Comedian Richard Lewis is widely credited – by the Yale Book of Quotations, by general pop culture records and by he himself – as being responsible for the term ‘from hell.’ Y’know, ‘the neighbours from hell,’ ‘the boss from hell,’ etc. And yet the phrase has so penetrated the vernacular that people who have never even heard of Richard Lewis use it all the time. It’s just part of our cultural landscape. That seems to be how it is with Tom Green too. He pioneered a form of comedy that changed everything, a certain form of surrealist/reality/prank hybrid that has manifested itself through Jackass, the Janoskians, the Jalals. But there was nothing quite like The Tom Green Show.
So it’s funny to hear Green telling anecdotes about some of his greatest pranks during his Melbourne International Comedy Festival show. Make no mistake, this is a stand-up comedy show, not a spoken-word retrospective or anything like that. But to see Green right there onstage talking about the time he hacked up a quartet of severed cows’ heads or had his dad’s car airbrushed with a girl-on-girl sex scene is, in a weird way, to be witnessing history through the eyes of someone who lived it. Every anarchic, groundbreaking, friggin’ gross second.
But Tom Green the stand-up isn’t quite the same guy as Tom Green the guy who made Freddie Got Fingered. Although he still has his absurdist moments (a lot of which seem to come out during his crowd work), he seems a little more sentimental and personable these days, whether it’s reminiscing over the innocence of pre-internet porn, or the way news was disseminated before social media, or the spirit of friendship inherent in ’we’re setting fire to this cow-brain together’.
This feels like a guy who built his early body of work to amuse himself and his buddies, not to earn a bunch of likes from strangers, and who seems to relish being able to connect with his audience in-person, to look into the eyes of everyone who grew up (or refused to grow up) with a VHS of Something Smells Funny playing on a TV in the corner of the room 24/7.
This is perfectly illustrated by the show’s closing bit, in which Green acknowledges the split between critical and audience reactions to Freddie Got Fingered. I won’t spoil it for you, but Green absolutely nails the concept of letting a piece of work find its own audience, critics be damned, even if that work involves tying sausages to his fingers while bashing away at a keyboard with steaks dangling from his ears. But Green comes across as so likeable and perceptive that you certainly don’t need to be a Tom Green fan to enjoy this show. It helps to know a bit of background when he’s referencing his marriage to Drew Barrymore or his only-aired-in-Canada songs about crack babies, or his spontaneous moments on the set of Road Trip, but you don’t need to know that stuff to laugh at his views on being a single dude in his mid 40s, or what he learned from his last few relationships, or his feelings on the pervasiveness of Instagram. And you sure don’t need to know that stuff in order to appreciate his thoughts on the possibility of a Trump presidency (even though Green was fired by that guy on Celebrity Apprentice for getting wasted with Dennis Rodman). Ultimately, it’s simply a funny show by a guy who has a clear worldview and isn’t afraid or ashamed to express it. A guy who also just happens to have sucked the milk right out of a cow on-camera.
BY PETER HODGSON
