Tom Green will be appearing at The Vogue Theatre as part of Global's Comedyfest on Friday. Go HERE to read Part One of my interview with Tom.
I happened upon your book, Hollywood Causes Cancer, a few years ago and a certain phrasing you used really stayed with me. You talked about the pursuit of, or a desire to have, a "textured life."
I do have a tendency to change things up. I don't like to do the same thing year after year after year. I think that's why when I did my show for ten years I was doing crazy stunts and I needed to take a break from that. I enjoy doing my talk show because I'm not being an outrageous, over-the-top persona when I am hosting. I invite outrageous over-the-top people on my show and I actually am the straight man and ask straight questions and try to do a decent interview.
Unlike contemporaries ... you've always maintained a certain sweetness about yourself. We don't see a lot of the negative or mean-spirited crassness around your comedy. I don't think about Tom Green and see women in bikinis on trampolines.
Yes, absolutely. I have always tried to rebel against that type of thing. It's probably part of being Canadian. The Canadian sense of humour is there and perhaps what you are describing is a more American way of approaching comedy.
I'm rebelling against that by not dong it. But also being a bit of an underdog myself – which I've always considered myself, being a kid on a skateboard in the 80s and listening to rap music when nobody was and having a “me vs. The Mainstream” mentality. I've strayed away from that sort of genre, that “jock” or misogynistic comedy. Because at the end of the day when you're doing that, you're drawing a line in the sand – if you're a woman, you're probably not going to like that. I've done so many over-the-top and bizarre and crazy things that sometimes the message can get skewed about who I am: I'm not an angry, misogynistic guy. I'm actually making fun of misogynistic angry guys. I'm making fun of the jocks and the mainstream status quo. But I've had my moments, too. As I get older I'm learning to control it a lot more and stay positive more and more.
As crass or lewd as hanging inside a deer carcass may be (Freddy Got Fingered) , it doesn't really offend me. Your comedy is actually very inclusive.
It's the kind of the thing that if you really look at it, you understand that I'm mocking a lot of stuff. Somebody could write about something like that as the most shocking thing ever, but for me, I'm flipping it over so far that you're actually kinda making fun of it while doing it. That's always been a big point for me, and certainly with Freddy Got Fingered I was trying to make fun of comedy movies! By making it the craziest, most stupid, outrageous thing ever - “Oh, now you're delivering the baby! Oh, now you're biting the umbilical cord in half! Now you're swinging the baby!” That onslaught can be misconstrued. So you have to take a few steps back and understand that, but not everybody does. But then when somebody really does take a minute to think about it – like that genius AO Scott at The New York Times, who compared it to Dadaism.
I see that a lot in mainstream comedy movies, most of which I don't get. A lot of the humour revolves around clicheed archetypes that I, as a woman living in 2010, can not relate to. So they are just boring to me. As absurd as wrapping yourself in a deer carcass may be, it's still such a neutral line. It's not demeaning.
I'm trying to appeal to people's creative sensibilities. We're a pretty media savvy people and television and movies have been being made the exact same way for 50 years now. There's a bureaucracy involved in making TV and movies. It revolves around money – it's expensive to make this stuff so you have executives and producers needing to control how everything is being made. So as a comedian when you work your way up and then suddenly, “You're gonna make a comedy movie!” what you get is a cookie-cutter movie and you gotta either go with the flow and do your best job within those boundaries – or don't! That's why everything is exactly the same. You can't really stray from it because the person who's paying for the movie is the one who is making all the decisions. You have to be very aggressive to make a movie like Freddy Got Fingered and go up against the powers that be that are actually paying for the movie and argue – like a nut, like a madman – to try and let them do what you're not supposed to do. They've been focus grouping this stuff! If you wrap yourself around in the deer carcass and roll around on the ground, 80% of people are not going to like that. Well you know what? I don't care about that 80%! I'm appealing to the f**king 20% of intelligent people that actually want to see something crazy happen. Those who are going to go to the movies to see something crazy, not because they want to go see something that's like every other movie. For me, the mainstream business has a disconnect sometimes – they want everybody to like it so that it makes $100 million dollars. That's the difference between me and them.
Tom clean$ up well.
We're living in a world where the biggest news stories of the day are about drunken, out-of-control actresses who can't get their lives together or who won American Idol or what the football scores are. People aren't looking for different. People want to see things that make them comfortable and that they can relate to.
You're a very creative person; you're a journalist, you're writing. You're a writer. You look at the world through a different lens than most people. So do I. So do a lot of people. So do most of your friends, certainly all of my friends. We're always cutting things apart. 90% of people don't look at the world like that. 90% of people like to go to the shopping mall because they like to be around a whole bunch of other people and they like to go to this store because other people shop there and they like to watch American Idol because everybody likes American Idol and they like to be on Facebook because everybody's on Facebook and it's popular and it's cool. I'm the type of person that doesn't wanna go and watch this show because everybody wants to watch it and I'm getting off of Facebook because everybody is on it and I can't stand it.
So, you know.. that's the torturous life and struggle of being an artist. Everything seems so clear because of the herd mentality of human people; there's such a sheep, herd mentality that can be very frustrating and sometimes exasperating. That's the way it all works. That's what a lot of my stand up show is about – talking about some of the hypocrisy. You know?
I totally do. And I really hope you don't cut your ear off after this interview.
(Laughs.)
