Tom Green: Comic mercenary

by Emma Kat Richardson

Comedian Tom Green has gone back to his stand-up comedy roots by launching an international tour. The traveling circus hits Comix in New York this week. You’re town just may be next.

Tom Green wears a lot of labels, but in reality, everything you think you may know about him is probably wrong. (Or, at least, partially incorrect.) Yes, he’s irreverence incarnate – remember, he’s the former MTV star who once gained notoriety by both suckling on a cow’s utter and humping a dead moose on camera. But what you may not suspect of the Canadian export is Green’s intimate understanding of how to both manipulate and overhaul the comedy establishment simultaneously, or his keen sense of what constitutes tools to build the perfect joke. (Wackiness frequently included.)

Although he’s well-adept at playing dumb, there’s nothing remotely dumb about Green, despite the outrageous and often shocking comedic persona he sports. He has recently managed to stay several steps ahead of the competition by pioneering his own Web TV, streamed on TomGreen.com, which has provided him with the perfect, uncensored outlet for his unique brand of humor while effectively keeping the oddball comedian out of the corporate, restrictive fold of network TV. (Conan, you may want to be writing this down.)

Along with the TV show, Green is also in the midst of embarking upon the TomGreen.com-sponsored world stand-up tour – an endeavor sending him and his loyal band of jesters traipsing across the globe for a stand-up extravaganza that makes ample use of Internet broadcasting and new media technology, mainly by video updates from Green’s website and an open invitation to fans to bring recording devices to the shows to tape their reactions.

Checking in from the television studio that doubles as his house, Green waxes philosophic with Punchline Magazine about the corporate media monopoly, Andy Kauffman, and Green’s own reputation as the continued torchbearer of “gonzo” comedy.

How does your stand-up act differ from your well-known TV persona?
Well, I’m being myself as much as possible when I do stand-up, as I do when I do the TV show. I’m goofing off and being silly as well, and talking about things I find interesting and ridiculous. It’s not like I’m doing a different persona, you know? I always like to keep it as real as possible, but I always tend to be a little bit wacky, too.

Obviously, there are a lot of differences between doing television and stand-up. Stand-up is so much more of a pure art form. You’re standing there all by yourself on the stage; you don’t have a teleprompter, you don’t have a bunch of cameras pointed at you. You’re talking directly to the audience. On television, you’re talking to two audiences at once: you’re talking to the audience that’s in the studio and you’re talking to your audience that’s [watching] television. You’re kind of splitting your attention between the two.

But it’s exciting. You can’t yell “cut!” when you make a mistake and hope that they’ll edit it out, so the differences are obviously more technical, you know? As far as what I’m trying to do and as far as the message I’m trying to convey, what I think is funny, it’s the same.

Did you always envision yourself as an Andy Kaufman-style gonzo comic?
I’ve always liked weird and outrageous and ridiculous things that are kinda coming from a different perspective than the mainstream. I don’t know what word I would use to describe myself, because there are so many words. People call me a “shock comic,” people call me a “gross-out comic,” people call me “outrageous,” “wacky,” “goofball.” Obviously, things evolve over time, too – I’m doing different things now than I was maybe 10 years ago.

The main thing is that I’ve always kind of liked to take on the status quo. I’ve never liked to go out and do exactly what everybody is doing in the mainstream; I’d rather challenge the mainstream. I’ll take “gonzo.” Sounds good to me. Andy Kaufman, he was awesome because he seemed like he was pretty acutely aware that the mainstream way of doing things didn’t [work], and was often a little bit contrived. He had a fun way of taking that on, you know? Sometimes, he would sort of make himself look foolish in a way that not everybody understood, in order to make a point. I definitely think I do things like that at times.

Do you feel like he’s always been an inspiration on your comedy?
You know, it’s funny, because I didn’t know who he was until Man on the Moon came out. It was sort of one of those things that kind of missed me; it was just a few years before my time. But then, when I started doing my show… I did my show for a long time in Canada, and it wasn’t until I moved my show to the States that it started drawing that comparison, and I kind of went in and looked into it. I realized that I find him really hilarious. I definitely find him very inspiring now. I grew up really interested in comedy: folks like Monty Python, David Letterman, and all sorts of different things. I don’t really think that I would compare my stand-up to his, you know, now, but there are some things that I do that might be similar.

