The Persistence of Buddy Cole: Scott Thompson Discusses His Most Iconic Role

Scott Thompson is back on the road, engaging with comedy in a way that almost no one can. He’s touring in character, as a character that debuted in 1989, and using that character as a shield to deflect from the fear that he sees as holding other stand-ups back. The Kids in the Hall veteran has brought back his signature and groundbreaking maximum offender Buddy Cole: a chain smoking, outspoken antagonist who defined Thompson’s career. To celebrate his return to form, Thompson has re-released Buddy Babylon: The Autobiography of Buddy Cole, a mock memoir that was first published twenty years ago, with new material added in. Thompson hopes that the world is ready for Buddy Cole now, and so far audiences are proving him right.

We sat down to discuss the book, his tour, The Onion Comedy & Arts Festival, the trails of Scott Thompson, the state of comedy, and some heartbreaking regrets about a career well lived.

Paste: What do you do on your tour days off?

Scott Thompson: I pick a random day and I don’t answer the phone. I do a lot of napping and I go to old bookstores. I buy a lot of first editions of sci-fi novels. My most prized first edition is probably The Man in the High Castle. It’s not the most valuable but it is the one I love the most. I have a first edition I, Robot which is pretty damn cool. That’s probably worth more.

Paste: What’d you think of the High Castle TV adaptation?

Thompson: I never really got to see it. I don’t have Amazon. Television today is easy to forget. There’s so much stuff now and so many great shows get lost.

Paste: I’m plagued by how little breaks through these days because of how much is out there. I came up as a Kids in the Hall fan because the show was on Comedy Central every afternoon. In the YouTube age, would I have ever found you?

Thompson: I get that. When am I supposed to find time for something like The Americans? You think of all these hundreds of people doing their career highlights and no one notices. I worry for them. The things that get attention are the things that push the right buttons at the right times. We always pressed the wrong buttons at the wrong times. That’s our secret. As Bruce [McCulloch] always said: everything we touch turns to cult. Nothing any of us have ever done has gone mainstream. In a weird way, that’s kept Kids in the Hall vital. Nothing the five of us have ever done—the closest has been Dave [Foley] in Newsradio, which was itself very much a culty show. It wasn’t Big Bang Theory. It’s a curse to always live just under the radar. But that means we’re all still hungry, and we’re far hungrier than men our age should be. It is a little embarrassing.

Paste: Cult fandom isn’t all bad, it just means you find appreciation down the road. For example, you’re re-releasing a book you first put out twenty years ago.

Thompson: The reason I did this is that Buddy Babylon was released into a chorus of nothing. No one talked about it and no one reviewed it. People were terrified of it for so many reasons. And people were terrified of the thing I am so proud of. It broke my heart that no one paid it any attention. Twenty years later, I think the world is ready for it? I think it will finally get a review and people will know they missed something good. The literary establishment ignored me because comedians couldn’t possibly write a book! And people didn’t want to be too gung-ho about gay things because that would reflect badly on them. “It’s too gay!” And then it was also Canadian. People didn’t want to look up what the word “poutine” meant. And Canadians were mad about it. “How dare a comedian write a funny book. Our only books should be about suicide or genocide; how dare he!” And the gay press didn’t touch it because, “How dare a gay man write a book and not be a prostitute! How dare this faggot do something other than work on his abs!” But it is a real novel and no one gave it any attention, and they called it racist and homophobic, and twenty years later I thought the world will give us a fair shake. And I don’t mind being called a “Canadian racist homophobe” but the book is just pure funny and I couldn’t understand what happened. And there’s a section that was taken out because the book was too long for the publisher, about how Buddy Cole was a supermodel in the Philippines who inadvertently launches the People’s Revolution. It’s a forty page chapter and they took it out, but now we get to put it back in. It needs to be back in. My dream is that it gets a New York Times review. I know that’s very Legacy Media. I’m an old guy. I like Legacy Media. I believe the newspaper is going to have a resurgence. We shouldn’t trust anything online anymore. Newspapers have the benefit of time and vetting. I trust it. When someone at a hotel offers me a USA Today I stare at them with such contempt. “I didn’t ask for a napkin! Or a rag! I asked for a paper!” Give me a USA Today if there is a spill.

Paste: Here is my line-in to Buddy Cole. I grew up in Central Kansas, in a church that was particularly not keen on inclusion, and I remember seeing Buddy Cole in episodes of Kids in the Hall and being… I don’t know? Afraid? Upset? Pretty sure that this was the version of gay people that my church wanted me to believe that all gay people were? Again, I was an idiot kid, but Buddy Cole took a number of years to contextualize and understand. And I feel like perhaps I cracked what made Buddy when, at the time my only familiar performance of a gay man came from the cast of the film version of La Cage aux Folles? I dunno. Maybe where I’m going here is to ask how often people tell you that Buddy was their first interaction with gay characters in pop culture and/or how that usually went? Where does Buddy exist in the history of comedy but also culture.