Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
Former Kid in the Hall Scott Thompson holds court about his sissy-celebrating new book and solo tour.
Jul 24, 1998 | He's a dedicated barfly and a natural-born ham, the unabashed queen of debauchery. Buddy Cole, who made his debut telling tall tales from a bar stool on the Canadian sketch comedy TV series "The Kids in the Hall," is the creation of Scott Thompson, one of the Kids' founders and the only openly gay member of the troupe. Two years after the Kids split up, Thompson is keeping Buddy alive with a continentwide comedy tour and a new memoir titled "Buddy Babylon: The Autobiography of Buddy Cole," a novel's worth of material that Thompson and collaborator Paul Bellini wrote for the character. The story is a classic rags-to-riches tale -- Buddy moves from his childhood home on a northern Quebec pig farm to the fast-paced urban party scene, touching glitter and glam, copping a feel where he can and experiencing many a night he barely remembers on the way to momentary stardom. Like the show from which it sprang, Buddy's story is full of flaming silliness and caustic intelligence, as well as deliciously random humor.
In their heyday in the late '80s and early '90s, the Kids in the Hall took cross-dressing comedy over the threshold of camp into a truly original comedic art form. It was easy to forget that none of the five Kids was a woman. Besides Buddy, Thompson contributed a giddy portrayal of Queen Elizabeth (to whom he bears a stunning likeness) to the group's repertoire. In his post-Kids life, Thompson is best known as Brian, Hank Kingsley's gay personal assistant, on HBO's "The Larry Sanders Show." Salon recently spoke with Thompson about his stand-up comedy tour, his opinion of a certain gay sitcom star and the repressed culture that resists Buddy Cole's alcohol-soaked wisdom.
You were just in Texas, right? What was that like?
Well, I'll tell you, that was an education. Houston was very good. San Antonio was good and bad. I had some great shows; I had some other shows where half the audience walked out. But my retort to San Antonio was, "Jeez, it's as if they've never seen a feminine blond boy before, which means they must never have seen 'Titanic.'"
It's interesting to go back into the hinterlands. You realize people are different. It's not like the coast. But that's fine for me. I have a real warrior mentality. I like to do battle. I like a challenge.
Of all the characters you've developed, why have you decided to take Buddy Cole on the road?
Well, I'm promoting my novel. That serves that purpose. The other thing is, Buddy Cole had an enormous amount of material that I'd already written for him, and I've continued to write for him ever since the show ended. And he's the one character I do that is not just a character, he's also a person who's very self-reflective and he has pretty much an opinion on everything. So it allows me to range far and wide over the state of the world. He allows me to say things that other characters are not allowed to, and he allows me to wade into areas of taboo and somehow get away with it. You know, some of the things I'm most fascinated by are things that people can't really talk about openly, like race and self-loathing among gay men and sexuality. And I get to be a queen, and that's a big relief.
A big relief from what?
Well, it's a big relief to let all of your feminine qualities reign; it really is a release. Oddly enough, of all the characters I did in "The Kids in the Hall," the most feminine character was a man. Buddy Cole allows me to access that queen in me. As gay culture has ascended, there's been this attempt to masculinize gay men, which I think is quite silly and very wrong-minded, and I'm hoping that Buddy Cole can slap a little sense into people. You know, I'd be slapping them with a handbag! But, I mean, come on -- the sissy is the truth. The muscle queen is not. That is a false construct held up by wires, strings, steroids and the gym. It's not real. And if gay men aren't going to accept the sissy, then they're doomed.
How have your characters changed as you've gone from a Canadian TV show to a major motion picture to solo TV gigs?
It's very difficult to create characters on your own. One of the greatest things about Kids in the Hall was it was a laboratory. We were together for 11 years. You had four other people who were constantly pushing you to go deeper and to be better and constantly criticizing you, and that's a very healthy thing in art. So for me it's been very difficult to continue to create new characters without the boys. I have created some new characters, but most of them have just been my older characters. I'm extending their lives. Because I always intend for my characters to be with me for life.