I was just reading that your new stand-up act incorporates not only stories onstage, but music. How do you weave those things together to make a show that’s compelling?
Yeah, I do a couple of songs. I’ll sing two songs from Road Trip, “The Salmon Song.” Most of my audience knows the song, and everybody sings it with me. I like to pull a guitar out for three or four minutes, and I’ll do a couple of little things. And, I may or may not do some rapping, if I feel like it – I do some rapping in the show because I’ve always liked rapping.

But mostly, it’s pretty heavy spoken word stand-up, joke-telling and storytelling. I don’t get too, too much music. Maybe if I start doing longer sets; when you do two shows a night at comedy clubs, you tend to not go too much over an hour. I don’t want to incorporate too, too much music into that; I want to think about the stories and the jokes, but I could see myself bringing more music into the show in the future, as I move into larger venues and do longer shows and things like that.

What have you done over the years to develop your comic style?
Well, to be honest with you, I didn’t really do stand-up [consistently] over the years. I wanted to – I did stand-up when I was in high school, but then I sort of stopped doing it and I started doing a public access show. I tend to be somebody that kind of focuses on one thing at a time: I really ended up focusing on that show for five or six years in Canada, and then it got picked up by MTV. It was very specific to itself – it was all about me going and out doing guerilla pranks on the streets and stuff.

I was building this talk show, but I always wanted to go back and do stand-up, and I was never really able to find the time to devote to doing stand-up. Now, I’m doing a Web TV show in my house. I built a TV studio in my living room, so with my comedy… I’ve got to put it all in the same category, though, because being up onstage, doing the show, hosting the show, it’s been sort of in the same vein, and I’ve been thinking about how I would apply that to doing stand-up. About a year ago, I started up onstage in LA, running this live show and practicing.

Speaking of MTV, is there a moment from your run there that sticks out most clearly in your memory?
Well, you know, my show started in 1999 on MTV, basically through 2000, and I had been doing it for a few years before in Canada. Is there a moment that sticks out? Well, there are a lot of pretty crazy moments. It was a much longer process than most people in America realize. I sort of had seven years of working my way towards getting that show, so obviously, I think just getting picked up by MTV was a huge moment, because I’d been doing it for so long. I’d been doing it in such an independent way, and when they picked it up, it was just very exciting.

As far as the comedy itself, there were watershed moments when I realized that we were doing something that was really striking a chord with people. Five years before MTV picked up the show, we did a couple of pranks on my parents when it was playing on the public access station, and it really seemed to strike a chord with people. Like, here’s this guy who’s waking up his parents in the middle of the night, and he’s pulling all these pranks on his parents; that was something where I kind of realized that, like, this is something that people really like.

It was also just kind of like figuring out all the stuff with video cameras that you can do – at the time, I didn’t have any television people telling me what to do, and all of a sudden, we’d be realizing that, hey, it’s funny to film people’s reactions. The reactions of people can be a really funny one, you know? It was really figuring all that stuff out that was really kind of exciting. Obviously, the show got picked up by MTV and it took off and became sort of a huge show on MTV, that was hugely exciting. It surpassed my expectations, and obviously was the dream, you know? MTV picks up your show, and the next thing you know, you’re walking out on the David Letterman show and sitting down with Jay Leno, and you’re getting all these great opportunities and exposure. People are loving your show – that was exciting stuff.

Since you’re a talk show host yourself, I’m curious to know what your whole take on the Leno/Conan late night debacle is?
I think it’s the nature of the television business. At the end of the day, everybody involved is extremely talented and highly capable; there’s only one time slot at 11:30, and everybody seems to want it. Things end up happening, and sometimes I think it’s kind of nice, in a way, to be doing the show in my living room on the Internet, because nobody can come along and cancel me. But I’m not being paid $40 million to walk away from a canceled show, either, so if I could cancel myself and get $40 million, I’d probably do it.

It’s just the nature of the television business right now. Things are changing right now: everything’s influx, the Internet is here, TV ratings are going down, more people are getting their [television] intake online, so there’s a lot more competition. I don’t personally believe that anyone’s to blame in what happened, you know? It’s just kind of… shit happens.

