BUDS DIGEST 005 / FEATURE
COMEDY PUNK SCOTT THOMPSON
Interviewed by BUDS DIGEST
Photographed by CHRISTOPHER SHERMAN
Scott “Lips” Thompson photographed by Christopher Sherman in Toronto, ON. April 2021. Fabulous Eyewear from Frankly Glasses.
The masterful and riotous actor, sketch comedy legend SCOTT THOMPSON, discusses three decades of being gay in Hollywood, the new season of Kids in the Hall and the difference between a drunk audience versus a high one in this rare and revealing conversation with the editors of Buds Digest.
We catch the smart and sensitive comedian at his home in Toronto, just off the heels of the premier of Comedy Punks, the long awaited documentary detailing the history of his beloved sketch troupe. The colossally influential actor gets real with the mag, touching on everything from career jealousy to the generational trauma of the AIDS epidemic to his favorite science-fiction. “Straight people feel completely empowered to call me queer,” THOMPSON says of the current shift in culture, “but if I say ‘faggot’ they will literally clutch their pearls so hard they would strangle themselves – and yet, both of those words were used to hurt me.” Read on for more from the genuine and radical comedy genius.
BUDS DIGEST: Hi Scott, where are you calling from?
SCOTT THOMPSON: I'm in Toronto. I've been here for the last two years. Waiting for things to start up again. Canada went really hard on the pandemic. We were really locked down. We're not in the same place [as the U.S.], psychologically or physically. We're just starting to open up. You still see lots of people wearing masks on the street. I think the psychological toll was just enormous. I've realized Canadians love rules. They love to be told what to do. The difference between the two countries to me has become very stark.
BD: Americans do not like being told what to do.
ST: And you know what? I like that. When I was a kid, North America tried to go metric. Both countries decided it together, because they figured, you know, we have to do this together, but [the U.S.] just wouldn't do it! I think there will be a real reckoning in the next few years with how everybody handled the pandemic. There were certain things that The States did that I think were completely wrong and I think Americans have a harder time seeing themselves as a group. Particularly now when we are so divided in the world and individualism is souring. It's getting ugly. The truism that everyone should be fighting is narcissism, this individualism, [the idea that] everybody's an island and everybody can do whatever the hell they want, who cares about the body politic? There's some countries that are way on one side and others on the other and Canadians, we're much more of a group people.
The mask mandate just ended two weeks ago. I thought I would be the person that just dropped it immediately, but I found that I still wear it when I go into a drug store or Starbucks, I don't know why. I've just been indoctrinated.
BD: It’s interesting, the social dynamics of people being around each other. Some people feel comfortable hiding a little bit.
ST: I'm not that guy. People that say “I'll wear them forever,” I'm like, well, why don't you just say you're terrible in bed? Why don’t you say you hate fucking? I wouldn't wanna get involved with someone like that.
BD: It’s nice to see people’s faces when you meet them…
ST: I think some people that maybe have some issues with socializing, let's just put it that way, might enjoy this, but I certainly don’t.
I miss the lower half of the face. I hate eyes. I'm waking up to the fact that this whole eye bullshit, this whole nonsense that the eyes are the window to the soul… what a load of crap. Because if that's true, we're soulless and I don't wanna look into people's souls. I'm so sick of looking into people's eyes. I want the nose and I want the mouth. I'm kind of an animal. I like the mouth. For me, the soul is the mouth.
BD: You have kind of an iconic mouth, Scott.
ST: I do, thank you! I’ve got big lips and a big mouth. When I was a kid, I had quite a few nicknames, but “lips.” They called me Lips Thompson! Scooter or Lips. But I do not have iconic eyes. I’ve got little watery, tiny eyes that no one has ever mentioned. They're criminal eyes. They're small. They're beady. They're sunken.
“I was a pot-smoking, cock-sucking science-fiction nerd. Those were all things that made me an outlier. Those are all mainstream now. This might be my time!”
BD: What was it like going back to work on the new season of Kids in the Hall?
ST: Well it was a little scary. It's what we've wanted for a long time. The five of us have been working towards this for quite a few years, some of us more than others.
When it happened, it was a little scary because we were like holy fuck — I didn't think we'd be this old! Like, what? Our comeback is gonna be when we're unfuckable? That's not the plan! And that means we have to be funnier because we're not as cute? That's what I think happened. We were like a boy band. I feel we're as funny as we ever were. We're very tight. We've been together for a long, long time, since we were very young.
