Tom Green: Shock Broker

It’s Canada Day and Tom Green is back home visiting the folks in Ottawa. Were this 13 years ago, his parents Richard and Mary Jane would be sleeping with one eye open, ready to stagger out of bed and find their son airbrushing a lesbian porn scene onto their car, slipping a cow’s head between their sheets or hiding blaring radios all over the house at 4am.

Such stunts were standard procedure for a twenty-something manchild trying to carve himself a niche as the mad hatter of cable TV. So when the older, possibly wiser Green interrupts our chat to let his long-suffering mother into the house, I’m almost surprised not to hear his mild-mannered greeting followed by a horrified shriek.

But this is 2011, and things are a little different for the man responsible for two MTV series, a sporadic rap career and the gleefully juvenile shock flick Freddy Got Fingered – which was mauled by critics a decade ago but remains a favourite among his mostly young, mostly male cult following.

His visit to Ottawa marks a rare break from the hectic touring schedule he has maintained since he took on his latest incarnation as a standup comedian in 2009.

“I’m going non-stop,” he says. “People keep booking me to come, so I have to go, because I know every time I go onstage I get a little bit better, I know a bit more.”

Eager to “keep the rhythm going of being onstage”, earlier in the week he played a one-off slot at a local venue called Yuk Yuk’s – the club where, albeit in different premises, he first flirted with standup aged 15.

The setting may have been familiar, but the crowds were considerably bigger this time round. It might come as a surprise to learn that Green can still attract fans in droves, given that he hasn’t had a regular television career since 2003. But after MTV dropped The New Tom Green Show he went to ground and has sustained his sizeable fan base in the only place weird enough to accommodate his stilted brand of shock humour: the internet.

In 2006 Tom Green’s House Tonight, which brought 38 million video views to his website each month, cut him loose from the clutches of producers, censors and sponsors. Streaming live from the living room of his California home, he presented the surfing public with cosy, casual interviews with celebrity friends, off-the-cuff horseplay and live callers on Skype. It was his house, his rules, and now standup comedy is offering him a similar sense of liberation.

“Honestly I think I’ve found something now that I’ve been striving for for the last 20 years, which is creative freedom and independence as a comedian,” he says. “When I was doing my show on television it was always exciting, but you always had to run everything past somebody. There was always a feeling that you weren’t in control of your own fate.”

His love affair with the internet, dating back to 1996, provided the launch pad for his standup – yet his attitude towards technology is ambivalent. When he comes to Edinburgh he’ll wield an arsenal of gadgets for shooting and uploading clips on the hoof, but he’ll spend much of his stage time looking at the pitfalls of social media.

Green, who turns 40 the week before his run begins, says: "It’s an interesting age because if you’re 30 or 25 you don’t really remember what it was like before the internet or before cellphones. And that’s a very significant shift in the way that we’re living, the way that we communicate and socialise with each other."

“It makes doing standup a lot more fun when you’re 39 than when you’re 19," he adds. "I’ve definitely got a lot more stuff on my mind that I feel strongly about, I’ve been through a lot more in my life, I’ve had a lot of crazy experiences over the years, stuff that I feel the need to get up onstage and make comedy about.”

In that sense, he’s certainly not lacking in stories to draw on: his testicular cancer operation, which he filmed for an MTV special ten years ago; his attempt, at a hiphop festival last year, to rescue trashy reality TV star Tila Tequila from a hail of rocks and faeces; the much-publicised collapse of his five-month marriage to Drew Barrymore in 2001. But even with his real-life and observational material, Green has found he cannot shake his onscreen past.

“There’s been some shows where it’s just so raucous because people are so excited to see me. They’re big fans of Freddy Got Fingered and they’re shouting out all the lines from the movie. And I’ve been like: ‘Ok, Jesus! I want to start talking about what I want to talk about’.”

He insists he doesn’t mind that his rowdier disciples make his shows unpredictable rather than derailing them altogether. This patience makes sense for a man who knows which side his bread is buttered, whose gratitude to longtime fans sees him stay behind after shows to sign DVDs and gurn for snapshots. But at the same time, Green knows he can't play only to those who have seen Road Trip 27 times.

“If I knew that all I had to do was walk up onstage and sing ‘Daddy, would you like some sausage?’ then I wouldn’t have written any jokes this year,” he says, quoting a typically nonsensical catchphrase from Freddy.

He sets himself high standards, enthusing about the process of “microanalysing” his jokes in search of the perfect set. But with his dedication to the stage comes the need for other projects to shift on the backburner. While the web show has been on hiatus since Green went on the road, there’s also the small matter of Prankstar, the film he insists is finished and simply waiting for distribution.

When asked about its content, he is cagey: “I can’t really talk about it because it’s so crazy that I don’t want to give anything away.”

A quick search reveals that a company called Elixir Films was at one point planning to release the film as far back as 2006. Its synopsis, in which a fictionalised version of Green lets two students film his disastrous road trip across Canada, reads like a snippet from some parallel universe, a nightmare in which he never finds the momentum provided by standup:

“Beginning in Hollywood, the crew documents Tom withstanding a barrage of insults, shallow hangers-on, and the loneliness of waning fame… Tom is met with an uncaring public and fans who can’t help but bring up his past… Prankstar takes over where Tom’s career in Hollywood left off.”

Whether Prankstar will ever see the light of day remains uncertain, as with the rap songs Green records in his home studio – “I have probably a couple hundred songs I’ve recorded that no one’s ever heard.”

So, with an unseen movie and a hoard of music rotting in the archives, what’s to say his latest venture isn’t just another disposable pet project? It’s off to a strong start, but might he abandon his standup career if it falters in the long run? Green is adamant that he won’t.

“I’m planning on doing this now for the next 20 years,” he says. “I’m going to keep doing this and I love it.”

It’s a surreal image: 2031, with Green aged 25-going-on-60 and his former fratboy devotees still hollering obscure references at the stage. Whether he will last that long is impossible to say – but his run at this year’s Fringe should give us some idea.