\n<\/p>\n
\u201cWe probably won\u2019t fall through,\u201d Tom Green said as he stepped out onto an expansive frozen lake that sits along his bucolic 150-acre farm in the hinterlands of Ontario, periodically stamping his foot to be sure. I followed his lead, bundled in a polar-rated Baffin snowsuit he\u2019d wisely insisted I wear for this expedition.<\/p>\n
A few decades ago, this easily could have been a setup. He was, after all, a guy who became superstar famous for audacious pranks that captured the bubbling, cheeky rebellion of Y2K-era youth. But that absurdity was kept at bay that frigid Tuesday in early January. Green, 53, is not quite the same troublemaker who crawled around on the street, interviewing unsuspecting passers-by with a \u201cpiece of poo on a microphone,\u201d as he did in one of his most memorable bits.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s since moved on from those high jinks, even as similar content has proliferated across screens. Social media has made it so exceedingly easy for everyone to try to stand out from the pack, Green said. \u201cTo a certain extent, it\u2019s lost its impact.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
These days, suckling is out and nuzzling is in. \u201cI love Fanny,\u201d he said later, cozying up to a mule that is one of the many animals I saw him gently tending to as he found joy in the little details of farm life. The chickens, for instance, had been laying more eggs than he could keep up with so he\u2019d been lining some up on a nearby fence for the crows to enjoy.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo me, I thought the weirdest thing that I could do is get a farm and a mule,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s kind of what makes it fun for me is that this is ridiculous. Can you believe this? I\u2019m riding a mule.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Green is returning to the spotlight this month with a flurry of new projects for Amazon Prime Video, including \u201cI Got a Mule!,\u201d an aptly titled hourlong stand-up special premiering on Jan. 28. \u201cTom Green Country,\u201d a charming four-episode reality show that follows Green as he gets his farm in order with the help of friends, neighbors and his parents, comes out Jan. 31; and \u201cThis Is the Tom Green Documentary,\u201d which recounts his dizzying rise to fame, debuted Friday.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cPeople are probably going to be surprised that I\u2019m not, like, completely crazy,\u201d he said of \u201cTom Green Country.\u201d \u201cThere\u2019s a sort of a wholesome heartwarming thing to this \u2014 that I have a close relationship with my family, that I love animals, that I enjoy doing a lot of things that a great many people in the world enjoy doing, like getting out into the woods,\u201d he continued as we rambled around the property in an A.T.V. with his rescue dog, Charley, and his fianc\u00e9e, Amanda Nelson.<\/p>\n
After 20 years in the Hollywood Hills, Green realized that there was a misperception hanging over him. \u201cI\u2019m not really a Hollywood guy,\u201d he said. \u201cI started to feel like I wasn\u2019t being true to my authentic self.\u201d So he moved back to Canada in 2021.<\/p>\n
\u201cTom is actually really reserved usually and serious,\u201d Glenn Humplik \u2014 his sidekick on \u201cThe Tom Green Show,\u201d the straight man to Green\u2019s madman \u2014 said in a phone interview. \u201cHe\u2019s very analytical about every single comedy bit and thing that he does. It\u2019s not just a primitive demonstration. He understands why something is funny or not. And it goes beyond just comedy \u2014 about life. He really reflects on things a lot. Maybe too much sometimes.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cThe Tom Green Show\u201d started in 1994 on Canadian cable access television, half talk-show fever dream and half on-the-street mischief. It moved to CBC Television and then to the Comedy Network before Green entered the United States in 1999 like a wrecking ball, cracking the perfectly polished pop ecosystem dominated by the likes of the Backstreet Boys, \u2018N Sync and Britney Spears.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe way it hit MTV just at the right time and the way that they blasted it out there,\u201d he said, \u201cto be able to, that quickly, permeate into pop culture in the biggest country in the world for media, I realized this is different.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
When Green released the video to his novelty track \u201cThe Bum Bum Song (Lonely Swedish)<\/a>\u201d in 1999, his fans inundated \u201cTotal Request Live,\u201d MTV\u2019s wildly popular vote-driven countdown show, and it shot to No. 1. After a week, MTV essentially forced Green<\/a> to retire it from rotation. The show had prerecorded the following week\u2019s episodes, which was antithetical to its premise, and the network hadn\u2019t anticipated Green\u2019s sudden rise. \u201cI feel for 98 Degrees,\u201d Green winkingly told Carson Daly<\/a>, the host of \u201cT.R.L.,\u201d on air.<\/p>\n Back in those whirlwind few years, Green hosted \u201cSaturday Night Live,\u201d graced the cover<\/a> of Rolling Stone, and had a high-profile relationship and short-lived marriage to Drew Barrymore. Oprah Winfrey invited him and his parents, Mary Jane and Richard Green, onto her show. He wrote and directed the 2001 film \u201cFreddy Got Fingered,<\/a>\u201d which seemed to set a new standard for how much a movie could be reviled by critics.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Perhaps most enduring, he was enshrined by name in Eminem\u2019s lyrics to \u201cThe Real Slim Shady,\u201d<\/a> a track from 2000 that helped cement the rapper as one of music\u2019s biggest stars: \u201cSometimes I wanna get on TV and just let loose, but can\u2019t, but it\u2019s cool for Tom Green to hump a dead moose.