The question of whether Scott Thompson will keep his nipples covered remains unanswered, but a little striptease isn’t entirely off the table. The one-time (and still, occasionally) Kid in the Hall is headed to Vancouver for a headlining appearance at Laugh Your Sexy Ass Off, two nights of old-school burlesque, music, and comedy coming to the Rio Theatre. When the Straight reaches Thompson at his home in Toronto, he’s still pondering what to do on either night. “Honestly, I’m just starting to think about it, but it seems like it would be perfect for a character,” he says. Perhaps the most obvious thing is to let his flaming alter ego Buddy Cole take on the job?

“He’s like a showgirl, so it is kinda perfect,” Thompson muses, before picking his interviewer’s brain about what, exactly, he’s gotten himself into. “Burlesque is pretty straight, isn’t it? Does it really turn men on? I’m curious. I mean, cause nowadays in a world where the most hard-core porn is basically within everybody’s arm’s reach, would anybody really go to a burlesque show to be turned on? It’s more about entertainment, right? And how much do they take off? Do they all strip down in some way? Buddy can definitely go down to pasties and panties.” Is that a promise?

“No!” Thompson responds, momentarily seized by panic. “I’d hate to disappoint people. Either way, if I don’t strip, it disappoints them. If I do, it disappoints them. Basically, I can’t win.” Anybody who’s attended Kitty Nights at the Biltmore in the past six years should know that the audience definitely wins, even if Thompson, theoretically, doesn’t. Laugh Your Sexy Ass Off is the latest brainwave from Kitty Nights producers Burgundy Brixx and Doug Thoms (aka the Purrrfessor)—both of whom will perform at the two-nighter alongside the Wet Spots, Watermelon, and dancers April O’Peel, Cherry Ontop, Villainy Loveless, and Sparkle Plenty.

Thompson’s got his work cut out for him with that lineup, but at least he’s arriving on a roll. Buddy Cole’s recent appearances on The Colbert Report as the show’s Sochi Winter Olympics correspondent were an indisputable triumph. “I was very happy with the way it went down. Very happy,” says Thompson, who went into the job wondering if “people actually remembered Buddy or if he would even seem relevant”. Notwithstanding his claim that he was paid in “clothes and Facebook likes” for the Colbert gig, doesn’t an East Side theatre in Vancouver seem like an awful long way from Comedy Central and a regular audience of something like two million viewers?

“It doesn’t really matter to me where an offer comes from. If it’s interesting to me, I wanna do it,” says Thompson, whose real bread and butter in recent years has been standup work. “Anything that’s interesting and different does a person a great favour, because it forces you out of your box.” Nicely put, although Thompson doesn’t disclose if we’ll actually get to see Buddy Cole’s box.

Georgia Straight, July 2014