Episode 106: Happiness Is A Sassy ‘Buddy’ and a ‘Birdhouse In Your Soul’

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• 20 Years Later, Gay Icon Buddy Cole Is More Relevant Than Ever

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  “The Kids in the Hall” changed the face of sketch comedy with their subversive TV series that aired on HBO and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Twenty years later, the comedy holds up incredibly well. One could argue that’s because the Canadian troupe was ahead of their time.

  Take, for example, “The Kids in the Hall” member Scott Thompson’s famous creation, Buddy Cole. Cole is an effeminate, gay socialite with a tendency to lisp. And he’s not only out there with his sexuality, he’s out there with his opinions.

  In 1998, Thompson and “The Kids in the Hall” writer Paul Bellini collaborated on a book, “Buddy Babylon: The Autobiography of Buddy Cole.” The book highlighted Buddy Cole as an icon at an especially homophobic time in comedy and in culture at large. Now 20 years later, this faux memoir has been republished.

  “The book was released into a storm of nothingness,” Thompson told “BETA.” “No one reviewed it, no one talked about it. It was as if gay people were ashamed of it and straight people didn’t want to say they loved it because it would make people think they were fags. Now 20 years later, my belief is that people are ready for this book. It broke my heart that no one paid it any mind.”

  Thompson and Bellini were both gay men living in Canada in the 1980s when the AIDS epidemic hit.

  “I think that in many ways, we were so cursed that we retreated into art,” Thompson remembers. “I just really had this feeling that we were all going to die.”

  Out of that ominous era came Buddy Cole.

  “So Paul and I just basically started documenting everything. And then one afternoon, we were in Paul’s place, we were in his room which was full of blue paintings from his friend Randall Finnerty. And I just said, ‘It’s my blue period.’ And he turned the camera on and goes, ‘Start talking.’ And I started talking like Buddy Cole. I started doing that accent, that voice,” Thompson recalled. “The first stuff I started saying was ‘I’m a vampire, I’m a thousand years old.’”

  The debut of the Buddy Cole character on “The Kids in the Hall” went very well, Thompson recalls.

  “Back then, a lot of it was just the idea of playing a character like that was outrageous. And I think a lot of people laughed just at the way I moved, the way I spoke. People are conditioned to laugh at the effeminate male. I look back on it and I think a lot of the laughter came from people just literally feeling superior to the character in a way,” Thompson said. “But then the problem is Buddy Cole feels superior to you so you can’t really feel superior to him. He will smack you down.”

  “New York Magazine’s” pop culture website, “Vulture,” included Buddy Cole on its list of “100 More Jokes that Shaped Modern Comedy.” The website wrote that Buddy “wasn’t just a gay character talking about being gay. The genius of Buddy is that he was a gay character that talked about everything,” — even race.

  The article went on to say that “Buddy Cole helped change the tide of how gay men were represented in comedy.”

• Paula Poundstone Creates Her Own Metrics Of Happiness

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  Is there a key to human happiness?

  Comedian Paula Poundstone — best known as a panelist on NPR’s “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” — set out to find it in her book, “The Totally Unscientific Study of the Search For Human Happiness.”

  After seven years of compiling research on all sorts of activities that claim to make you happy, Poundstone was a little disappointed that her ultimate conclusion was fairly straightforward.

  “It’s all the things that your parents told you,” Poundstone told WPR’s “BETA.” “Get some exercise, go outside, socialize and pitch in and help.”

  For Poundstone though, the reward was very much the journey, not the destination.

  “As a writer, I knew that the experiments themselves would be good playgrounds for writing jokes,” she said.

  Poundstone said this book was also not a quest to find out what made her happy as she has a fairly strong grasp on what she enjoys doing, but rather to experiment with lifestyle changes that led to a lingering positive outlook.

  “The real question was what could I do that would leave me with a bounce, you know. So that when I returned to my regular life of raising a house full of kids and animals and being a stand-up comic — and just being stuck just being me 24 hours a day — you know, that I would have some residual good feeling to carry me through the challenges of my regular life.”

  Poundstone engaged in many experiments, ranging from finally plugging in to abandon her Luddite status to her attempts at organization with mixed results.

  In order to quantify her efforts, Poundstone invented units of happiness. She dubbed the smaller unit a “Hep” of happiness. Put together, four “Heps” and you would have a “Balou” of happiness. The highly scientific etymology for these neologisms was none other than the names of her cats. She’s hoping it will become the official measurement of happiness globally.

  
  Paula Poundstone with her cats Hep and Balou. Photo courtesy of Paula Poundstone

  “I love the idea of a ‘Hep’ and a ‘Balou’ being a universal term,” Poundstone said.