Once we started writing together again, we realized that we had stuff to say and we decided to just think of this as Season 6 with a twenty-five year break. We decided not to really change anything. Sketch comedy is a pure form of comedy. We just need to do sketch comedy the way we've always done it.
If this deal with Amazon hadn't been signed before the pandemic and the world really started to go crazy, I don't think it would've happened. I think they would have gone “do we really want five old white guys, in 2022, to launch the Canadian Amazon arm on,” but they were stuck with us! The social changes of the last two years have been so enormous and it’s not a secret that comedy's having a hard time. It's definitely a more difficult time to do the kind of comedy that we do. It's much harder to push the envelope today because everybody's got an envelope. Everybody is ready to be offended and that's been difficult.
BD: Tell us about the documentary.
ST: The documentary was really exciting. They've been working on it for a number of years, but it fell apart for a long time and then Amazon came aboard and let them finish it. Reg Harkema, who made the documentary, did a beautiful job. We're in a place in our life where we could actually be more honest about who we are and where we come from. So we were very open to talking about some of the darker currents of our lives. Before we would've, not tried to hide it, but tried to skirt over it in a way because it's comedy, but I think people are more amenable to understanding where our kind of comedy comes from.
It's a very funny documentary and it's moving, which I don't think any of us really quite expected. I didn't watch the whole thing until it debuted a couple weeks ago at South by Southwest. The five of us watched it in a sold out house in Austin and the response was unbelievable. Watching it, I felt like, oh my god, this might work. We felt such love from the audience. I thought, well, geez, maybe we won't be canceled. Maybe this love will kind of overwhelm people and they will understand that everybody comes from different times. You act out as you're allowed to in your time. But to sit in that audience and to hear them laugh… it's probably one of the funniest things we've ever done, even though we had nothing to do with it, really. It was just them putting it all together with lots of interviews, but it's edited so beautifully. It tells all five stories, singly and as a group and it doesn't pull punches. It's very open about some of the tragedies in our lives. And I was unexpectedly moved. The five of us were all kind of crying.
BD: You bring up this kind of dichotomy of how the world is maybe more critical of comedians but also maybe a bit more empathetic…
ST: Yes. I do think you're right. It’s like holding two kinds of opposing ideas in your head at the same time, because I think that's absolutely true. Yes, people are much harder on comedy, but I think they're more understanding of where comedians come from.
It's really nice to watch a movie about your life and the life of our family, because I consider The Kids in the Hall a relationship. We've been together for over thirty years. So thirty-four years since we met. So this is my longest relationship. The five of us love each other, there's no question. It's a love story.
It's quite beautiful. It made me feel proud of us, proud of my own life, proud of our life, our lives and how we kept together and how we bonded many years ago in this goal. We're five guys who have a purpose and we have a mission and we've never really abandoned that. We've capsized, et cetera, but we've never truly abandoned it and now we're very adamant in finishing the job.
It's been really nice to see your life and go, oh, I made the right decisions. I did the right thing. Particularly as a gay man, in the world that I came into and world that I'm in now, what it was like for someone like me. For many years I was very angry and I would say bitter about the way things had happened for me. How come I didn't have the career that I thought I was going to have. I didn't quite understand the depth of homophobia. I did but I kinda thought that I could fix it. I couldn’t and it took twenty-five years to look at it and think, you know what, okay, I didn't get those opportunities that I thought I would have and that's okay, because I was first through the door and that's pretty exciting.
BD: You have certainly made a mark!
ST: I'm jealous. I'll be honest. I've been quite jealous of what it's like for younger queer kids, how their lives are so easy compared to mine. But now I'm not. I'm proud of who I am. And I'm proud that I'm someone that helped make it like that for them. I'm at peace with it all.
BD: An inspiration is an understatement. We have been inspired by you for many years.
ST: Ah, thank you. That's very nice to hear. It means a lot to me. So, it’s you guys I'm talking about!
BD: I would say you’re someone that helped me come out of the closet, 100%. Curious what your thoughts are about the queer world and how that's all changed.
SC: It’s a big Pandora's Box. Obviously I have some opinions that I think are gonna be very difficult for people to hear. I also know that I don't have to say everything that I'm thinking at this point in my life. I take a little more time to think it through. I don't want to upset the apple cart completely. Generally, I mean, it’s a thousand times better.
