Buddy Cole. QEII. Over 100 waiters. As a member of the god-tier sketch troupe The Kids In The Hall, Scott Thompson’s contributions to comedy have been indelible, and as a rare openly gay public figure as far back as the ‘80s, Thompson blazed a courageous social trail as well. I’ve been a fan of his work forever, but the news that he’d been in a mutant punk band in the late ‘80s, contemporary to the emerging popularity of KITH, came as a surprise to me. The band was called Mouth Congress, and Thompson co-founded it with KITH writer Paul Bellini (the same Bellini as the recurring towel-clad-man character in many KITH sketches) and Jeff Goode, now a producer/host of Thompson’s Scott Free Podcast. And their stuff was rather a lot of fun. Via Chart Attack:

Over the past month, some kind soul has uploaded a trove of Mouth Congress recordings to Bandcamp. So far, the dump includes 15 albums, with names like The War On Flowers and A Fey Breeze, featuring should-be classics “Paul Jude Bellini” and “How to Strip for Your Husband” alongside live show recordings, sound collages, sketches, and a who’s who of cameos from the comic group that the pair were hanging around. It’s a time capsule of Canadian punk, comedy and queer culture, and as good an excuse as any to tune out for the rest of the day or week or whatever.

Here’s the Bandcamp playlist. You can buy the digital album here, if you like. Some material is NSFW so any nine-to-fivers reading this, you might want to use your earbuds.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Kids in the Hall’s Scott Thompson has plenty to say about fruits

 
I wish I knew about this when it was still active: Scott Thompson, the member of the Kids in the Hall sketch comedy troupe who broke ground as an out-of-the-closet gay performer at a time when homosexuals were still punching bags for some of the world’s most popular comedians, used to maintain a blog about fruits. Ha ha.

Thompson announced the fruit blog’s existence with the following, in February of 2011:

In the beginning there was the apple and everything was quiet. Then Eve took a bite and that’s when the fun started. The apple is the most popular fruit in the Western Hemisphere and grows pretty much everywhere. There are thousands of types of apples. My favourite is the Macintosh or Macs. Maybe that’s why I love my computer so much. I used to love Delicious apples when you only had them rarely. Then one day they were there every day, their bumps no longer exotic, their almost cloying sweetness no longer exciting. And then they weren’t even called Delicious any more and we were all suppposed to pretend that it had always been that way. No thank you Big Brother. I’m fine with my Mac and a hunk of cheddar. And no thank you, you can keep your fancy handkerchief to yourself. I’ll just polish it on my jeans.

New postings ended in September of 2012, roughly coincident with the announcement that Thompson would play crime scene investigator Jimmy Price on NBC TV’s Hannibal. But in that year and a half or so, Thompson (and friends) blogged a ridiculous series of video fruit reviews. He bravely took on the pomegranate, confronted guava with steely resolve, and went toe-to-toe with tiny bananas and lived to tell the tale. It’s pretty obvious these were all made in a single session. Since I’m laughing, I don’t care.
 

Pomegranates, part I
 
More fruit reviews after the jump…