Green reigns as king of teen humor

Naturally, he will swathe himself in a massive fur parka, which is currently stashed in the rear of the van. "Everyone on the show condones the slaughter of animals," Green notes.

"Encourages it!" a production assistant chimes in from the back seat.

It takes a while to set up the rather elaborate scenario - Green in mukluks; a wheeled "sled" laden with fur swatches, hunks of cheese and a plastic salami; a mutt named Cosmo - and then Green's off down the street doing his hit-and-run comedy. And the most arresting thing about it, frankly, isn't how completely demented the scrawny guy looks in his Nanook ensemble. Or the way he hands a startled businessman a slab of Havarti in exchange for his suitcase, then ticks off sidewalk vendors by grabbing their merchandise and leaving them dented cookware. Or even the encounter - the video clip that will probably wind up being used on the show - where Green charges into an office tower and encounters a security guard who sternly tells him, "You can't bring your dog sled in here."

It's that after only five episodes of "The Tom Green Show" on MTV, starring an odd Canadian comedian whom virtually no one south of the border had heard of a month ago, a whole lot of people under 30 recognize the man in the mukluks.

"Oh, it's Tom Green," someone murmurs as the comedian tries to wrestle away a woman's scarf.

"Tom Green, wassup, man?"

"Funny (expletive), man."

Which was not precisely the reaction that Green and his writers, always in search of outrage, had in mind. But it will do.

You can't exactly call his half-hour show "alternative comedy," which is the overbroad label for non-punch-line funniness mixed with performance art. "It makes you think of someone in a black turtleneck, scrunching in a corner with candles, drinking pig's blood," Green objects.

You could call it adolescent humor, given that it highlights such bodily-fluid encounters as Green sucking milk from a dairy cow's teat or delivering a stream-of-consciousness monologue while buying condoms. In fact, Canada's Comedy Network, which began airing a version of "The Tom Green Show" last year, proudly rounded up various critics' pans - "sick, offensive" and "amateurish and infantile" and even "a circus of cruelty and mayhem" - and trumpeted them in a promotional spot. But its 27-year-old star sounds wounded. Fond as he is of fart and pee jokes, "I want the show to be labeled a smart comedy show, not a gross-out comedy show," Green says, gamely trying to have it both ways, all ways.

So there is no convenient description for what happens Monday nights at 10:30 except that it's highly unpredictable, as likely to prompt gasps as laughs, and a hit for MTV. Of the network's prime-time shows, it's No. 2 among MTV's core 18-to-24-year-old viewers (behind "Celebrity Deathmatch") and No. 1 among 12-to-34-year-olds.

Green, a goateed beanpole who has suggested he belongs on the cover of Sickly Man magazine, looks bleary by the end of the day. After the trader bit, he spent all afternoon impersonating a consumer reporter, striding into 14th Street stores to demonstrate that the appliances he'd bought earlier were full of spaghetti and meatballs and demanding explanations. Like so many of the professionally outrageous, though, he's calmly articulate off-mike and off-camera. Eating eel rolls at the sushi place near the office, explaining and defending himself, he's . . . nice.

In fact, he's still reeling from the fact that just two days earlier, he made his first U.S. talk show appearance - with David Letterman, whom he'd only been watching and worshiping his entire life. Green showed the video of the time he had his parents' Honda secretly spray-painted with a lesbian love scene and the words Slut Mobile, then recorded their unamused responses and his mother's tight-lipped telephone messages - and Dave actually laughed. "I was like, 'Omigod, this is crazy, he likes my little joke!' " Green burbles.

He's been gunning for this ever since he launched an offbeat Ottawa radio broadcast and then segued into local cable in 1994. Neither show paid him for his 80-hour weeks; Green had to move in with his favorite targets, Mom and Dad. Yet he assured them he'd soon be in New York or L.A., doing a national show. "I had this attitude from the beginning, as unrealistic as it was," Green confesses. "Although I'm pretty self-deprecating, in private with my friends we always said, 'We're gonna do this.' . . . I was setting the bar so high it would have been completely embarrassing to fail. And completely embarrassing to quit. I told everyone I was going to do this."

And he has, using the same talk show format he honed in Ottawa and the same sidekicks. His buddy Phil sits in a window at the rear of the stage, drinks coffee and laughs. Period. His other pal, actually named Glenn Humplik, functions primarily as the mortified recipient of Green's particularly frat-boy stunts. Both are computer industry hotshots, not comics or actors, who fly in for Manhattan tapings out of loyalty and the what-a-hootness of it all.

Between studio segments, there's video of Green accosting pedestrians with a bullhorn, of a bandaged Green falling spectacularly off his crutches as horrified passersby rush to help. Green fills his parents' living room with llamas and geese. Green slips into his parents' room at night and deposits a bloody cow's head on their bed while intoning, "This is a message from Don Corleone."

A week after the Slut Mobile prank, Richard and Mary Jane Green "kind of laughed, sort of," says their unrepentant son, who's making them pay for all the years they nagged him to stop skateboarding and get a job. "But they also don't want me doing it again."

It's a brand of nose-thumbing that combines insurrectionist tendencies with a twisted interest in repelling the very audience it attracts. "I love when people walk away from the show saying, 'What the hell did we just see? What was that? That was weird,' " he acknowledges. "Sucking milk from a cow's udder kind of gets a laugh, but it also gets a baffled, you-can't-believe-what-you're-watching scream." His problem, potentially, is that he doesn't want to be known as only bizarre or tasteless. "Is what I did today shocking?" he says. "No. Silly and gonzo and goofy, but it's not shocking." In fact, he regrets that his fur-swaddled trader extended his middle finger at a busload of passing tourists on Wall Street, a gesture that will be edited away.

Green's unlikely ally in this quest to be not entirely revolting is MTV, which works hard to appear hiply unorthodox but is actually more conservative than his Canadian outlets. That segment in the Canadian version of "The Tom Green Show" in which Tom and Glenn made each other vomit? Or the one where Tom did . . . something unpleasant . . . with the contents of a condom? "No way in hell that'll ever be on television" here, says John Miller, the show's executive producer. "He's challenging me to rethink what comedy is. I'm challenging him to use the more clever part of his comic imagination."

No doubt this will cause some muttering up north. Green's appearance on a Toronto talk show took on legendary proportions when he pulled out a stinking, semi-decayed raccoon carcass, causing the host to rush off the set while his lapel mike transmitted his retching. Naturally, therefore, Green's cult tuned in eagerly to see what their dauntless hero would do to David Letterman.

Sillies. Green wants to be David Letterman; he was entirely well behaved. "When Letterman called, it was completely surreal," Green says a bit dreamily. "If the whole thing ended tomorrow" - the MTV show, the upcoming movies he's got small parts in, the looming fame - "that was definitely more than I expected."

© Copyright The Washington Post Company

Back to the top

09-16-99