The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Why This Canadian Comedian Is Heading to Ukraine

Episode Date: April 30, 2025

This week, Dave Thomas, of SCTV fame, will travel to Ukraine to talk to civilians, soldiers, and stand-up comedians. We discuss his upcoming trip and what he's hoping to achieve.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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make a first time donation and continue to discover your 2 Point TVO. Dave Thomas has spent decades making people all over laugh on SCTV, as one of the McKenzie brothers and in innumerable other movies and television shows. But his next big mission is anything but humorous. Tomorrow, Dave will travel to Ukraine in hopes of shedding some light on the plight of its people who have endured three years of Vladimir Putin's immoral and illegal war. And Dave Thomas joins us now from Los Angeles, California with more. It is great to see you again, Dave.

You and I are both from the same hometown. Our parents knew each other. So let's get all that on the surface before we start and tell me why you are going to Ukraine. Well, I have a friend named Andy Bain, who I partnered with in an animation company in Los Angeles back in 2001. Andy was a very savvy MBA student who went over to the Ukraine and purchased a couple of businesses when the Soviet Union dissolved.

One of them was an animation company. Our plan was to outsource to the animation company. Over the course of the decade and a half that I worked with Andy, I got to know the Ukrainian people that we were working with the artists, very talented people and storytellers. And it was a great collaboration. Well, then the war started and Andy stayed in the Ukraine. don't know, 10 days ago and told me that he had formed this charity called the Ukrainian Freedom Fund and it's on the online. You can get a UFF, the UFF, the UFF, the UFF, you can get it at uff, the uff.org.

And he wanted to help the Ukrainians in their struggle against the Russians. And he has a military background, so he had connections and he was able to pull some resources together, get some favors and things like that, but ultimately he needed money and he asked me if I would come and help him raise awareness for his charity because he said, you got a profile in Canada, maybe we can get Canadian donors to help us out here. Here's the kind of stuff they're doing. They're obviously providing food and medical and all those kind of resources to the victims and civilian casualties of the war, but they're also providing food and medical aid

to the soldiers. They're evacuating old people and children from the front lines. They have technical people with electronic expertise who are helping defuse unexploded ordinance that's in the rubble of apartment buildings. They're working with Canadian military advisors to help bring the Ukrainians up to speed with the sort of modern electronic warfare that the Russians are waging. One of the things he told me is that the Russians are doing a lot of drone attacks on very specifically targeted on people and things like that, hitting their cars. So a lot of the Ukrainian cars now are outfitted with aerials and anti, you know, electronic

stuff to confuse the radar and the sort of direction finding on the drones. Well that does raise a good question about your safety Dave. Are you not concerned about yourself going over there? Well okay two things. I'm playing with the casino's money. I'm 76 so I've had a damn good run and I'm a happy guy. But I'm gonna be well protected and I think I'm going to be fine. And he said, it's a very strange dichotomy that the city of Kiev at during the day looks like, you know, a beautiful modern city with, you know, outdoor cafes and that there's no war at all going on.

And then at night the air raid sirens go off and the rockets begin to fire. So, you know, there's a good side to it and a safe side to it and another side where you have to be cautious. And Andy has all the resources to help protect me. So I think I'm going to be fine. But, you know, I am going to go up to GEPRO, D-N-I-P-R-ro, which is on the front lines. Because one of the things I wanted to do was to ask the Ukrainians that I interviewed if they could still laugh, if there was anything in their lives that gave them a

release from the tension of the war that they could laugh at. Well, as it turns out, they can and laughter is more important to them than ever. So are they expecting you to come over there and be funny? No, but I am going to interview, because I don't speak the language, but I am going to interview Ukrainian stand-ups in Dnepro. I'm going to interview Ukrainian standups in Dnepro. I'm not pronouncing it properly. And I want to ask them specifically, what are they laughing at? What are the jokes that, what do they think is funny? Are they all Vladimir Putin jokes or, you know, what exactly is it?

How long are you going over for? About 10 days, maybe a little more. I want to talk to the people. I want to find out how the war is affecting them. You know, it's uprooted them. A lot of them are refugees. They've moved away from their towns that have been bombed. Their children's schools have been interrupted.

They've lost relatives in the conflict. And you know, this is the biggest war in Europe since World War II. And I don't think it's getting as much attention as it should, you know, but I'm not there, I'm not going to be getting into the politics of it because that's not me. That's not my job. I don't have any skillset there or any real right to talk about that. But I do think I have a right to talk about the people. And I do think I have a right to talk about the human suffering.

And I do think, and I want to find out what is going on on a personal level. So I'm hoping that that's the kind of emotional interviews that I can conduct with these people, that we can then cut something together and put it up. The uff.org has a Facebook presence and an Instagram presence, but I don't know, maybe there's a longer form thing that we're going to cut together. I have a friend named Pat McMahon who's an Emmy award-winning, he's a Canadian, an Emmy award-winning Canadian editor who's done a lot of documentaries in war zones. He gave me some tips about questions to ask and how to approach this.

I had directed films before, I'm not completely incompetent in interviewing or assembling stuff, but I am not a novice. As I said, my goal here is to tell a personal story and to get these people to open up about, you know, well, I've got questions that I'm planning to ask them, like, you know, what keeps you going on the hardest days? How's your life changed since the wars began? And, you know, what do you miss about life from before the war?

And what do you think the future is going to be for you? And what's something small that still makes you laugh these days? You know, stuff like that. That's great. Things that make it very personal. You know, I hope you'll permit this observation. And I do wonder whether you have felt it yourself. Back in the day, you got very famous

doing the best impression anyone ever did of Bob Hope. And of course, one of the reasons Bob Hope got very famous was that he used to go overseas and entertain the troops on behalf of the United States. Has that, has it occurred to you that you're kind of taking a chapter out of Bob Hope's playbook here? Well, I'm not standing in front of the Ukrainians and doing a Canadian monologue.

Right. Do you know what I mean? There was a part of Bob, I remember he did a show in China, and he had an interpreter interpreting his monologue. And it was one of the most ridiculous things I've ever seen. You know, so I'm not going to be doing that. But I do want to find what the comedy connection might be just on a personal level, because I'm very interested in that because of my

background. And but, you know, Steve, this is, this is a story that, you know, that's personal and for me, it's at this stage of my life, you know, I'm really grateful to have an opportunity to do something that feels real, you know, something that I think is necessary. And that, I don't know, maybe, maybe this will inspire other people to do stuff to try to raise money and to help the Ukrainians. Because, you know, we're living in a really crazy world right now. And I'm not ever really sure whether I think it's crazy just because I'm an old guy and

old people always think the world is crazy or whether it really is crazy. But I've talked to people who say, no, no, Dave, it really is crazy. It's crazier than ever. They are right. It really is crazier. Dave, do you mind if we check in with you

when you are over in Ukraine? And I don't know if we can get a line out of there, but if we try, can we talk to you when you're there? I would love that. And they have resources. Andy's got resources that will probably allow that to happen. So if I can be on the street talking to people or at a stand-up club on the front lines

or talking to soldiers or something, I'd be happy to find a way to link that up with you guys. That'd be great. Wonderful. OK to link that up with you guys. That'd be great. Wonderful. Wonderful. OK, thank you so much for joining us tonight on TV OAT. Next time you talk to your brother, Ian,

tell him I love the concert of his that I went to in Oshawa not too long ago. He still sounds angelic. Wonderful voice. And of course, I love his songs. And you be well over there, OK, my friend? And we'll touch base soon. Thanks a lot.