada, “a smart, effeminate older man with enormous energy who broke my heart.”
The heart and soul of the Cole character (and Thompson, too) is that of a true stoic, unafraid of the truth with a sense of humor based on the fact that he came up (and out) in the 1980s, and thinks of his life as defined by the cruel era of AIDS. “My entire adult life was dominated by those four letters. The Kids and my solo work—even my punk rock band, Mouth Congress—that was my sex life and love life. I never thought I would make it to 40, so we might as well do everything. That’s why I came out of the closet when I started my career. I’m not afraid of the truth, but on occasion I can’t speak to that as people now have such knee-jerk reactions. That’s why I’m doing this new tour as Buddy. He’s better at the truth than I am.”
Originally designed as a “600-year-old vampire who’d been at the center of everything,” Buddy Cole was the most jaded of Thompson’s characters—and over the past decade, Thompson has felt a greater kinship to his creation. “We’ve merged more now than at any time in the past. As I got better, personally, at separating my emotions from my brain, I got closer to Buddy. I could see how he did it. I actually didn’t think that I would even turn to him again until this whole Amazon matter.”
This “whole Amazon matter” comes down to having no Buddy Cole bits in the sixth season of The Kids in the Hall, which aired in 2022, over 25 years since the original series came to an end after five seasons in 1995. Filmed hermetically on a soundstage without its usual live audience, many topics such as trans rights issues went unaddressed on the revival. “You probably recognized that that new Kids in the Hall show didn’t touch on topics that the world was consumed by,” Thompson says dryly. “I did present many Buddy Cole monologues and those topics did get touched on—they were all rejected.”
“My entire adult life was dominated by those four letters [AIDS]. The Kids and my solo work—that was my sex life. I never thought I would make it to 40, so we might as well do everything.”
Once he got over his disappointment and disgust, Thompson realized that Buddy Cole needed to be heard—now more than ever. “I performed a magic trick where I took all of my anger, gave it to Buddy, and—in an alchemical way—turned that loss into a victory,” says Thompson. “It made me stronger. It made Buddy stronger. And no matter what, this material would get its day in the light. I was grateful for the Amazon money and the chance to do The Kids again in a credible way. But there was a part of me—and of The Kids in the Hall—that they did not want. My anger would not capsize me. When I’m onstage you cannot touch me. You can keep me from television and you can keep me from streaming. But you cannot stop me from getting on and off a stage in front of my fans.”
In Thompson’s mind, the new Buddy Cole “King” show will show his character coming to conclusions that will “shock and anger” people—on the left and on the right. “I won’t tell you everything, that would spoil the joke. But I can tell you that no one will be safe from Buddy’s ire,” he says, not really laughing at the possibilities of disturbing his audiences with Cole’s newly found fatalism. With that, “King” is the sound of Buddy Cole doing something drastic. “It’s time to go to war,” Thompson says frankly. “Young gay, trans, and nonbinary people may not know they want Buddy Cole now, but they do need to hear what he has to say.” FL
