“Tokenized? That was when I was GOOD,” Scott Thompson says to Eugene Weekly, responding to a question about how he felt as a gay comedian in the 1990s. “I was at the top of my talent.”

Thompson is a comedian and actor who rose to fame in the 1990s as a member of the groundbreaking Canadian comedy troupe and sketch show, Kids in the Hall. In the late ’90s, he joined the cast of The Larry Sanders Show as Hank Kingsley’s gay assistant, Brian. In both projects and real life, he is openly gay, pretty funny and quite Canadian. More recently, he was CSI Jimmy Price on the acclaimed television show Hannibal.

Nowadays, Thompson is traveling comedy clubs around the U.S. and  Canada, as his most famous KITH character, Buddy Cole, in a tour he aptly titled “The Last Gloryhole.” 

Thompson says he developed Buddy Cole, or Charles Butterick “Buddy” Cole, based on a guy that he used to hook up with. His show is part standup comedy set, part one-man show, where Buddy Cole — an effeminate, promiscuous provocateur — shamelessly delivers his views through monologues on the gay community, baseball (catchers vs. pitchers), social issues and his friendship with Queen Elizabeth (or “Lizzie”) — all from the comfort of “Buddy’s,” a gay bar that he bought with the money he saved from quitting cigarettes for a week. 

“He’s fun to play,” Thompson says. “He’s stoic. He’s funny. The difference between him and I is that he doesn’t care.” 

Thompson was a gay comedian at a time when homosexuality’s only place in comedy was as a cheap, yet common punchline. Throughout his time on Kids in the Hall, Thompson challenged the social norm through simply existing on television, playing characters who were gay, straight or otherwise. In the show’s five-season run from 1988 to 1995, Thompson’s sketches made tongue-in-cheek statements about gay stereotypes, navigated gay struggles or most significantly, featured himself as a character where his sexuality was not central to the plot. And occasionally, his character kissed men.

But Buddy Cole was different from all of that. From the moment he said, “I may have been born yesterday, but I still went shopping,” in the very first season, the game changed. 

Through his monologues, Cole crossed territories that went uncharted by any comedian before him. While many straight comics loved to joke about men having sex with each other in the 1990s, no comic did it as eloquently as Buddy Cole, who got around the block, and did so confidently. “I was wearing next to nothing. In fact at one point, all I was wearing was a diplomat’s hand,” he would say as he sipped his martini.

Thompson explains that the effeminate gay archetype was born out of homophobia and misogyny. “It’s an extension of hatred of the female, hatred of the feminine. A man like Buddy Cole was deemed as someone that was weak and humiliated, and something you can’t be afraid of because he’s so tragic.” 

So Thompson created Buddy to turn this on its head, and give gay people a type of positive and explicit representation on TV that was seldom in the early 1990s. For Thompson, Cole “is the main character. He’s not a supporting character, he’s not the best friend. He’s the star, he’s the warrior, he’s the leader. He is the one.” He continues, saying that he also sought to show “There’s nothing wrong with a feminine man, and being feminine didn’t make him less of a man.”

However, Thompson didn’t make being an effeminate stereotype his entire brand. When he was cast on The Larry Sanders Show as Brian, Thompson requested that his character “not be a snap queen,” he says, as he expected the show’s creator to write the character like Buddy. “I already had Buddy, I didn’t need to do it again.” 

Instead, “Brian wasn’t super strong or masculine, he wasn’t compensating for anything,” Thompson says. He was just a gay guy, who was respectful, went on dates, stood up for himself and had flaws. Thompson also contributed another central characteristic to Brian regarding representation. Per Thompson’s request, Brian was Canadian. “I had never seen an openly Canadian character on American television,” he says.

Representation was important for both Thompson and comedy. As an openly gay man talking about being gay in all regards (from the wonderful to the messy) was so impactful that in 2017, Vulture named one of Buddy Cole’s monologues in its list of 100 More Jokes that Shaped Modern Comedy. 

However, Thompson says that Buddy was just as important to him as he was to his audience. “I knew that when I put on his armor, nothing could touch me,” Thompson says. “I came of age in a terrible time for gay men, and it was my protection against the world.” 

He continues that he had a very specific reason to bring him back. “I feel like it’s time again. I had to put Buddy’s armor back on, because we are in a very difficult time again. I really think arrows are coming from both sides now, and so it’s even more scary.”

Despite platforms like the Canadian Broadcasting Channel citing Buddy as “ahead of his time in many ways,” when Amazon Prime rebooted Kids in the Hall in 2022, the streaming service made it clear that Buddy would not be returning, as the sketches had aged poorly. Thompson didn’t appreciate that. “I don’t like being told what to do,” he says. “Amazon thought they were being liberal, but really they were being homophobic.” 

“There are lots of gay comedians out there now, but there’s no one that’s had my experience that’s been there from the beginning,” he says. “I consider myself and my generation of gay men as war veterans. I’m coming from the war and telling you what happened from my perspective. Not looking at it. You know the myths of history, but I was there. So I’ll tell you what really went down.” When Amazon would not allow his character to appear, “it became war again.”

He performed as Buddy Cole in 2024 on his “KING” tour, where “I wanted to get to a point — and it’ll never be fully gone — but I had to go to get this anger out of my system.”

But after the KING tour, Thompson says, “I’m old enough to go, ‘who cares?’ I know who I am. I know what I am, I know what I’ve done, I know what I’m doing, and I know that comedy is the greatest weapon.” The Last Gloryhole is Thompson, and Buddy’s, reconciliation with this realization (named for a sketch whose title Amazon did allow on the show). This tour also aims to explore Thompson’s question of “Who’s getting blown and who’s blowing? Only the universe will decide.”

Scott Thompson is performing at Olsen Run Comedy Club, 44 East 7th Avenue, 7 pm Thursday, April 24. Doors open at 5:30. The show is 21 plus. Tickets available at OlsenRun.Com.