BD: Would you have advice for young queers coming out of the closet these days?
SC: Well, I can only advise gay men. I'm gonna stick in my lane. I dentify as a gay man, truthfully, I don't really identify as queer. I have a hard time with that, I'll be perfectly honest with you. I don't quite understand, everyone seems to be queer now. I'm a gay man. All my advice will get me in trouble right now… Can I say “faggot” to you two?
BD: Yes! Absolutely. We wanted to talk about that word. Some of the original Kids in the Hall sketches that use “faggot” would just not happen on television today.
ST: They won't allow me to say it!
“Faggo” from Kids In The Hall Season 2, Episode 13. 1991.
BD: To see somebody like you using that word on television was very profound and empowering.
ST: I don't agree with making things unsayable. I'm absolutely against that. And I found the [recent] struggle for the Kids in the Hall was very difficult, censorship wise. In our entire career, we have never, ever seen this level of censorship. I sort of miss the religious right. At least I knew what my enemy looked like. Now my enemies are my friends and the call is coming from inside the room, if that makes sense. It was bewildering to be lectured to in zoom calls about the use of the F-word by people who weren't gay. That's disturbing. I don't understand that. It's just a word. The more you ban things, the more power you give them.
BD: Absolutely.
ST: I think this will eventually play itself out. I think we're going to be the ones on the right side, but it might not happen for a while. But the censorship was quite intense. I'm not actually supposed to talk at all about it because I promised the boys I wouldn't ruin everything, but it was tough. It was very tough. I did not expect that, in 2022, none of them did, that the gay guy would have it the hardest. That was a fucking crushing blow, to realize that, oh my god, they're hardest on me.
The word “queer” is interesting to me. I'm getting back into stand-up and I'm trying to figure out how to address these things, comically. It's interesting that so many people call themselves queer now. You don't even have to have sex with the same sex. I don't quite understand it. Straight people feel completely empowered to call me queer, but if I said faggot they would literally clutch their pearls so hard they would strangle themselves. And yet, both of those words were words that were used to hurt me. Nobody asked me. No one asked the gay and lesbian elders if this was okay. Why should straight people, anyone, be allowed to say queer when I can't call myself a faggot? That makes no sense to me. I don't like to even answer to [queer] beause I'm like, do you mean a girl with blue hair whose best friend is gay or do you mean an actual cock sucker? This is where I’m at.
BD: Fascinating.
ST: I'm a different generation. I don't know how to relate because I feel like I'm a war vet. My entire life was about one thing: don't die of AIDS. That's all I thought about for 25 years. I'm missing a leg. I've got a purple heart. I lost so many people that I loved. I don't think I'll ever be the same. I think any gay man of my generation has PTSD and that is something that has to be confronted this, this psychic shock that we went through. I think in many ways, with older gay men like me, those chickens are coming home to roost. It's very difficult to get over it. I don't think you ever really do.
BD: There hasn’t been a national reckoning with what’s happened.
ST: I think our community is kind of bearing it a little bit. They don't really want to talk. People aren't really equipped. They're not ready to face what happened. Even though the movement is built on so many of our dead bodies. To look at it honestly means that society's going to have to confront their horrible behavior. They threw us under a bus and we were allowed to die. We went through a war inside of a society that was at peace and people looked the other way. It's very difficult for society to confront that. It might not be quite ready and I have to be philosophical about that.
BD: Then you have the pandemic that's happened and kind of thrown all sorts of weird perspectives onto large scale death.
ST: And the pandemic… it's difficult for me to take it seriously. I take it seriously, but for me, did young people lose half their friends? I don't think so. We're not talking about losing your sense of smell. We're talking about mass death and living your entire youth worried about death. That's a very different thing. And also the pandemic is the entire planet. The AIDS plague, people pretend that it affected everyone, but that was nonsense. That wasn't true. That was just stuff people said because they knew that society didn't care enough about us to fight it unless they thought they were also at risk. It’s an ugly thing to say, but I truly believe that. We had our own plague inside of a world that didn't have a plague and the world was not fighting together to save this, to save us. We were blamed.
You spend your entire youth, for me it was fighting off feelings of uselessness and suicide, to finally I'll get out, get out so that I can be myself. Then I get out of my small town and I start to come out and then this plague hits, which tells you that everything that people said about you is true. And that's something that I don't think I'll ever get over. I'm not an unhappy person and I'm not a bitter person, but there's a part of me that's just never really going to get over that.