  Her most successful experiment, in terms of bottling happiness, was her attempt to “get fit.” She enrolled in her neighborhood taekwondo dojang and took as many sessions as her schedule would allow.

  “I have no passion, by the way, for taekwondo or self-defense,” she said. “The reason I chose that studio is it’s the closest one to my house and although I wanted to get fit, I didn’t want have to walk that far to do it.”

  Poundstone jokingly noted her progress by how much easier her trips to dispose of cat litter were becoming. She also noted a better resiliency to life’s hard knocks that she hadn’t felt previously.

  “I remember — and I recorded it in the book — feeling like when I breathed in it felt like I was breathing in possibility,” Poundstone said.

  This resiliency was put to the test when Poundstone suffered several personal blows while penning that chapter.

  “In the process of writing, ‘The Get Fit Experiment,’ one of my best friends died and my dog died and I went to visit injured service people at Walter Reed,” Poundstone said. “Under normal circumstances in my life, those are things that would’ve laid me pretty low.”

  Instead, Poundstone was surprised to have a healthier and more hopeful outlook.

  “I felt sad, but I didn’t feel overwhelmed,” she said. “I could still see and feel a future, but in the moment it was sad, which is very different from how I often feel.”

  The long span of time Poundstone spent gathering the research for the book netted an ulterior conclusion. She identified that the book is also a bittersweet memoir of watching her children grow and leave the nest. If that gets her down, she can always fall back on her own happiness research.

  “Oh yeah, I’m definitely using the results,” she said. “I’d be a fool not to, I think.”

• The Lasting Impact Of They Might Be Giants' 'Flood'

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  In 1990, the alternative rock band They Might Be Giants released their seminal album, “Flood.” Released by Elektra Records, it was the band’s first release on a major label. Using the record label’s reach, members John Flansburgh and John Linnell positioned “Flood” for maximum exposure and created a cultural touchstone for geek culture.

  Alex Reed is co-author of the 33 and 1/3 Series installment, “Flood” chronicling the album’s place in pop history.

  Reed argues that the timing was key for the album’s success. The record became a large part of a new wave of cultural signifiers that began mainstreaming the once fringe “geek” identity, wiping out the pejorative context from the word.

  “If you start looking at who was on the cultural ascendant at that moment, in 1990,” Reed told WPR’s “BETA,” “that’s when your Gary Kasparovs and your Bill Gates of the world start to become a culturally visible force and when people start saying, ‘Well geez, I’m going to own this identity.’”

  Even though the album only yielded one chart-topper with “Birdhouse In Your Soul,” Reed touches on the impact that the album had for its audience.

  “I think a lot of the people who heard it instantly recognized that this was different, that this was not like the other stuff that was charting. And when you feel something is just for you, even if it isn’t widely popular, that popularity has a kind of depth to it,” he said. “You end up sticking with it.”

  “Birdhouse in Your Soul” would breach the Top 10 in the U.K. charts and as Reed describes, the song’s frenetic and complex structure is emblematic of the album’s overall themes. The song features nearly 18 key changes that seemingly reflect the restless nature of the group and represents the “flood-like nature of ideas” on display on the record. Moreover, for as catchy as the song is lyrically, it is ostensibly about a night light.

  “The song is about a blue canary-shaped night light that you plug into a child’s wall which has got this kind of childlike innocence to it that pervades a lot of They Might Be Giants music. But then in describing it, they bring in this entire universe of metaphors,” he said.

  Reed argues this unabashed openness present in the band’s lyrics formed a strong connection to listeners who shared and appreciated their earnest impulses.

  “The genuine eccentricity of their music is being presented as part of the personality and never as a put-on,” Reed says.

  In the song “Dead” — which features the protagonist being reincarnated as a bag of groceries and pontificating on all of the things left undone — the band wrangles with the universal relatability of having a lot of unfinished business in life, but being too lazy to finish it, singing:

  “Now it’s over I’m dead and I haven’t done anything that I want (now it’s over)
  Or, I’m still alive and there’s nothing I want to do.”

  “It’s a really appealing song,” Reed said, “in both its foreignness of central metaphor, but also the familiarity of the thing that it’s referencing.”

  The track “We Want a Rock” tackles the cyclical nature of fads with a very circular New England inspired contra-dance backing accompaniment.

  “I think that the song ultimately comes out as a defense of simple pleasures. I feel like the song really says ‘you know what, you’re allowed to like the things that you like even if they are patently ridiculous and that’s OK,’” said Reed. “I think it’s a very life affirming song in the way that it stands up for our right to participate in a fad and get the social pleasure from that even as we’re parading around like fools.”

  “Flood” is still the best-selling They Might Be Giants album to date and remains a kind of siren song for listeners to “wave that freak flag.”