John Scott Thompson (born June 12, 1959), known professionally as Scott Thompson, is a Canadian actor and comedian, best known as member of the comedy troupe The Kids in the Hall and for playing Brian on The Larry Sanders Show.
Early life
Thompson was born in North Bay, Ontario and grew up in Brampton. Named for his uncle, he later dropped the name "John" to simplify his name for the stage. He is the second oldest of the five children in his family.
In 1984, Thompson became a member of The Kids in the Hall, whose eponymous sketch comedy series aired starting 1989 on the CBC in Canada and on HBO in the United States, but moved to CBS for its fourth and fifth seasons. Openly gay,[2] Thompson became best known on the show for his monologues as "alpha queen" socialite Buddy Cole, and his appearances as Queen Elizabeth II, secretary Cathy, businessman Danny Husk, suburban housewife Fran, actress Francesca Fiore, and the demented old man in the popular "Love and Sausages" sketch.
Concurrently with The Kids in the Hall, Thompson and his writing colleague Paul Bellini collaborated in a queercore punk band called Mouth Congress.[3]
During the mid-1990s Thompson ran an interactive website, developed by his younger brother Craig and called ScottLand. It had a live-chat area, voting and comedy espionage and sold Buddy Cole T-shirts and video tapes of comedy sketches.[4]
Thompson published a humour book, Buddy Babylon: The Autobiography of Buddy Cole, and a graphic novel, The Hollow Planet, based on characters from The Kids in the Hall,[6] and has written and performed two one-man shows. In 2014, Thompson, in character as Buddy Cole, did a series of reports on The Colbert Report as the program's correspondent for the 2014 Winter Olympics.[7]
In 2015, Bellini and Thompson uploaded all of their Mouth Congress recordings to Bandcamp,[3] and they reunited the following year for several live shows to promote the release.[8] They launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a documentary film about the band; that film, Mouth Congress, premiered at the Kingston Canadian Film Festival in 2021.[9]
In 2018, Thompson launched Après le Déluge – The Buddy Cole Monologues, a one-man show in character as Buddy Cole.[13]
Personal life
Firebombing
In 2000, Thompson was living with his boyfriend, French documentarian Joel Soler, in Hollywood. Soler had smuggled footage out of Iraq to make an E! News-style satiric political documentary comedy, Uncle Saddam, about the eccentricities in the home life of Saddam Hussein and his family, which bubbled behind Hussein's dictatorial façade. Thompson wrote the narration for the movie, which was read by actor Wallace Langham. Following the movie's release, Thompson and Soler's West Hollywood home was firebombed on November 1, 2000. Thompson has discussed the details of this incident in interviews with Jesse Brown of Canadaland and fellow Canadian comic Elvira Kurt, as being inspiration for his future show The Lowest Show on Earth. In the interview with Kurt, he says of the attack, "We were sleeping and a group came to our home. They filled our giant garbage cans with gasoline and set them on fire on our front lawn. They had buckets of red paint. They covered the house with it so it dripped off like blood. They put a note in the front hall that said, 'In the name of Allah, the merciful and compassionate, burn this Satanic film or you will be dead'. They underlined "dead" just in case we weren't freaked out enough".[14]
This, along with many other incidents throughout Thompson's life, including the 1975 Centennial Secondary School shooting at his Brampton high school, led him to process incidents of terror on micro- and macrocosmic levels through his one-man comedy show The Lowest Show on Earth. Thompson went on tour with this show and secured a spot in New York, off-Broadway. The posters—featuring Thompson lying supine on the ground with a big wad of semen dripping down the side of his face—went up around the city on September 10, 2001. The following day, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center made the one-man show's difficult material impossible to talk about.[15]
^Carly Maga, "Two different kinds of Canadian classic: Plus, an exciting sampler of African Canadian dance to cap off Black History Month". Toronto Star, February 21, 2016.
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