What sort of creative process do you employ when coming up with ideas for your bits?
I always start out with what makes me laugh. I tend to joke around a lot with my friends; pretty much always analyzing and talking about things that are going on around the world, things that are going on in my personal life, things that are going on in the media. If I’m talking with my friends and thinking about something that makes me laugh, I’ll just write it down. I used to carry a notepad around with me and write everything down in the notepad, but then I’d lose the notepad. But now, my cell phone has a little electronic notepad, and I’m always jotting down notes to myself in my cell phone.

Every once in a while, I’ll sit down at my computer and look at all the notes I’ve made and see if I can actually write it all out, and then try and craft it into more of an actual joke. Then I try it with stand-up onstage, and usually by the time I try it onstage, it gets a laugh, but sometimes you need to try things or type things up. I tend to think outside the box, so sometimes I’ll say things that are a little out there and people don’t necessarily know what I’m getting at, so I’ll revise it or change it.

That’s the great thing about getting up onstage and doing a world tour, where I’m doing six shows a week, an hour at a time, so I’m constantly revising what I’m talking about, whether people are kind of vibing with what I’m getting at.

I really want people to connect with not just the silliness of what I’m doing, but also the points I’m trying to make and what I’m trying to say. I think we’re living in kind of a crazy time right now, where corporations are really taking over a lot of [everything], and we’re being forced to ingest by the media. I don’t think that’s necessarily fair to consumers or society as a whole, that we’re being told what we have to watch, basically. There are only a few companies that really run all of the television stations and all the magazines, and I think there’s a lot that needs to be said about that.

I like to make jokes about that, but sometimes I think I go so far down the road that people miss the point, because we are so consumed by that media that I think some people don’t question it. It’s always amazing to me that sometimes an audience might not even necessarily… I can really tell the way people think when you get up onstage and make a joke about the Kardashians, or you make a joke about American Idol, or you make a joke about TMZ, right? Sometimes the audience reacts like they really, really like that stuff, you know? I was sort of trying to make the point that that was some mainstream stuff that we’re being force-fed, but when you’re taking on the establishment, you’ve got to remember that a lot of people like the establishment.

So I try to walk the line. I want the show to be something that’s cool to the mainstream audience, but also not complete milquetoast, middle-of-the-road garbage stuff.

Because you’re doing your new show on the Internet, do you feel like that’s given you a better outlet for saying what you want to say, without having to adhere to certain corporate principles?
Well yeah, absolutely. You know, I started with a public access show, and there were no real rules; it wasn’t run by corporations. I didn’t come up to the system of working for the man, so to speak, where you kinda had to play by all these corporate rules. I definitely think that’s made me kind of used to working without those rules, but I also have the experience of going to MTV and working with major movie studios.

By the way, I like working with both – it’s fun working with major networks and studios, because they kind of come in and put their own constraints on, but they put them on for a reason. You don’t necessarily want to be flying around and not appealing to a mainstream world. When I first went to MTV, I’d been doing my show, as I said, for six or seven years, and I had audiences where I knew what they’d like. I had a lot of people coming up and following my crazy little college radio show to my crazy little public access show, and they were loving what I was doing.

You move to MTV, and they wanted you to kind of [cut out] a lot of the rough edges, so that mommy and daddy and grandma and grandpa like it, too. And, you know, that’s cool, because you want mommy and daddy and grandma and grandpa to like it. They’re people. I don’t just want to appeal to 21-year-olds, 25-year-olds; I also want to appeal to 35-year-olds and 45-year-olds and 55-year-olds, so you kind of get a different perspective.

I worked for The Tonight Show for a few years, and I’d go do these little bits and musical pieces, and sometimes I’d run off the handle and do something completely outrageous, and they’d edit it in a way that they didn’t show the most outrageous thing that I did. I’d go, “Hmm, wonder why they didn’t show that,” but then [I’d realize] that oh, that might not necessarily appeal to somebody who’s kind of more of a mainstream person. And it’s cool – it’s cool to have that experience, and that’s why The Tonight Show has been rated so well over the years.

But when I do my stand-up, I like to kind of play with both things, you know? I think it’s kind of fun for me to play with the audience a little bit. I like to kind of confuse the audience a little bit and take them on a little bit of a ride, you know?

