It's going amazing, man. I've actually been on the road nonstop since I was last in Nashville a year ago and just haven't stopped [touring].
What kind of crowds do you normally encounter?
They've just been amazing crowds, all different types of people, people that follow me on the Web or know my MTV show, or all of my movies, or just have heard that I am doing stand-up, and a lot of people that are in the stand-up comedy crowd too, so it's been a good cross-section of people.
How exactly would you describe your act?
I'm covering a lot of different subjects — it's a very high-energy show. Obviously, it's stand-up comedy, so it's me standing there talking to people about things. I'm not integrating any props or anything into it.
Except for the guitar?
Yeah, I don't even have a guitar anymore. I just really want to strip down everything I'm doing onstage, something that is very much pure stand-up, no gimmicks. I'm really focusing more on the point I'm trying to make with my show — talking about the world and social commentary about things that are happening with society and our addiction to technology. We have gotten much more connected on the Web, but maybe given up lots of our privacy, and I am definitely addressing that head-on. But it's a very silly, ridiculous show too, very much in keeping with what people would expect when they come to see me. I am not taking myself too seriously up there and I have a lot of fun improvising with the audience, and it gets a little crazy sometimes.
Is it hard trying to balance social commentary or media commentary with general irreverence?
No. It's actually much more fun for me, and it's also more effective when you are ripping on something that is relevant, you know? You can talk about how Facebook is messing up people's marriages and ruining high school reunions and all sorts of ridiculous examples, but because people are actually relating to it on a real level I think it's got more impact. I've been so immersed in the Internet and a lot of the stuff that is very new for people, like having a Facebook page or having pictures of themselves floating around online and having everybody in their school seeing it or their friends seeing it.
This is something that I have been doing for 20 years. I was barging into my parent's bedroom with a video camera 15 to 20 years ago and putting it on the public access station. That's in some ways very much the precursor to what is happening now with YouTube and Facebook and publicly putting out your personal videos and photos and stuff. So I'm pretty aware of these pitfalls that people might now be experiencing for the first time. I think the bulk of people think Facebook and cell phones and text messaging are just the greatest thing that has ever been invented in their lifetime — I don't think it's gotten to the point yet where people have started to feel like, "This is an addiction that I can't kick, or this may have some negative implications to me in the future." But as I talk about it, it's fun because I see people at my shows are starting to go, "I don't really want my husband on Facebook all the time."
It's definitely become the world's kiosk. It's a minefield. I think MySpace wasn't so much like that because it wasn't a constantly updating feed of personal information.
Yeah. I believe that there will come a point in time — and if I can have anything to do with it myself I would be happy to do my part — where people will start to get off of these social networking sites and it will be cool again to not have a huge online presence, to actually go back to having a private, free life.
I am a very big fan of the Freddy Got Fingered movie.
Yeah? Awesome! That has been another really exciting thing about touring this year — I'm meeting a lot of people that have become very passionate about the movie.
I don't think it has much to do with the fact that I was on a lot of LSD when I saw it.
Well, I am sure that helped.
It made more sense after I saw it a second time, sober. Critics really panned it, saying,"Tom Green is funny when he is doing these pranks to real people, but when it's fictionalized, what's the point?" But it seemed to me like you were really just pranking them.
Yeah, exactly. The audience was the mark, for sure, and I think that people, over time, have started to understand that, because until I had that vitriolic reaction from people there was sort of nothing to really have that factor. So if you're sitting there reacting to it, not realizing that you yourself are actually the punch line — by the time you have written the newspaper article it's too late. But now, almost 10 years since the movie came out, it's sort of grown this massive cult following.
It's so funny to me that something that was considered one of my least successful creative ventures has now turned into probably one of the biggest things I have ever done, definitely bigger than my MTV show, considering the amount of people that come up to me after my stand-up shows quoting lines from Freddy Got Fingered .
Is the movie that came out the movie you set out to make? Because it seemed like one of those random, spontaneous movies where you were using a big budget to figure out how to make a movie.
