Laugh Lines: Conversations With Comedians (5 page)

Corey: What’s Lorne Michaels’ cell phone number?

Dave: He would never give it to me. I have no idea. I don’t even know if he has a cell phone.

Corey: You’ve explored a time machine theme in a couple sketches. What would you do if you really had access?

Dave: To a time machine? It reminds me of a joke I once made. ‘If I had a time machine, I’d use it to go to the girls’ shower room and watch them shower. Oh wait, that’s invisibility.’

Corey: How is your laser eye surgery holding up? I’ve been thinking about getting it.
(In a documentary about the Kids’ 2002 reunion tour, ‘Same Kids, New Dresses,’ Foley gets Lasik eye surgery on camera. It ticked off the other members in the troupe that he would get surgery while they were performing on the road.)

Dave: Oh, Lasik? I love it. I know people are talking; there’s been some bad press about it lately, but I love it. I like that I can watch TV in bed without glasses; fall asleep without my glasses getting all bent out of shape.

Corey: Are you thinking about getting any surgeries on this tour?

Dave: I think I would be well served by a pretty extensive round of Liposuction. That would be pretty good.

Corey: Which characters from the show, either yours or one of the other guys’, would you not mind spending the rest of you life with—or at least a really long weekend?

Dave: I don’t even know if I’d want to spend a weekend with any of the characters from our show. I wouldn’t mind dating some of the women I’ve played.

Corey: How would you explain the TV show to small child if they wanted to know what it was about?

Dave: I would send them out of the room. My 5-year-old came and saw a live show a couple days ago and apparently really liked it. All the dirty stuff, if you don’t understand it, just erase it in the short-term memory. I would make sure the kid knew it wasn’t really a kid’s show.

Corey: What do you think of fans still trying to ‘crush your head’ after all these years?

Mark McKinney: I hate people that quibble with whatever got them famous, because there’s a lot of really good actors who would kill to be the one always getting their head crushed. I’d like to think that I’d equal that someday with something.

Corey: How did your time as an apprentice writer (with Bruce McCulloch) on ‘Saturday Night Live’ help you when it came time to write as Kids in the Hall?

Mark: At 3:30 in the morning on a Tuesday, desperate, I learned something about writing. I can’t actually say what it was—it may just be something like ‘Hang in there, baby’; the cat on the curtain rod poster—but we wrote some of our best stuff.

Corey: What was it like working with Lorne Michaels?

Mark: My experience working with Lorne Michaels is a lot better than my experience working without Lorne Michaels—in comedy anyway.

Corey: You guys played women—a lot—during Kids in the Hall, but they were quite realistic portrayals generally.

Mark: I think that happened really early. We just had one idea about performing as women. I think it probably wasn’t one of our most creative ideas; it was simply that we weren’t going to be those guys with big water-balloon tits.

Corey: Was there ever the thought of using a real woman like Python did with Carol Cleveland?

Mark: We were writing a lot of scenes where we did wish we had a female member, but they never stuck. We were too obnoxious for females.

Corey: Did you dare try to pull off your drag in public?

Mark: I never had the guts to do it, but Scott Thompson said he was gonna spend an entire summer in a dress, and he didn’t do that either.

Corey: Will you share the origin of the Chicken Lady?

Mark: Kevin had written a sketch. The whole idea was he was a guy with a freak show at the circus, and his trick was he could make his nose bleed at will. And the whole scene was these kids taunting him, and he doesn’t need them because he’s in therapy and in touch with his feelings, and he doesn’t need to perform; he’s on his lunch break.

At the end, the throwaway line is, ‘Get out of here, kids; go see the Chicken Lady. She’s an emotional dependent; she’ll do anything.’ And at the last second, we decided it would be funny to see the emotionally-dependent Chicken Lady.

Corey: Post-Kids, you played a priest in two films. Do you see yourself in that calling?

Mark: Either that or I look like I’m after little boys.

With most of the great comedy teams either dead or disbanded—and chances of a Monty Python reunion about as likely as founding member Graham Chapman returning from the grave—it’s refreshing to see one Canadian troupe still make it work after three decades. During the first season of “Kids in the Hall,” audiences were introduced to Buddy Love, a flamboyant barfly created by Scott Thompson.

Corey: How do the Kids get along today?

Scott Thompson: This is now a group that has accepted that we’re together forever. It sounds like we’re dealing with a terrible disease, but in a way it is. You know, a marriage is a disease. You just decide to embrace it or not, and so it’s more of a creative affair.

Corey: How is Buddy Love?

Scott: He’s excellent; he’s really good. He just got back from the Middle East, so he’s a little tired. He needs some down time.

Corey: Buddy seems to celebrate some of the elements that make up gay stereotypes. How much of Buddy is in you?

