Tom Green

The surreal cult TV star tells Andrew P Street all about...  

...returning to stand-up comedy.
It's been going good! It's amazing how much fun it is when you get to get up on stage every night for an hour and do stand-up. I started writing this show about a year ago. You really get out performing every night for your own audience, people who came to see you, so it's really kind of a lot of fun. It has been a little bit of a pandemonium, to be honest with you. People having a good time, you know, and it is a very silly show.

...what he's been up to for the past few years.
I have built this television channel in my living room here in LA and I have been doing the [online] show for a couple of years, and it has done really well. We get a lot of great guests and it is really fun. I have been working and living in my house for the last three and a half years, and I think it has been driving me a little bit crazy, so I had to get out of the house and go do something. This is something I have wanted to do for so long – do stand-up – and it is the perfect time to do it.

...why he's been away from stand-up for so long.
The funny thing is, is when I was 15 years old I started doing stand-up and I did it for three years in Ottawa, Canada at the Yuk Yuks comedy club. I really thought that was what I wanted to do. And when I was about 18 years old I got this record deal for the rap group I was in, and I stopped doing stand-up and became highly focused on this rap group, and by the time I was done with that I was still basically young and embarrassed. So I quit doing stand-up, and I went back to school and took broadcasting and just really started focusing on doing radio and my public access TV show, which basically eventually became my MTV show [The Tom Green Show]. I spent so much time doing that, but sort of in the back of my mind I have been basically kicking myself for the last 15 years, saying "man, I really, really want to do stand-up."

...whether testicular cancer derailed his career.
That it was definitely a very traumatic experience. It was a very scary time. It does make you take a bit of a pause, but I don't really think that [slowed him down]. I made the movie Freddy Got Fingered after I got cancer, which I wrote and directed, and it's got a crazy cult following that's sort of emerging. I'm going on the road and performing around America so far all the shows have been basically selling out and they are all full of people that love that movie, and when I mention the movie I re-enact some crazy scenes from the Freddy Got Fingered movie on stage, which are just these silly songs and silly dialogues things that people remember.

...the recent critical reappraisal of Freddy as "Dada-style art prank" rather than "terrible, terrible film".
When we made the movie we were trying to do something that was so over the top that people would be scratching their heads wondering how it got made in the first place. That was sort of the joke: "how did you get them to let you do that?" And that was sort of a joke. I don't thing people necessarily immediately get it, but you know what? There are definitely a lot of people out there that found the movie. I have approached the studio about it and turns out that they have actually sold a lot of DVDs and now the movie has actually become profitable. I want to release a director's cut of the movie, so I am trying to work on getting that to happen right now. I just think it would be a lot of fun to bring the movie back in the form of a director's cut. There are actually a lot of crazy scenes that I didn't get to put in the movie, scenes that just got edited out. For probably very sane reasons.