Honestly, it's pretty much exactly what we set out to make. We literally wrote a script and went out and shot it, and when we wrote the script I visualized exactly what I wanted it to be, right down to biting the umbilical cord and licking the broken bone, all that stuff. Although sometimes, if you're putting a bloody deer carcass on your back and thrashing on the ground, there is obviously some improv there, but it's pretty much what I set out to do, believe it or not (laughs).
Did you anticipate the reaction the film received?
I didn't quite expect it to be as dramatically panned across the board like it was. It was the first time I ever experienced anything like that, but now, frankly, I understand a lot more about the world, and people, because it's human nature, you know? It came at a time in my career where people were ready to give me some shit, no matter what I did. I was all over the media, I'd just had cancer, a No. 1 show on MTV, and it was the first time I ever experienced people wanting me to fail. Up until that point everybody wanted me to succeed. I'd had this little show on the public access station that kind of took off and everybody was sort of rooting for me. As you get older and you're in this business for a longer period of time you realize that it's almost a sign of great success when the mainstream media starts to come down on you that harshly, because it would never come down on somebody that harshly that wasn't on the radar.
So when you get that negative of a reaction, it's kind of a validation that the grand prank is working?
Absolutely. You are totally correct about that. But the thing is, it was really sort of meant to be more, like, 50 percent of the audience gets it, and I thought, "Man, these people that write these reviews, are they so simplistic that they can't see that I was obviously doing this on purpose?" But there were several reviewers that did get it right away. The New York Times gave me an amazing review for Freddy Got Fingered — it was so good we put it on the inside of the DVD box.
There were people that got it and understood what I was doing. The assumption was that there was going to be some old lady in the movie theater that's going to walk out in disgust when I'm swinging the baby around by the umbilical cord, and then everybody else in the audience is going to watch this conservative old lady walk out and they are going to laugh even harder, which is exactly what happened. I just didn't think that every newspaper critic in the country was a conservative old lady — I figured they had a little more nuance to them.
The thing you don't want to do though, as a creator of comedy, is to get too caught up in what people think and start overanalyzing things, because then you can sort of drive yourself crazy and lose any sense of spontaneity and freedom that you might have had before you started worrying about it. That's the amazing thing about doing stand-up comedy for me. [ Freddy Got Fingered ] has become an overwhelming success for me. As I tour the world — Australia, Canada, London and every city in the U.S. — I'm sure I have probably been selling out all my shows, and I am sure pretty much half my audience is coming out because of Freddy Got Fingered , so it's completely given me a major new chapter in my career, doing live performance, and it's really something that I have wanted to do my whole life — to tour full time doing stand-up. I'm literally booked doing six or seven shows every week. It's tiring but it's exciting. There are maybe a handful of comedians in the world that did as many shows as I did last year.
Is it harder to be funny in front of an audience than it is in front of a camera?
Not for me. I find it easier in a lot of ways, because they are a huge component; you have them to react off of. They are reacting to your joke, but then I am reacting off their reaction. I never really intended to do movies. Ever. I like movies, but I always wanted to do television. I always watched late night talk shows. The most exciting thing that I ever perceived myself doing was doing a show like David Letterman .
Which you did get to guest-host.
Yes, yes I did. [Now] I'm doing my Web show on the Internet, which is growing in numbers every year. I am actually starting an Internet comedy network this year.
So you kind of have a love/hate thing with the Internet then?
I use it more than anybody, but that's the funny thing about my show, because I do bag on it. Although I did cancel my Facebook page. I no longer have that.
So then Mark Zuckerberg is after you now.
Yeah, well he won't be able to find me because I'm not on Facebook anymore. Really, I'm using the Internet in a different way than most people because it's more for marketing with my comedy — and actually my show itself is on the Internet, but that's because I am so immersed in it that I'm aware of the potential. If you're not somebody out there marketing yourself as a comedian, I don't see any real use being on the Internet.
This is where I was going with bringing up Freddie Got Fingered in light of Facebook, because it seems like that was really the moment where everyone knew who you were and your cover was blown, as far as the format of the MTV show. In the '90s you had some relative anonymity among the people you were pranking, but you are performing as yourself, with people who know your persona. How is that different?