BD: Serious trauma.
ST: I was just making peace with HIV and then this hit and my gay friends were like, “Are you fucking kidding me? No, no, no…” I think my generation of gay men, we're more equipped for this. It might have been easier for us because we know what it's like to negotiate risk and I think a lot of young people don't quite understand how to do that. We know that life is dangerous. We know that around the corner is death and you can still enjoy your life. You can still have a fantastic time, but you have to accept that you can't shut everything down because you can't live in a world without fear. You can't live in a world without pain. These things are going to happen. So we're resilient, think in a way that any kind of war generation is.
“Fame should only come to children trapped in wells. That’s the only fame that’s sustainable.”
BD: You used some of your personal trauma in those early KITH sketches especially with the word “faggot.” [See Kids in the Hall Season 2, Episode 10: Fag Basher and Season 3, Episode 2: Fag!] Are you retaining some of that personal approach in this new series?
ST: We're the same people we were, but we were not allowed to use any of that language.
BD: Can we expect some particularly “gay” sketches?
ST: Yes. But, I think you'll be surprised at some of the topics we don't address – I'm not even gonna say them because I don't wanna get in trouble right now. I promised the boys I would keep my mouth shut, but there are a lot of topics now that you're not even allowed to address and that's not healthy for society.
Twenty-five years ago, we also had a kind of a monolith in our way, a different kind of monolith and it came from a different place and a different side of the spectrum. It truly is different now. The censorship is mostly coming from the left and those are the facts. It's just the way it is. Now it's all about identity politics and there's this idea that you can't even weigh in.
“Buddy Cole: I’m Canadian” from Kids In The Hall Season 1, Episode 20. 1990.
BD: The documentary is called Comedy Punks and you guys have this punk ethos within you. Do you feel like that energy is still coming through?
ST: We found different ways to push the envelope. We found different sneaky ways of getting things across – and we were quite sneaky. One of the great things about our arc is that we never quite became huge. We never really became a massive cultural force. We were always solidly cult. I think that has really helped us creatively.
I've realized that failure and success are both sides of the same coin and massive success and massive failure are pretty much the same thing and in that they can both be catastrophes. The fact that we never became household names really helped us because it kept us hungry. So all those years that I was jealous – it sounds like I have a lot of jealousy issues – jealous of other people, comedians that went much further and got much bigger. I always would blame it on that fact that I'm openly gay and that might be true. It is true. But, now I look at it think, fuck, I dodged a bullet. Because I'm here now and I'm not supposed to feel relevant, but I do. And that's an incredible gift.
BD: As relevant as ever!
ST: It's unheard of, it doesn't make any sense, but I feel it. And maybe I'm delusional, but I feel like, “Oh, I'm gonna piss people off again, hallelujah!” That's gonna be fun. I forgot how much fun it is. I've made peace with the whole “cancel thing.” If people want to cancel me, fuck off. Who cares? I got canceled years ago. None of it matters to me whatsoever. If the show comes out and it's a twenty-four hour cycle, we hit huge and then we're destroyed, which could happen — fine. If this show is like a cultural juggernaut that helps change the conversation — also fine. If it comes out and we become huge and then we fuck it up — fine. If we sell out — fine. You know what I mean?
Even our level of fame, which was a lot bigger [in Canada] definitely, I didn't handle it well. No one really does. It's not a normal state of affairs. And the people that want fame are generally not the ones equipped for it.
BD: Absolutely.
ST: Fame should only come to children trapped in wells. That's the only fame that's sustainable. Or doing something heroic. Or losing an arm to a shark. That's the kind of fame that's sustainable — but chasing it? No. My dream is that the show's successful enough that we get to do another one and another one, but I don't want it to be big.
BD: You have a solid audience.
ST: I want that. But, you know what? I have no choice. There's no choice in what's going to happen. The only choice I can make is how I react to it. I can't figure out what's going to happen. It is fun, though. When we were in Texas, the five of us did stuff together. We did a panel. We did stand up separately. We performed together. We showed the documentary, we showed clips. It went so beautifully.
BD: It seems like the reception has been really positive so far. I think people are ready.
