How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
"I'm back!"
It was Valentine's Day and Tom Green — the Canadian-born maestro of late-90s, early-00s gross-out humor — was practically yelling it over the phone. Could it be true? With Canada on our minds and "Freddy Got Fingered" buried almost 10 years in the past, could there be an impending renaissance for the former icon of comedic grotesqueness?
Probably not. But he's definitely moving forward.
Green is confident these days, not necessarily because he's going to join the cast of "Jersey Shore" and lick soy sauce off Snooki but because he's found stability. He's found a crowd that will laugh at his jokes, a steady stream of income, and a TV studio that is, conveniently, his living room. He's found rappers — among them, T-Pain and Xzibit — who will feed and nurture his flow. He's returned to stand-up, something he started doing at age 15 and stopped when he began pouring himself into music and bizarre TV.
"I've never really been as comfortable as I am now," Green told me, six weeks into his brand-new TomGreen.com World Stand-up Comedy Tour. "Ten years ago, I was still trying to find myself; I wasn't really comfortable in my own skin."
If he's found a place in the world, that place is TomGreen.com. And it's a warm place. It kind of looks like a porn site, demanding your membership in italicized all-caps, but most of the material it contains features neither roadkill nor vomit. Watching a fully-bearded Tom Green reminisce quietly with a clean-cut Steve-O is itself somewhat surreal; it's sort of like seeing Dennis the Menace and the Hamburglar at their college reunion.
"People always added the word shock to my comedy. I always thought that was an inaccurate word for what I did," Green said. He prefers the word "confusing" — an adjective I'd be more inclined to apply to Google Buzz than elephant masturbation.
In a way, he even qualified that. "I love animals," Green said. "I've never hurt an animal in anything I've done. Except for some worms, but I don't consider worms animals, they're insects."
All evidence points to the conclusion that Tom Green has grown up. Evolved. He himself admitted that his stand-up show is "traditional." It draws from an adult perspective deepened by success, failure and a battle with testicular cancer, rather than a deranged, pre-adolescent id. When he busts out the "Bum Bum Song," it's because the crowd has certain expectations.
Has he gone soft? Perhaps, but I don't think that's a bad thing. When the American public granted him temporary court jestership, when he was allowed by the Hollywood gods to briefly and scandalously marry Drew Barrymore, pop-culture needed an injection of primitive abandon. "Seinfeld" was over; Adam Sandler was on the rise.
Now it's 2010. In terms of Steve-O's output alone, we've been through two "Jackass" movies and God knows how many strange encounters with the animal kingdom on "Wildboyz." We turn to "Jersey Shore" not because the antics of its orange citizens are shocking, but because they're fascinatingly sincere. Green is right to pursue a more sophisticated version of himself. As an Internet success story with 40 million downloads a month, he's downright inspirational.
"It was a real interesting moment in time," Green said, speaking of his celebrity peak. I can see why he'd want to leave it at that.
Tom Green will be performing Feb. 18-20 at Comix.