Scott: It allows me to say things that I think people wouldn’t listen to in my own voice. It allows me in some ways to say the un-say-able. Somehow the accent lulls people into a false sense of security, like ‘Oh, I know what this is; it’s a stupid queen.’ Then he hits you with something that’s pretty smart and he’s actually kind of tough and aggressive in a way. His femininity I find very alpha—an alpha queen. That’s basically how I see him.

Corey: What kind of advice would Buddy have for someone coming out of the closet?

Scott: One step at a time and, you know, just remember what you see now. In the future, you’re gonna look back upon it and be mighty embarrassed by a lot of it, but don’t be ashamed. I mean, you get a little older and go ‘Wow, was I ever a hard-ass.’ You know, everybody has their own agenda. Just because your door’s opening doesn’t mean somebody else’s door is ready, and it might not ever be ready and it’s none of your business. That’s how I feel.

Corey: You do a great impression of Queen
Elizabeth. Have you heard if the royal family has seen you perform?

Scott: I would love to know. I’m sure some of them have seen it, I’m sure. If the Queen saw me do the Queen, it would thrill me. A lot of comedians do her and especially in the Commonwealth, every comic does the queen, and I like to think mine’s the best. Not because I’m the best at it but because I look like her. I think there’s probably people that do it better, but they don’t look like her.

And I just happen to have this weird genetic connection, I don’t know. I look at my father and he’s the same age as her and he looks just like her. You know how when people get old and men become women and women become men? It’s weird, because he’s her. Charles is my Dad and we are in some kind of line that was broke off like 1,000 years ago or something. The family looks like us; the boys look like my brothers. It’s weird. I think that’s what I’ll do one day is a one-man show where I play all the members. Princess Anne’s a girl I could do, because I’m a pretty horse-y girl and so is she. She was never pretty.

Corey: You guys all played women in the show. Who made the best one?

Scott: Now or then? It’s so cruel. I just don’t want Dave Foley to read this. I would say Dave before.

And now, I still say Dave. The face. He’s just got more feminine features. Oh, he knows; he’s very aware of it. He’s actually kind of perversely proud of it. It thrills me that I’m the ugliest woman, because I’m the gay guy and I’m supposed to be the best. We’re all about shattering stereotypes.

Corey: Did you ever do drag outside of Kids in the Hall?

Scott: My friend, Paul Bellini, and I we were gonna for one whole summer. I had just joined Kids in the Hall. That was our thing. We said we were gonna wear dresses all summer and we did do it. We would go to bars and we would wear our dresses under our clothes and we would let them go down afterward, and they would throw us out at times—especially in gay bars where men are trying to pretend they’re real men—and we’d wear these dresses and they’d be kind of upset with us. But I felt kind of sexy. But we didn’t do it for the whole summer. No, we chickened out. We did tramp around town a bit, walked around Young Street in a dress one Saturday night. That was thrilling. We weren’t in drag; we were just in dresses. No we weren’t pretending to be women; we were just being Scottish.

Corey: Has being an out actor hurt your career at all?

Scott: Yes, honestly, yeah. I think people have a hard time, even with Kids in the Hall. You look at the work in that and the things that we’ve done and Buddy’s just part of what we do. I’m a real mousy guy and I think I probably pissed a lot of people off. I do find it disappointing because it’s almost a castration that’s happening and I really don’t like it and I didn’t know it would happen. I mean, I wouldn’t have changed anything, but I really wish I could have a more varied career. Then I read things. I read something the other day where a guy’s making fun of me, like, ‘Scott Thompson has made a career out of being gay,’ But yeah, you don’t get it, buddy, that’s all they give me. Nobody offers me anything else. I don’t get to even audition for other things, so what do you want? I need to earn a living.

I do my own thing and I do stand-up and I have a one-man show where I do 14 characters. And only one of them is gay, but no one really notices that. I just hold on hoping that role will come along that breaks that for me, and I’m hopeful it will or else I’ll just write it myself. I’ve written two movies that I’m trying to get made and if they get made, and they’re done well, I think they will change everything for me.

Corey: Was there ever pressure from the Kids not to come out?

Scott: In the early days, yes, there was pressure not to, from them and outside—especially when we were gonna be on television. Most people said I was crazy and they were right, but I did it anyway. But now, no. No one gives a shit.

Corey: What are the chances of another Kids in the Hall movie?

Scott: I’d like to do another movie, but I’d like to do it completely different. I would not do it ever again with a studio. I would do it for less money—not that our movie cost a lot. It didn’t. I’d even make it for less money. And we decided our film—if we make another movie—would be much more down to earth, small, mostly just about people, not period. Just keep it about people, and do it on our own.

Corey: What about the movie you wrote?

Scott: There’s no studio attached, but there’s a director attached who loves the script. I’m not really in it. It’s my story; it’s an autobiographical coming-of-age comedy, set in my hometown. He’s in love with someone but it doesn’t work out; an unrequited love story, in a way. It’s kind of like ‘Rushmore’ crossed with ‘American Graffiti.’ That’s what I really want to do next is make this movie.