ST: It's definitely time for the pendulum to swing back. This pendulum swung so far and I didn't realize that it would knock me out. I hope that we are part of it. It doesn't matter, but I think it will swing back. I think people are tired of it. I know I'm exhausted from it. I don't really know if comedy really needs to be reformed. Comedy is still a mathematical thing. There's gonna be different people that use it and different kinds of people in comedy, but comedy itself doesn't really change. It's always about loss of power and the higher a person has power, the further they fall, the bigger the joke, the bigger the response. And if something makes an audience laugh, you can be upset as much as you want, but you have to accept that there might be something there. They wouldn't have laughed if there wasn’t something there, so let's talk about it.
It's a beautiful thing and it's a very important thing for an open society to embrace. I feel strongly in our role as jesters, speaking truth to power, but we also have to remember that power looks a lot differently than it did twenty-five years ago and a lot of times people don't quite realize that the paradigm already has shifted. It shifted years ago. We're just catching up. So when people say “punching up” or “punching down,” I just go, well, you don't quite understand what up and down means anymore, because a lot of these targets that you think are punching down, they're actually punching up. You just haven't clocked the paradigm shift yet, but it's already happened.
BD: There's a difference between comedy as yourself, saying things that you wanna say, versus satirizing through characters like Buddy Cole. Is he coming back?
ST: Well, this will probably surprise you. Buddy will be in this series, but there will be no Buddy monologue. I submitted five and they were all rejected. There is a Buddy Cole scene, but the monologue, no. Which I'll be honest, that was the most difficult thing.
BD: No kidding.
ST: That's been a gut punch to me. They tell me that they can't do it because “we're protecting you.” This is what I found fascinating with this cultural discussion. “No, Scott, you're not allowed to do this because we need to protect your community.” You need to protect my community by stepping on me?
BD: Do you think you'll continue Buddy Cole on your own?
ST: Yes. During the darkest days of the pandemic, when I was thinking, oh my, god, I'm never gonna get through this, the Kids in the Hall aren't gonna make it through, I realized that what they've done again is they've given me another gift. They've made Buddy Cole fucking punk again. I'm gonna launch a Buddy Cole tour, which is the stuff you couldn't see on TV. That will be fantastic. It made Buddy relevant and a hardass. This fucking guy still scares people.
And I know that he's me, but we have a different relationship now, Buddy and I. Before, when I created Buddy, he was my voice. He was my standup voice. I really would've been a standup if I was a young gay kid today, but it wasn't possible for my generation. I mean I tried in the mid-eighties, but the atmosphere was so ugly, everywhere, from the other comedians to the audience, to everyone. I was just like, you're you don't belong. But when I met the Kids in the Hall, all around the same time, I went, oh, I can hide inside that team. I come from a family of five boys so I understand what that's like to be on a team and to have your position, like a hockey player. Buddy Cole became my voice because I couldn't say any of those things. I took that stereotype of the effeminate homosexual, which people up until then had ridicule constantly.
Literally every comedian, every movie had a bit where gay men were mocked. Lesbians too but men just like to make fun of other men. I thought [Buddy] was a kind of a character that people don't take seriously and they think they're stronger and tougher than he is. So I can use that to allow them to hear what they need to hear. That's not the way it is today. There's lots of Buddy Coles on TV now… Okay, superficially. But, it's more than clothing and being able to do a death drop.
BD: The original KITH was where I really learned about sketch comedy and comedy itself. Do you believe in the concept of “stoner humor.” Is there a specific type of humor that appeals to stoners?
ST: Well, I’m a gay stoner! I’m a generation that loved Cheech and Chong! That was a huge deal when I was a kid. Thing is that Buddy drinks, I smoke pot. I barely drink but Buddy wouldn't have worked with a joint.
They had some great weed rooms, I must say, in Toronto, before the pandemic. They were all over the place before they legalized marijuana here. One of the places I loved to develop my comedy, my standup, was in these weed places, because they were illegal and they were like speakeasies. They were all through the city. They were everywhere. That was a really fun place to perform.
I must say, there's a difference between a drunk crowd and a high crowd. I think a drunk crowd's better. A weed crowd takes a little more time, you know? You have to be willing to wait for that laugh and a lot of it's like, “yeah, that's funny.”
BD: Not always a boisterous crowd.