\u201d Eminem was referencing a segment that initially aired in the middle of the night on Canadian cable access to a handful of viewers before it was eventually shown on MTV. Green could never have imagined it would somehow define him.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s like you\u2019re driving down the road, you\u2019re trying to make a show, you\u2019re living in your parent\u2019s basement, you\u2019re just looking for anything to film, and all you\u2019ve seen is trees for two days,\u201d he said, recalling the fateful drive from Ontario to Vancouver. \u201cAnd then you look out the window, and there\u2019s this giant, beautiful animal that was unfortunately hit by a car.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Green has alternately been called groundbreaking or juvenile; avant-garde or disgusting; ahead of his time or out of his mind.<\/p>\n Today, it wouldn\u2019t be a stretch to call him the father of cringe-core, acclimating audiences to the gleeful discomfort of bits taken too far for too long, clearing a path for comedians like Nathan Fielder, Sacha Baron Cohen and Eric Andre, and shows like \u201cThe Office\u201d and \u201cIt\u2019s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.\u201d<\/p>\n Andre, whose Emmy<\/a>-winning \u201cThe Eric Andre Show\u201d ran intermittently for over 10 years, has repeatedly called Green<\/a> an inspiration.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople were always like, \u2018Where did you get the idea for the show?\u2019\u201d he said when he was a guest on \u201cTom Green Live!\u201d, a talk show that ran on TV from 2013 to 2014. \u201cThen, just one day, I was like, \u2018Oh! That\u2019s from Tom\u2019s show, Tom Green. Then I was like, \u2018Oh, I\u2019m just biting Tom Green.\u2019 So thank you for your brain.\u201d<\/p>\n As a teenager, Green\u2019s brain was shaped by \u201cMonty Python\u201d and \u201cCandid Camera,\u201d Norm MacDonald and Richard Pryor, but mostly David Letterman, his idol then and now. When Green was asked to guest host \u201cLate Show With David Letterman\u201d in 2003 \u2014 a call viewers see him receive in real time in the new documentary \u2014 he is nearly in tears. He considers it a high point in his career.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Green started doing stand-up when he was still a teenager, but his first taste of fame came as a member of Organized Rhyme, one of Canada\u2019s first successful rap groups. The group won a Canadian Music Video Award in 1992. Green soon shifted his focus to comedy, but being part of Ottawa\u2019s underground scene that combined hip-hop, punk and skater cultures helped define his outlook at a young age.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you hang out at punk rock shows all the time,\u201d Humplik said, \u201cyou and all your friends are in that scene, you have a good understanding of the kind of rebel attitude and the sort of anarchy-style behavior at that age, and that sensibility definitely landed itself into the show.\u201d<\/p>\n Technology was also an obsession of Green\u2019s since childhood, and later, inspired by these scenes, he started hitting the streets with a camera in tow, an uncommon sight in the 1990s.<\/p>\n \u201cIt caught that audience, and people loved it,\u201d Humplik said. \u201cAnd it was fun, and it was real. It wasn\u2019t manufactured.\u201d<\/p>\n Pioneers don\u2019t always get the credit they deserve, his mother, Mary Jane Green, told me. \u201cI think he felt that. But he has this ability to reinvent himself as he goes. And every time he does, it seems to become something.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n That\u2019s just a drawback of pursuing unproven ideas, Green said. Once proven, the money comes, along with people who want to mold their own version of it. \u201cThat\u2019s happened several times with me,\u201d Green said. \u201cWhen something works, it gets repeated, you know?\u201d<\/p>\n He is in part referring to \u201cJackass,\u201d the MTV skater-boy prank franchise that MTV swiftly installed when Green\u2019s show went on hiatus after he was diagnosed with testicular cancer in 2000. As Green recovered, a new batch of stars was minted. Some segments on \u201cJackass\u201d were clearly inspired by what Green had done; a more critical assessment would be that they were copied.<\/p>\n \u201cThey were skateboarders, and we were skateboarders. But we were making fun of bro culture \u2014 maybe they think they were making fun of it, too \u2014 but they are actually bros,\u201d Green said. \u201cThey are actually cool, like Johnny Knoxville\u2019s a cool guy. I\u2019m not cool.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cBut to see other people do the same bit, it, well \u2014 the hard part was thinking of it,\u201d Green said. \u201cThe act of doing it wasn\u2019t the weird part, thinking of it was the weird part.\u201d<\/p>\n He says he holds no ill will toward the \u201cJackass\u201d cast: He understands more than most how exciting it can be to get anything on the air. But it\u2019s one of several instances where he hasn\u2019t been able to capitalize like others have, especially financially. \u201cJackass\u201d alone has had multiple feature films in addition to the show and its spinoffs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cLook, I have done well, I\u2019m doing fine,\u201d he said, \u201cbut, you know, a billion-dollar franchise is a lot different than \u2018The Tom Green Show.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Aside from \u201cJackass,\u201d or the abundance of prank content that now populates YouTube and TikTok, Green is also referring to his early forays into streaming: He started uploading audio clips to the web around 1999, and by 2003 he was uploading and streaming video.