Laughing through his tears
Kids in the Hall alum Scott Thompson finds catharsis through new show Scottastrophe
Peter Vesuwalla


Sometimes life on the road just ain’t all that fabulous, even if you’re Scott Thompson.

Deep in the wilds of Rock Creek, B.C., he finds himself out of cell-phone range and is forced to call me from a pay phone.

It’s been such a long, tiring trip that the former Kids in the Hall star can’t even remember the name of the next town on his 17-stop tour.

“We’re going to… I can’t remember where we’re going,” he says and begins to laugh. “We’re right in the middle of the Okanagan Valley in the wine country — Sasquatch Country. We’ve just come from Osoyoos, near Penticton where the Ogopogo is, so we’re in monster country.

“Every day if we’re not performing we’re travelling. Yesterday we came from Whitehorse. We flew from Whitehorse to Vancouver and then Vancouver to Osoyoos, so it was a two-and-a-half-hour flight and then an eight-hour drive, and now we have a three-hour drive until the next stop.

“But it’s gorgeous. It’s just like Brokeback Mountain — I keep looking for Heath Ledger. We’re staying in people’s homes sometimes, little hotels, performing in community centres and churches, building the show very organically and letting it grow on the road. It’s really exciting.”

Scottastrophe is a different kind of show than the 47-year-old is used to — it consists of music courtesy of Bob Wiseman (Blue Rodeo) and Magali Meagher (The Phonemes), followed by a mix of standup, storytelling and slides.

“And no characters,” Thompson adds. “I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It’s kind of an exorcism, this show. It’s really cathartic. By the end of this tour I’ll be in totally different place mentally.

“It’s kind of an explanation of things, almost like coming clean,” he continues. “You go up and say, ‘This is who I am. This is what I am.’ Don’t get me wrong. It’s funny, but there are parts of it that are actually dramatic, and that’s very different for me. It’s difficult for me to go onstage and not try for a laugh, but there are parts of the story where I decided not to, and it’s really fun to kind of confound the audience that way.

“It’s a story about how many ways you can fuck up and still land on your feet, so it’s a story of hope. People will come and go, ‘Wow, thank God that’s not me.’ So that’s my message of hope: you’re not me. Some people have even cried, so I had them thrown out.”

In fairness, the last five years haven’t been all bad for Thompson. He participated in a Kids in the Hall tour, did countless TV appearances on everything from Providence to The Simpsons, and was host of the reality show My Fabulous Gay Wedding for a stint.

Still, Thompson found himself miserable in L.A.

“It’s a very lonely place if you’re not plugged in. Everybody’s from somewhere else. Everything’s really far away, and if you’re not working and you’re in show business you don’t really exist. And everybody you know is in the same field, so if you’re working they’re jealous. It’s not healthy.”

Strange as it may sound, it’s actually terrorism that has Thompson into such a self-reflective mood. In 2000 he had a very personal experience with terrorism, which he won’t talk about in interviews, preferring to save it for the show. He dealt with it the way any comedian would — by building a routine on it.

“The whole beginning of the last show was about Afghanistan,” he says. “Buddy Cole went to Afghanistan and fights the Taliban and tries to bring down Osama bin Laden and has an affair with Uday Hussein and ends up in Iraq having sex with Saddam and there’s a nuclear suitcase bomb and anthrax.”

That show, titled The Lowest Show on Earth, was doomed before it began because it was originally scheduled to open in New York on Sept. 19, 2001.

“It’s basically a routine by Nostradamus,” he says. “Imagine you’re in New York and this is what I’m talking about. There’s a conceit in the show that the whole attack on Sept. 11 was to bring my show down.”

Things got even stranger in the aftermath. Suddenly Thompson’s references to previously obscure subjects such as the Taliban were the stuff of headlines. In the culture of suspicion that followed, the FBI began scrutinizing Thompson and his boyfriend at the time.

“It’s hard for a comedian or any other artist to explain why they’re talking about certain things,” he says. “They go, ‘Why would you be talking about anthrax or Osama bin Laden or the Taliban?’

“I would go, ‘I don’t know. It interests me.’ I just think that sometimes artists get close to some collective truth.

“It was a couple of years before comedy really came back. People were scared and frightened. You had Bill Maher being cancelled and Janeane Garofalo being blacklisted.

“There was the White House saying you better watch what you say. There was a real chill in the land. I think everyone went, ‘We’re fucked,’ and I was really fucked. It’s taken me five years to get my nerve back, and this tour is definitely doing it for me.”