ST: It's like the way comedians are: “Oh, that's a good joke.” But now marijuana is definitely having a moment, that's for sure. The last two years there's so many pot shops here, it's making me go, “Oh god, it might be time to stop.” What, I gotta give up pot and cock sucking? They're mainstream. Everything that made me a rebel. I was a pot-smoking, cock-sucking science-fiction nerd. Those were all things that made me an outlier. Those are all mainstream now. This might be my time!
BD: I think our audience recognizes that in you and will be so thrilled that you are included here.
ST: Thank you. Because the other four are all drinkers. They would always mock me like, “Oh there's Scott with his joint.” Yeah, there's Bruce with his mickey of scotch, stumbling around!
BD: Did cannabis ever come into play with the original series? In the writing or just for you personally?
ST: No, no. We weren't like that. We didn't get high and write stuff. Paul Bellini and I would quite often get high and write stuff and sometimes Mark and I, but no. We were very, I would say pretty old school that way. We weren't even like an improv group. We didn't improvise stuff. We were very much old school writers. We would “spritz” as we called it. We would help each other to get things to the next level, but things would be scribbled down on napkins and that sort of thing and then we would go to our computers. We would sit down and write. All five of us did that.
What we would do is we would do shows and have the sketches written out. We would allow ourselves to improvise within the structure, but we never really went out with an idea and said, let's see what happens here. That was Second City and that was the world we were trying to destroy. That was our enemy. Not an enemy, but we were like, ah, you gotta have an enemy. It's healthy for young people. I hope there's a bunch of young ones coming after me because that'll be fun. I want them. It's natural. At the end of the night we might do an improv set. But even that we wouldn't do it normally. We would get suggestions from the audience about a play and then we would try to improvise a one act play. So we would do like forty-five minute improvs. We were all in Second City, but we were all kicked out. For me, when there's too many rules, it's time to break them. If it makes people laugh, then it's funny.
BD: Absolutely.
ST: You just can't really argue with it. I think drama, you can argue with it. You can't argue with comedy. If the comedian or the group kills, they kill. You could see a dramatic performance and everybody can have different reactions to it. Some people might think it’s terrible. Other people can think it was brilliant. But when it’s a comedy audience and they're all laughing their heads off, it's hard to argue. There will always be the drip that walks up going, “Why I never…” There’s always those people, you just have to deal with it. Every generation has Margaret Dumonts sprinkled throughout. I made a really old reference there.
BD: We’ll make sure to link it. [10 Things You Should Know About Margaret Dumont]
ST: Yeah, link to a Marx Brother’s thing. [Best of the Marx Brothers Criterion Teaser] That's what I'm thinking like, god are we about to become the Marx Brothers in their later years?
BD: How do you like to enjoy weed in your personal life?
ST: I like weed at the end of the day. Like anyone during the course of the pandemic that end of the day, sometimes was in the afternoon. I’ve probably smoked more pot than I've ever in my entire life, the last two years. Now I'm coming out of the pandemic getting a little bored of pot.
BD: It's nice to take breaks from it. We talk about this all the time.
ST: I love taking breaks. I'm about to take a big break from it.
BD: Do you smoke and listen to music?
ST: I like movies. I like TV. I'm a reader. That's my number one art form, books.
BD: Any good books for us to check out?
ST: Right now I'm going through a kind of a revisionist era. I'm reading a lot of science fiction that I read when I was young, sixties science fiction, seventies science fiction. Mostly British. John Wyndham. JG Ballard. I'm reading the Midwich Cuckoos. That's really damn good. One of the best things I read during the pandemic was Station Eleven.
BD: Incredible story. Really fascinating the way that it's laid out.
ST: There were quite a few years when I stopped reading and it all came back during the pandemic, which I've been very happy with. I started reading again. I think that part of what took me away from that kind of dense reading is the internet, how it’s broken everything up into pieces and 120 characters, et cetera. My attention span needs to be longer right now. I was worried. Can I really read a 500 page Russian novel now? And then I discovered, no, I can't, but I never could.
BD: It's a great break from online life to actually crack open a real book.
ST: It’s the greatest. It's the lowest tech. It's a direct interface with the creator into your head. There's nothing in the way. There's nobody else in between you and the creator and I find that really extraordinary. I really wanna write some novels. I’m hoping that this career resurgence gives me the time and the means to be able to write a couple of books. I just really, really want to write science-fiction.
BD: Is science-fiction your favorite genre?
