'Kids in the Hall' star Scott Thompson steps out from behind the character he used to play on TV

"Kids in the Hall" was a sort of like an offbeat, somewhat surrealist cousin of "Saturday Night Live" produced by Lorne Michaels. They had a cult-classic TV show on Comedy Central back in the 1990s, and their sketches were often very conceptual.

In addition to sketches, sometimes they would do bits where it was just a character giving a monologue — and one of those was Buddy Cole, the owner of a gay bar, who would often show up and do monologues about his life.

Buddy Cole was played by "Kids in the Hall" cast member Scott Thompson. The show went off the air decades ago, but Thompson has kept Buddy Cole alive in various forms over the years. He’s currently touring a solo show called “Buddy Cole in the Last Glory Hole.”

Thompson joined The Show to talk about it.

It seems in order to be a creative, you have to choose some sort of platform that forces you to be writer, director, producer, editor — all of these things. And increasingly in choosing one of those platforms, you're also making a bit of a political statement.

SCOTT THOMPSON: No, I don't agree, no. No, I don't agree. I don't think about, "Oh, should I go on this road, because someone owns the road that I don't agree with." I still use the road. ... I don't know. I just think the world's gotten so, so politicized, my God. I don't know, like, not everything has to be political.

Well ... this show that you're doing, "Buddy Cole and the Last Glory Hole," do you think of that show as having a political core to it?

THOMPSON: Well, I don't know what you mean by politics. ... I talk about — most of my work is about human behavior. I don't think of human behavior as being left or right or aligned with aligned with any kind of philosophy. I just think of it as being human, and I've always used Buddy Cole to say things that I might not be comfortable saying. But that's what this show is about, basically. I do most of the show with him. And then about three-quarters of the way through the show, but he starts to realize that he might not be real, that he might be a character. Then he starts to realize that there's somebody behind him, there's somebody that it's me. And I wanna — I don't need you any longer. I don't have to hide behind this character the way I have for almost my entire career. You could not be an openly gay stand-up when I started.

So that's really interesting, because I think of you as such a gifted character comedian. I discovered your work first through "Kids in the Hall," and I loved your character work on that show. But if I'm hearing you right, that's a skill that you had to develop because doing stand-up in a less characterful way didn't feel like a pathway that was available.

THOMPSON: Well, that's true, and I started when I first began my career, I wanted to be just a regular actor. And I thought, "Well, I could be funny, but I can't be a comedian, because a comedian has to be honest about who you are" ... Where I came from, that was not possible. So I had to create Buddy Cole, because that character of an effeminate gay male, people go, "That person is not serious." So in many ways it allowed me to say very dangerous things, very subversive things. ... Like a clown. It was my clown, really.

How close is the the truth that Buddy Cole tells? I mean, Buddy Cole, as you said, he's this very big, extreme character. He's like this lounge lizard guy. How much do you feel like the types of things that he wants to joke about — whether they're sexual or political or whatever else — how much are his opinions and his takes, how similar are they to Scott Thompson's?

THOMPSON: Very. ... Yeah, because the thing is that the difference between him and I is that I, up until very recently, a lot of the things that I wanted to talk about, I had a hard time separating anger from it. And comedy doesn't work if the audience senses the anger that powers it. You know what I mean? ... Like so often anger is like — it's the fuel and the engine, but the audience should never smell the gasoline. But with Buddy Cole, you just smell cotton candy. You don't smell anger, you don't smell — I mean, most stand-ups do have a persona. ... The ones that I love were people that had a character like, like, like my favorite comedian of all time is Barry Humphries, who played Dame Edna. ... These are characters that people use to express. Certain things that they could not.