Comedian Dave Thomas.Dave Thomas/The Canadian Press
Dave Thomas is heading to the war in Ukraine on Wednesday. While talking about the trip with The Globe and Mail, the former SCTV star received a text message from his daughter asking him if he was sure he wanted to go, considering the recent air strikes.
His answer?
“I think I’ll be safe,” he says, after pecking out a reply to his daughter. “But, yeah, I’m a little frightened about it. I’m excited, too. Honestly, I don’t know what I’m getting into.”
The Canadian actor, comedian and writer is getting into a Turkish Airlines jet that will take him from Los Angeles to Istanbul, where a connecting flight shuttles him on to Moldova. From there it is an eight-hour drive to Ukraine, but only during curfew-allowed hours.
“I’m 76, I walk with a cane and most of my career is behind me,” he says. “So why don’t I go over there and see what I can do?”
He is making the trip on behalf of the Ukrainian Freedom Fund (UFF), a charity organization that according to its website was founded in 2014 to supply non-lethal equipment to Ukrainian units that had been stripped of assets by the pro-Russian regime during the initial invasion. The fund was re-activated in response to Russia’s full-scale attack in 2022.
Thomas is friends with UFF co-founder and executive director Andrew Bain, who served in Iraq and retired as a colonel from the U.S. Marine Corps Forces Reserve. Though the two worked on projects together through an animation company owned by Bain in Ukraine, Thomas has never stepped foot in the country (or in Russia, for that matter).
Bain recruited him to come over to talk with U.S. military officers and medical people associated with UFF, and to help with goodwill and fundraising.
Thomas wanted to do more. He asked for a sound and video technician to help him film more in-depth conversations, possibly for a documentary.
“I decided I wanted to really talk to Ukrainians,” Thomas said. “I want to find out how the war is affecting them. Do they have family in Canada? Have they been displaced?”
Because he’d never done anything like this before, Thomas called on friend and film editor Patrick McMahon for advice. The semi-retired B.C. native had cut for decades in feature films (including the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) and on television pilots. Late in his career he edited HBO documentaries including In Tahrir Square: 18 Days of Egypt’s Unfinished Revolution and the Emmy Award-winning Baghdad ER.
“I told Dave to ask people when they first heard that Russia had invaded, and if they knew anyone who had been killed, or ask them what it’s like to have a guy who used to be a stand-up comic leading the country,” McMahon said.
McMahon first met Thomas on the 1983 comedy Strange Brew. What he had learned from documentarians was to not ask questions when you already knew the answers.
“My advice to Dave was to put himself in the mindset where he’s setting them up to tell their story. If it is useful, then perhaps you can turn it into something. If it is not, then you just ignore it.”
Thomas will be in Ukraine for up to two weeks. One thing he won’t be doing is breaking out his dead-on impression of Bob Hope, the sneering, slope-nosed U.S. comedian who between 1941 and 1991 made 57 tours for the United Service Organizations (USO), entertaining military personnel around the world.
“People don’t know who Bob Hope is today,” Thomas said. “It just shows you how transitory it all is.”
One of his visits will be to a comedy club in the city of Dnipro, a target of repeated drone attacks. The club, he has learned, is doing booming business despite all the bombs. Thomas wants to “find out what they’re laughing at,” which is a comedian’s inclination.
He has no Ukrainian ancestry. The Ontario native, Los Angeles-based naturalized U.S. citizen and British passport holder through his Welsh and Scottish parents says this isn’t political.
“I’m not going to grandstand about Donald Trump and foreign policy,” he vowed. “I’m going there to find out how this war is affecting these people. At this stage in my life, I’m just grateful for the chance to do something that feels necessary.”