ST: I’m a huge science-fiction nerd. I’ve always loved apocalyptic fiction.
BD: Do you think there's anything about these past couple years and all the upheaval of society that brings you back to these books?
ST: Yes, absolutely. I've always loved apocalyptic fiction. This has definitely brought me back. I've been reading different apocalyptic books that I read before and reading them a little differently now. This is kind of an “apocalypse-lite” but it's definitely worldwide. It's definitely changed everything. There's no question about that. And I don't think we quite realize how much things have changed. I think we're all going to realize in the next year, how different things are.
BD: You’re not a big social media user, right Scott?
ST: I don't think we've realized some of the terrible effects it's having on us. I think it is driving us into our own little pods and I think it's creating a lot of social tension. I don't think it's helpful. I think it's hurting. I think it's hurting the body politic and I think humans need to confront it. I actually think that social media should be 18 and over.
BD: It's completely unregulated essentially and monetized and then thrown at everybody without any testing or consideration for what happens.
ST: Should children really be exposed to everything? I don't think so. I mean, I grew up in a very different time. I look at it and go, “No, I don't think that's healthy.” I think in some ways people are gonna look back on this era and go, you know what, giving your kid a smart phone at eight is form of child abuse.
BD: There's gotta be some point where we collectively are just sick of it. People talk about it, but yet we're still all participating.
ST: I don't know how you youngsters are negotiating it! A few years ago, I did this movie about an old folks home. I ran the old folks home. I was a middle aged man, acting between all young people and old people. The young people were really young, teenagers, twenty year olds and the old people were like in their seventies and eighties. The old people were all chatting away and talking and flirting and doing things, but the young kids were not. That was disturbing to me. What are they doing? Why are they on their phones? They're 21 years old! Why aren't they disappearing to the bushes to fuck? Why aren’t they fucking? It's not a sexy era.
BD: That's very interesting.
ST: Like, stop talking about gender and start fucking more.
BD: It’s not a sexy era but there is still a lot of focus in social media on how people's bodies should look. We should be meeting in the bushes more often!
ST: Cruising really came back in the last two years here.
BD: For sure. Cruising without apps. It is alive and well in New York, too!
ST: I'm so glad to hear. There was this cruising area that I used to go to all the time when I was younger and it was dead for years and then suddenly – boom – it came back and we were all like, hallelujah! Kind of woods cruising, which is how I came of age. I was definitely a forest fawn.
BD: Maybe that’s the start of the movement of people rejecting these other digital methods.
ST: I’m also very pleased with the daddy resurgence that’s happening. I’m not questioning it. I have theories on what's happening, but I have no plans on stopping it.
BD: You're definitely the daddiest person we're featuring in this issue.
ST: You see I grew a mustache too.
BD It's great. Very flattering.
ST: I have to do this project soon, as Buddy Cole, but I can't let go of this mustache.
BD: Maybe Buddy has a mustache now?
ST: My manager said I can shave it, but I have another project where I promised them I’d keep the mustache. I think the mustache is why I got the part because my audition was terrible. You know my businessman character, Danny Husk? It makes me feel really hot.
But can Buddy Cole have a mustache? I think it would be a betrayal of Buddy. If I wrote a monologue about Buddy growing a mustache, I think that would work. He probably wouldn't have this mustache. I think it would be a more fetish-y one, like with the curls on the end. Kind of like a barbershop quartet mustache. Maybe a little soul stash that went a little too long. Maybe multicolored and maybe it would have some beads in it or something.
BD: Something more fabulous.
ST: Buddy's not scruffy. He likes it. He loves a scruffy guy. It might be a really good topic to explore. This might have been a topic that Amazon would've said, “Oh that's all right, you can talk about mustaches, Scott!”
Scott and his Buddy Cole costume ponder what’s next. Toronto, ON. April 2022.
BD: What else can we expect coming up for you?
ST: I'm definitely looking forward to doing stand up again. I’ve written a show in the last two years that I can finally put on stage. Paul Bellini and I have an album that just came out called Waiting for Henry and it’s doing very well! It’s a double album. There's gonna be a lot of stuff coming out. The documentary is gonna come out. The series is gonna come out. Amazon has bought Death Comes to Town, the mini series we did in 2010. Now they're about to buy Brain Candy. There's gonna be an awful lot of Kids in the Hall available soon. So, there'll be many different ways to cancel us.