That sounds a lot like in the tradition of people like Andy Kaufman and Steve Martin.
I just read Steve Martin’s book about stand-up, Born Standing Up. It’s something that’s really exciting to me to just be able to play these clubs that a lot of these comedians have played in, with the history. We just did Zanies in Nashville, and you get to see all the pictures on the wall of Seinfeld and Leno, Adam Sandler, all these people that have come there over the years. It’s definitely very exciting to me, to be able to do what I’ve always wanted to do, to follow in the steps of these great comics.

Is there any goal that you’ve set for yourself that you haven’t yet accomplished?
Yeah, I really would like to be able to kind of, you know, independently make my comedy and do what I want to do without really having to worry about being allowed to do it. I still haven’t quite gotten to that point. I can always work, and that’s cool, but I can’t always go and do exactly what I want to do. I love doing my Web television show, and it’s done really well – it’s really highly rated – but it’s an ongoing struggle to get financing and sponsorship. It’s still an underground thing: TomGreen.com is the website for the television studio that I’ve built in my house, and it gets 2.8 million views per episode.

I’ve got a great little thing going here, but it’s still an underground thing; it’s not like I can hire five or 10 employees and do whatever I want. It’s still something that I’m trying to get off the ground, interestingly enough, and I’d like to be able to expand that. I’d like to be able to make a movie once a year, and go and direct, but I’m still not quite to that place.

It’s funny, though, because I just finished directing a movie, which took a few years to get made. It’s a really crazy movie, and I love it. It’s called Prankster. I’d like to be able to kind of continue to grow and be able to continue to create funny, crazy, non-conventional things. It’s a catch-22 that I’ve always had to deal with, because I like to take things so far and make the point that I’m not conventional, and the point that I’m not just sort of doing what I’m told.

The point of making comedy, to me, is then just a bit of rebelliousness to me. I like to make the point that this is making fun of the system, but if you make fun of the system too much, sometimes the system doesn’t support what you’re doing. I’m really excited about [what’s going on] with the Internet and independent television, and I’m trying to create this really independent business model for the Internet so that I can go directly to sponsors and just make a great, self-produced TV show every week, without having to worry about somebody coming in and saying, “Oh, you can’t say this! You can’t do that! You can’t interview this person! You can’t do that joke!” That’s the goal for me – that’s always been the goal, to get to that place where I can get a real good rhythm, and not have somebody tell me that I can’t.

To me, I like to look at it as art. I like to feel like I’m being artistic and doing something that’s pure and true to an idea that I come up with and accomplish. I don’t like to look at it as a corporate thing, but it is a corporate thing. It costs money to make this stuff; it costs money to make movies, and it costs money to make TV shows. Finding that balance is something I want to do, and not really have to worry about funding.

I think for as long as artists have found a way to make money off their art, that’s always been the conundrum.
I’m not complaining. I certainly have done some successful things. Ultimately, I’d like to find an ongoing way to do this Web television show; I think it would be really cool to do that with a decent budget and sponsorship and good distribution. I just want to continue growing that and be able to do what I want to do.

Can you tell me one thing about comedian Tom Green that’s completely true and unexpected?
Uh, let’s see. Completely true…but also unexpected. Well, I’m kind of a normal guy. I’m much more normal than I think most people would expect. A lot of times, that’s what I hear more often than not, and when I do interviews like this, people tend to think that I’m going to be, you know, making a bunch of funny sounds or funny faces or what have you.

But all that sort of silliness and wackiness, that comes from when I was younger, and when I was in high school and was a kid, I was sort of a very high energy, hyperactive kid. I was always trying to get attention, and started doing these funny faces and things that I do. Now that I’ve gotten older, I’m not running around making all these funny sounds or funny faces all the time. I think sometimes there’s a disconnect where people think that I’m going to be constantly on or constantly flying off the handle, but really, I tend to think things through a lot.

I like to try and craft my stand-up, like, “Okay, this is where I’m going to make the funny face, or do the funny sound. This is where I’m going to tell the story; this is where I’m going to tell the joke.” I think there might be the misconception that I’m a nut-job.

For more info and to check out Tom Green’s talk show online, visit TomGreen.com. Get to tickets to Tom’s New York City shows here.