It’s been 25 years since The Kids in the Hall barreled onto Canadian television screens and smashed the cultural status quo with heady, gender-bending comedy sketches.
A lot has changed in the last quarter century, but the five grown-up men behind The Kids in the Hall are as determined as ever to push the envelope right off the cliff.
“It’s the mafia,” laughs Scott Thompson on the phone from Toronto. “There’s no getting out.”
At 55, Thompson is the oldest of the Kids, and one of the busiest. Each member of the troupe — which also includes Dave Foley, Kevin McDonald, Bruce McCulloch, and Mark McKinney — participates in Kids projects (like the 2010 miniseries, Kids in the Hall: Death Comes to Town) while also chasing individual film, television and stand-up gigs.
Foley is currently starring in the CTV office comedy Spun Out. McKinney recently appeared in the CBC miniseries The Best Laid Plans.
And this weekend, Thompson — who recurs on NBC’s Hannibal and routinely cracks up Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, and Stephen Colbert on late-night TV — will headline Laugh Your Sexy Ass Off!, two evenings of burlesque and comedy at the Rio Theatre produced by Vancouver’s Kitty Nights.
In The Kids in the Hall television series — which ran for five seasons on CBC in Canada and HBO in the United States — Thompson was fearlessly flamboyant and unabashedly out at a time when many gay performers opted to stay pressed against the back of the closet.
Among his dozens of characters was the mega-popular Buddy Cole, who perched on a bar stool, swilled booze in a martini glass, and delivered frothy monologues on topics like marriage and racism (and Buddy hasn’t stopped monologuing: earlier this year, The Colbert Report sent Buddy to Sochi to report on the Winter Olympics).
The Kids in the Hall was born during a golden age of cultural fearlessness, according to Thompson.
“That was a perfect storm back then,” recalls Thompson. “We had [executive producer] Lorne Michaels wielding the axe, breaking the door down. The world was in the midst of a tumultuous change. The Berlin Wall was falling so there was this collective societal guilt that allowed us to get things in that would never have been allowed before, and also political correctness hadn’t done such a job on culture.”
In this current hypersensitive climate, sketches like the one in which Thompson dissected the word “faggot” wouldn’t make it out of the writers’ room, he says.
“Today, if they play that on the Comedy Network, they will bleep ‘faggot,’” says Thompson. “So the piece has no point.”
He feels for young comedians. They’re not allowed to dig deep and explore hot-button issues from every angle. “Our culture has become very punitive. We’re terrified of offense and people are shutting down voluntarily. In a strange way, we’ve imposed a kind of McCarthyism on ourselves,” says Thompson. “There are so many unsayable words now, and everyone’s terrified about being called a homophobe or a racist or a sexist, so a lot of people are just shutting up. They’re afraid. And everything’s being recorded, so you’re not allowed a bad day.”
Thompson is different. He’s still comfortable rattling cages. “I love to outrage people that are easily outraged,” he says. “It’s fun.”
It wasn’t always fun. At one point, Thompson fell out of love with comedy — and it took B-cell non-Hodgkins gastric lymphoma to reignite his passion for his craft.
“For years up until my diagnosis, I’d been questioning what I did, because I’d lost my love for it. My career was pretty much in the toilet, and I felt like everything I did made people uncomfortable, and I didn’t understand why I had to make people uncomfortable, and why couldn’t I just be a guy who fell down funny?” he says.
But when cancer struck, Thompson had ample time to reflect. “I realized that I was doing exactly what I was supposed to do, and if it made people uncomfortable, that was part of my job, and my job was to bring things out of the darkness into the light and to have people look at them and go, ‘oh, that’s not so scary.’ In that way, it was very good for me. I wish that I had come to that conclusion through an easier route, but some of us have thick skins and have to be hit really hard.”
Thompson beat cancer. It’s made him stronger, because “[nothing can really hurt me like cancer did. So if someone calls me a name or says that something I’ve done is racist or homophobic or whatever, I can just go, ‘well, you misunderstood, and it’s not my problem, I don’t need to fix your filter, it’s about you,’” says Thompson. “I don’t think you’ll ever see me on an apology tour.”
But you will see him touring with the Kids, who’ve continued to resonate with audiences despite the passage of time and paradigm shifts in culture and attitudes.
The Kids didn’t realize the impact they were having with their series until the end of the first season, when they took their show on the road. “It was like right out of a Beatles documentary: running from the stage to the bus, people chasing us, people rocking the bus, girls screaming. It was crazy. Everyone in the audience chanting our pieces before we even did them. It was a madhouse. That’s when we realized, ‘holy fuck, what the hell?’ We had no idea, really. All we did was work, so we really had no idea how much of an impact we were having.”
But too much time together in those early days took its toll. The Kids didn’t speak to each other for five years after the release of their critically panned (but cult classic) 1995 feature film Brain Candy. Since reuniting in 2000, however, they’ve been collaborating pretty much non-stop, most recently performing old and new sketches in venues across the United States and Canada.
“As time goes by, we’re sort of becoming like the Marx Brothers,” says Thompson. “The shtick is becoming very vaudevillian.”
In Laugh Your Sexy Ass Off!, Thompson shares a bill with local burlesque performers Burgundy Brixx, April O’Peel, Villainy Loveless, and Sparkle Plenty. The performances will be hosted by Doug Thoms as his alter-ego, The Purrrfessor.
“In a world where porn is around you everywhere, burlesque is a comic form of titillation,” he says. “All performance, in a way, is titillation. “
At the time of the interview, Thompson wasn’t sure which characters he’d be bringing with him to Vancouver, but he hinted that Buddy Cole might make an appearance. “There’s a monologue I’m doing now that’s about bullying and transsexuals, and it definitely could attract the attention of the outrage brigade,” he says. “We’ll see.”
Laugh Your Sexy Ass Off! runs July 11 and 12 at the Rio Theatre (1660 East Broadway). Tickets are $39.25/$49.75 at www.ticketstonight.ca.
