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IT'S NOT EASY BEING GREEN

Tom Green wants to grow up. Will we let him?

Text: JAMES MARTIN

1 | 2 | 3 | APR

Tom Green owns a large, expensive house in the Hollywood Hills. This is utterly daft. Houses are for grown-ups. Green is not a grown-up.

The fruit of several underachieving comedies and attempts at gross-out cinematic auteurdom, the house is a single-story post-and-beam affair, circa 1940. Sparse and tasteful, it’s adult teetering on ancient. (Rumour: Mickey Rooney once owned the joint.) Two Siberian huskies pace a hallway decorated with an oil portrait of Woody Allen. A framed autographed Ottawa Senators jersey decorates the pool house. Were it not for a small plastic windup toy depicting two enthusiastic horses in flagrante delicto discretely displayed on a shelf overlooking the kitchen sink, a visitor might entirely forget that the owner once humped a dead moose alongside the Trans-Canada.

This is, after all, The House That Roadkill Built.

The Tom Green short strokes: Born in Pembroke in 1971. Raised in Ottawa. Started doing stand-up comedy at 16, University of Ottawa student radio at 19, and hosting a self-titled comedy TV show on community cable by the time he was 23. The Tom Green Show specialized in tasteless pranks executed at a hysterical pitch, often directed at his hapless parents: Tom airbrushes a pornographic scene on the hood of his dad’s car; Tom walks down the street pretending to be blind; Tom milks a cow using his mouth. Three years later, Canada’s Comedy Network picked up the show nationally. Cue the dead moose. Two years hence, the show became a massive U.S. hit for MTV. Green moved stateside, acted in movies, designed his own line of skateboards, married Drew Barrymore. Diagnosed with testicular cancer in March 2000, he packed in The Tom Green Show so he could undergo treatment. He no longer has a) a wife or b) two testicles.

In June 2003, after lying relatively low, a healthy Green returned to MTV with a nightly one-hour talk show. On the sensibly titled The New Tom Green Show, Tom Green wore a nice suit, sat behind a nice desk next to his nice sidekick and made nice with a parade of guests. There were antics, yes, but nary a bovine teat, let alone a moose carcass. Had comedy’s enfant terrible graduated to big boy pull-ups? Had Tom Green (gasp!) matured?

You were correct to be freaked out. You weren’t alone. Although The New Tom Green Show was strong out of the gate, the ratings quickly nose-dived and MTV brass dropped the hammer last September. Using Hollywood math, the show lasted half a marriage. Clearly, the fans want the old Tom Green, not an older Tom Green. Perhaps the question wasn’t "Has Tom Green grown up?" but rather "Will we let him?"

"You’re not going to make me sound like an old stick-in-the-mud are you?" asks Green, sitting in his backyard and inadvertently aging himself 50 years by using the term "stick-in-the-mud." He squints in the late summer sun, enjoying the first day of what was supposed to be a two-week hiatus from the new show. Growing up is not something he’s going to cop to. Not without a fight.

I first interviewed Green when he made the leap to the Comedy Network in 1998. I opened that conversation with a series of questions about cabins and duct tape, pretending to confuse the upstart Ottawa unknown with Red Green, Steve Smith’s nationally beloved comedic persona. Time has been cruel to what was already an admittedly lame gag: Tom Green is now internationally famous and wealthy enough to retire at the tender age of 32. (Meanwhile, VHS copies of Red Green’s Duct Tape Forever fill 99-cent bins across the land.) I remind Green of this previous encounter as we nurse beers poolside.

"Oh yeah," he mumbles, clearly not remembering but ever the Polite Canadian. "Ha ha."

"And five years later," I add, "we’re sitting next to your Southern California pool, which is bigger than my apartment."

He chuckles, this time for real. It is the laugh of a man who owns a large pool.

1 | 2 | 3 | APR