<\/p>\n Then in 2005, Green began streaming shows and segments from the web-optimized TV studio he\u2019d built in his living room, including what would become \u201cTom Green\u2019s House Tonight,\u201d \u201cTom Green Live!\u201d and \u201cWebovision.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI was always looking at where technology was leading, and I was going, \u2018How can I use that to make some art with it?\u2019\u201d Green said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThere was this kid called Justin.tv. He was doing it at the same time as me. He wore a camera on his head all day,\u201d he recalled. \u201cI was over at my house, I was doing a talk show in my living room. And then there\u2019s these kids up in San Francisco, and they were putting video online. We all knew of each other. One became Twitch. Then one became YouTube. And then I\u2019m here on the farm riding a mule,\u201d Green said with a smile.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He interviewed celebrities like Pamela Anderson, Steve Carell and Flava Flav. One guest, Joe Rogan, credited Green with introducing him to podcasting and recently called his 2007<\/a> appearance on the web version of \u201cTom Green Live!\u201d transformative.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you had me as a guest on, it changed the course of my life,\u201d Rogan told Green<\/a> on \u201cThe Joe Rogan Experience\u201d last year. \u201cI remember like lightbulbs just going off in my head like, \u2018Why don\u2019t I do this?\u2019 The idea came out of you, man.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI wasn\u2019t gate-keeping,\u201d Green told me, as we stood in what he called the \u201cswamp cabin,\u201d a quaint structure that overlooked a frosty mire that he built with a friend.<\/p>\n \u201cI was showing everybody exactly how to do it. I\u2019d have comedians up there, and I\u2019d say, \u2018Yeah, this is how we do it. We plug this in here.\u2019 <\/em>I enjoy the fact that all of my friends and comedians that I like could now circumvent the frustrating process of having the only route to being able to express themselves on television was by going through a short list of corporations.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Except for putting a cow\u2019s head in his parents\u2019 bed as they slept, a nod to \u201cThe Godfather\u201d that didn\u2019t go over well, Green doesn\u2019t have many regrets, he said as we warmed up over Nanaimo bars and butter tarts in his 1857 farmhouse, the wood stove roaring.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n More so there were choices he wish he\u2019d been more thoughtful about, namely taking opportunities to show audiences that he wasn\u2019t an idiot, he was just playing one.<\/p>\n \u201cI have probably thought about it a lot over the years,\u201d he said of showing up in character on the late-night circuit.<\/p>\n \u201cThe thing that I was maybe miscalculating was that my show was so outrageous that it probably would have been more interesting for me to have gone on the show and just sat back like this and talk and be myself,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He was overexposed, he realizes, especially to a lot of people \u201cwho probably weren\u2019t seeking out weird television but now were being confronted by it.\u201d<\/p>\n That naivet\u00e9 would haunt him with \u201cFreddy Got Fingered.\u201d \u201cThis movie isn\u2019t the bottom of the barrel,\u201d Roger Ebert wrote in a scathing review<\/a>. \u201cThis movie isn\u2019t below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn\u2019t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n At the time, the reviews crushed Green. \u201cThat was the first time where I really got sort of a pushback to the weirdness,\u201d Green said.<\/p>\n \u201c<\/strong>I thought that people would understand to a certain extent that, like, he\u2019s trying to be crazy, he\u2019s not actually crazy. He\u2019s trying to be silly,\u201d he said. \u201cI assumed that people would sort of do the mental gymnastics of understanding.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThese are good problems to have,\u201d he went on. \u201cStill, doesn\u2019t make it any easier.\u201d<\/p>\n Although Green has stayed a pop culture presence, he\u2019s never fully recovered from the film in terms of mainstream success. And, perhaps bittersweet, \u201cFreddy Got Fingered\u201d is now considered a cult classic. It was even featured<\/a> last year on the Criterion streaming service, a modern hallmark of a certain type of artistic merit.<\/p>\n As for his next prediction, well, he\u2019s living it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In 50 or 100 years, \u201ccities may no longer be as relevant,\u201d he said. \u201cPeople may start to realize that there\u2019s a lot of space. We\u2019re all connected now electronically, so we don\u2019t need to be all sitting on top of each other.\u201d<\/p>\n He has plans to travel to the desert soon, to ghost towns in Texas and New Mexico, areas that fell on hard times when the railroads closed or the highways diverted past them. Some still have infrastructure in place, he said, and beautiful architecture. \u201cWhy isn\u2019t there an app that gets a whole bunch of people together? And they go buy a town, refurbish these towns, and bring it back to life,\u201d he asked. \u201cAll the people that want to get out of the city and want to spend less money.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cA big new idea,\u201d he laughed. \u201cNow someone else can go make a billion dollars off of it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\u2018I\u2019m Just Biting Tom Green\u2019<\/h2>\n
A Blessing and a Curse<\/h2>\n
Reflecting on a Legacy<\/h2>\n