My show premiered on MTV basically at the end of 1999 and I moved to America, so nobody in the U.S. had ever heard of me until then. All that material had been shot over the five, six, seven years previous in Canada on a small public access station, and it had slowly grown in popularity in Canada to a national public access network, then to a comedy network, so over those years I slowly got used to people recognizing me on the street, and then when it hit on MTV it was sort of an explosive thing. One day I'm walking through New York City and nobody knows who I am, and literally the next day after they started running promos for the show, before the show even aired, I couldn't walk 10 feet down the road without people spotting me. It was very exciting but also it was something that I'd been used to for seven years, I just wasn't used to them knowing me in the U.S.
It never impacted the show — we had lots of ways of shooting [around it]. Right now I'm walking around the airport in L.A. and I've got glasses and a trench coat on, talking on the phone, so I have a lot of ways of not getting recognized. There's definitely body language where, if you don't look at people in the eyes, people don't talk to you. So that's what we would do when we were on MTV, when we were shooting those bits. We would go into a certain town where it wasn't too crowded. I'd never go interview the 21-year-old kid, I'd go interview a 50-year-old woman who probably wouldn't recognize me. I just stopped doing the on-the-street stuff because I did it for 10 years and I wanted to move on and try something else. I did everything that I could think of [and] I needed a break from it. Doing stand-up is a lot more similar to doing the on-the-street stuff than doing the movies, because you do have an audience — when I am onstage telling a joke or talking about something crazy or talking to the audience, you can tell there are always some people in the audience that you can play off of. I can make fun of people, I can go after somebody, they can go after me, it's got a more spontaneous give-and-take to it.
Some of the material you do is very self-deprecating. Is that something you try to play up? Because it's hard to know when you are trying to be serious.
I do some self-deprecating stuff, but the longer I have toured and the more shows I've done, the less self-deprecating stuff I have done. I think as my confidence has increased onstage, I realized that the self-deprecating stuff, although it's funny and gets some good laughs, it's not necessarily helpful in the big picture. I have gotten so comfortable onstage that I'm sort of aggressive with my audience, and I decided to never really show them any chinks in the armor. Occasionally I would throw in a little joke just to break the ice.
I think a lot of comedians now today are sort of holding back a little bit because they almost don't want to look like they are trying too hard. And I am deciding to go the opposite route and going out there and hitting it with as much force as I can. I guess it's a part of my style — it's a high-energy, silly show. I do a lot of performance in the show, physical comedy, re-enact stories and do things like that — as opposed to just standing there and telling jokes in a deadpan way.
Tell people to start following me on Twitter @Tomgreenlive. The Twitter I am on all the time, posting a lot of videos on there and stuff. I think I am going to start doing a new game on Twitter: I am going to start filming little videos in every city I go to. Possibly spread peanut butter on something in every city I'm in, like, on a fire hydrant or something. Then I am going to videotape the peanut butter and post it on Twitter and ask people if they can find the peanut butter — sort of like a peanut butter around the world kind of thing. We might start hiding buried treasure in every city. Probably the treasure will consist of atomgreen.comT-shirt. We are going to make a video of us burying the T-shirt treasure and post it on Twitter so anybody who goes and finds it is going to be asked to make a video of them finding it.
Get on the Twitter and start waiting and watching for clues.
How long are you planning on going full-throttle touring as a comic?
I am definitely going for the next six months or so, because I'm booked for that long, and I do know that it's the kind of thing I'm probably going to do for the next 10 years, I think. I don't think I'm going to be doing it as nonstop as I'm doing now — I'll probably take a break at some point.
I am doing a comedy special this year, a TV special. It's going to be coming out on one of the comedy networks, so that's really exciting. I'm shooting that in June, so I'm going to continue to write and tour and prepare for that, and I may take a little break after we shoot that. I also have a bunch of other projects that I'm developing right now: I have a feature film that I am writing right now, I've got a TV series that's in development, so I think I will probably tour straight until I have to go into production on one of those and then I will take a break.
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