The standards in America and the standards in Canada are different. Canada is more repressed but, oddly, more tolerant. America is a country that's got a bit of an identity crisis. America, I think, fancies itself as a man, a big butch man -- Charlton Heston holding a gun for the NRA. Our [Canada's] symbol is a Mountie, which is a male figure, but it's a person without a gun who basically wants to talk to people. Our country wasn't settled by a gunslinger, it was settled by a cop. So Canadians have a very natural, inbred adherence to authority which in some ways is very analogous to England, and that totally affects our comic way of looking at the world.
America now is in a place where you have the right to kill people, the right to fuck your brother's sister, the right to be 800 pounds, the right to swear at clerks. Where I come from, you don't. There's much more of a sense of the body politic. I think in America now this individualism has gotten out of control. I think it's a misnomer to think that freedom is an absolute; it is not. If you want 100 percent freedom, then go live in the hills with the militia freaks. Because civilization is not about that.
We have such a reluctance to judge people [in America], and I'm a satirist and that's what satirists do -- they judge. And that's why I think our movie ["Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy"] bombed -- it was out and out satire, and America's more into parody, which is, to me, sort of the inbred cousin of satire.
I wonder what Jonathan Swift would say about that.
Oh! You've said the right word! I want "Buddy Babylon" to be compared to Swift. All I'm looking for in a review is one word: Swiftian. Then I will be so happy. That is a very big model for me. The book is a picaresque kind of journey. I'm not saying it's "Gulliver's Travels," but there are certain elements of it that are analogous. I mean, when Jonathan Swift wrote "A Modest Proposal" about eating the Irish, people wanted to kill him, because people didn't understand. In my career, people have wanted to hurt me and hold me down because they mistake content for intent. And you just have to ignore it.
Looking back now on the Kids, how does it fit into the comic landscape of other shows like "Saturday Night Live," "In Living Color," "Mad TV"?
I think of it as music -- "The Kids in the Hall" was Sonic Youth. We sort of affected the whole scene, but we never got the kind of attention of a Nirvana. I think people came along and took our ideas and became bigger with them. But I think we laid a lot of those seeds.
How would you compare the gay comedy of "Ellen" to Buddy Cole?
Oh. OK. I get in a lot of trouble over this.
That's good. Trouble's good.
Yeah, trouble's good. Trouble, trouble, trouble in River City! Buddy Cole's comedy is not driven by an agenda. It's not activism, it's comedy. Buddy Cole, number one, is about the joke. "Ellen" became about empowerment. And the only empowerment in Buddy Cole is the empowerment of talent and the empowerment of a great story. You look at Buddy Cole and he's not what you would call a paragon of virtue. Buddy Cole is not somebody you hold up and say, "This is what we should all be." I didn't create Buddy Cole or any of my work to make people feel better about being gay.
He's just sort of stumbling through it in a haze.
Absolutely. He's human. If there is empowerment, it comes through laughter. I think I have a good metaphor: My work turns over the rock and looks at the worms and the maggots underneath. Ellen's [DeGeneres] show turned over the rock and pretended there were candies underneath. A lot of that kind of work, to me, ignores the ugliness. I'm sort of a pariah because I try to tell the truth, and historically, people aren't always really interested in the truth. Not to shit on Ellen. I think she's hilarious. But I really do think the show got caught up in activism and became hijacked by those -- I don't even know how to describe those people -- by the fascists.
Who are you talking about?
GLAAD [The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation].
They so wanted a leader that they picked her, do you think?
She didn't have the chops. Ellen was a physical comedian. I saw her live before, she reduced me to helpless laughter, but at the end of the show, I wouldn't be able to tell you anything about her. That's fine. Everybody has their own muse to serve. And I think it was ill-advised for her to try to serve this muse. Her muse is Lucy, not Lenny Bruce.
Who's your muse?
My muse would be Lenny Bruce -- and Lucy. I look at things sometimes and I go, "That's ugly," and I just have to say it. Whereas, I think other people will stop themselves because they think it will hurt the cause. My cause is me. My cause is comedy. It makes me sound really selfish, but artists are selfish by nature. Art is selfish, it is dictatorial. It is not politically correct. It is not inclusive. It is not democratic. Art is a bitch riding a horse all night and then putting her away wet. That's the beauty and the ugliness of it. You have to accept that when you do it, you're going to be misunderstood.
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