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Q&A with Tom Green

Tom Green’s “World Standup Comedy Tour” made a pit stop at London’s Grand Theatre Monday night. Gazette Associate Editor Arden Zwelling caught up with Green over the phone from California last week to talk about his standup show, the pitfalls of the internet and getting out of the house for the first time in four years.

Also see Arden’s profile on Green and his comedy tour.

Gazette: How’s it going, man?

Tom Green: Well, I’m awake…

GAZ: Yeah, me too. It’s about 9:30 here in London — Where are you right now?

TG: I’m in Los Angeles so it’s like 6:30 in the morning. Getting up, doing a bunch of interviews today for the Canadian portion of my tour. And looking forward to getting up there.

GAZ: It must be exciting, coming back home to Canada.

TG: Yeah, it’s very exciting. It’s been an exciting year. I’ve been on tour all year doing standup. Travelling all around the world telling jokes and doing this show that I’ve put together. It’s been a lot of fun. But it’s kind of cool to come back and be doing shows up in Canada — for sure.

GAZ: You mentioned that you’ve been touring around for a while — it must be a big change for you, seeing as you’ve basically been working from your living room for the past four years. What’s it like to get out of the house and go on the road?

TG: Man, it’s really nice. It was sort of what spawned the idea of doing this tour. It was having to get out of the house, you know. I just wanted to get up in front of some audiences and actually perform some stand up. It’s fun doing the web show, I really enjoyed doing it, but it sort of became a little bit odd having people come into my house and not leaving. You can really get sort of isolated here in Los Angeles. You can isolate yourself in your house if you’re not careful. So I’m looking forward to it.

It’s going to be cool up in Canada doing the show. I think people are going to enjoy it. I’m looking forward to people seeing exactly what it is that I’m doing.

GAZ: Well it’s sort of a trip back to your roots, right? People know you from the TV show and movies and everything, but stand up is really how you started to get into comedy, right?

TG: Yeah, absolutely. As a teenager I did standup when I was in high school at Yuk Yuk’s in Ottawa. I did that for a few years. So I’ve kind of always rooted everything I’ve done in stand up. I’ve always enjoyed traditional comedy and I sort of took that and put it on its head a little bit with my TV show. But it always had that sort of cadence to it and I love it. It was always something I never really quite mastered as a teenager so it’s been an exciting year for me to go out and really focus on this and figure out exactly what it is that I want to do with this show.

It’s an ongoing, evolving process. I’m always writing new jokes and changing the show every week. It’s really been one of the most creative things I’ve ever gotten to do. You don’t have anybody else coming in and changing what you have to say. Even music, you still have to work with musicians and other producers and record company executives and with television it’s the same thing. You have people coming in and changing what it is that you’re doing. That was always kind of frustrating for me.

But with stand up, ultimately you decide what it is that you’re saying on stage and you say it and nobody’s going to give you any sort of notes or anything like this. It’s the most independent kind of thing there is, you know. So it’s been fun for that reason.

GAZ: Well, you’re actually writing jokes now. A lot of your success with the TV show and the talk show has come from bits where you’re improvising and you’re creating humour spontaneously. Standup is so much about having structured material and timing and prepared jokes. Is that a strange transition for you?

TG: You know, it’s always been very structured what I’ve done. I’ve always appeared to make it look like it was just kind of insanity but it was always very structured. It’s sort of similar in a lot of ways. The big difference and the big variable is audience. It’s a real audience of people who are coming out to a theatre and coming out to have a good time. In television you don’t have that factor a lot of the time. Even when you’re doing television with a studio audience there’s not necessarily the same connection there because you’ve got the cameras in between you and everything. Audiences on television are really a little bit disconnected from the performer. They’re sort of clapping along and looking at all the lights and not really paying attention to what’s going on. So that is the big variable that really has changed. That’s a lot of fun. There’s a lot of improv involved. I improvise a lot with the audience and that makes the show exciting.

GAZ: You’re right. I’ve checked out some of the stuff from your earlier shows on YouTube and a lot of the comedy seems to come from what you’re doing physically on stage — whether you’re standing on a stool or running around or whatever. Do you feel like your physical interactions with the audience are almost as important as what you’re saying?

TG: I like to be very physical with the show. I definitely move around a lot and I like that. The main focus of the show is what I’m talking about and the issues that I’m discussing. I’m talking a lot about things that are changing in the world. I think the theme of the show is how everything is changing in our world so fast now. I just turned 39-years-old a couple months ago — I’m turning 40 this year. It’s going to be a crazy year. I’m turning 40 — I can’t believe it, man. I’m starting to look back on my life and say ‘wow, look how different the world was when I was a kid.’ We didn’t have computers or the internet or text messaging or Twitter or Facebook or any of this stuff. I don’t necessarily think the world is changing for the better, to be honest to you, which is what I think is surprising but funny to a lot of people. What I’m trying to find a lot of humour in is the pitfalls of technology and the downside of all this new social networking and conveniences which are actually really kind of making life a lot more complicated.

GAZ: Yeah, from a lot of what I’ve seen on YouTube, you’re riffing on technology and the internet and how we’re sort of rewriting the way that we interact with each other and the ways that we communicate. But at the same time, don’t you have the internet to thank for much of your success over the last six years?

TG: I mean, it’s something that exists. That I’ve always enjoyed. I think that’s what gives me the perspective to be able to make fun of the internet. I’m not worried about offending the internet. The internet can’t be offended. But I do think that because it’s been so woven into my life… I mean, I started Tomgreen.com in 1996 and I’ve been doing it ever since in various forms. Of course we couldn’t broadcast video back then but we were blogging. It wasn’t even called blogging back then but I was writing a daily diary about my public access show.

It’s been there but because of that I’ve sort of had my life opened up like what has now happened to everybody who’s on Facebook. We have our lives opened up and have people coming in and being able to see inside our homes and invade our privacy. And it’s affecting everybody’s way of communicating with friends, family, dating, husbands, wives — everything is changing the way we interact with the world around us.

Because I’ve been doing it for a long time I see that there’s a lot of pitfalls to it. It’s not always necessarily good to have yourself out there that much. When you put yourself out there to the public people can be negative. You’re always going to get at least half the people being negative and only half if you’re lucky. We’re in a time when all of a sudden everybody’s realizing this and going ‘wow, I don’t know if I necessarily like being on this Facebook thing all that much.’ But it’s become such a popular thing to do that it’s almost hard o not to be on it anymore. And there lies the comedy. There are a lot of funny scenarios and pictures I can paint that we have all experienced. Hopefully we’ve gotten to the point where we can start joking around about it.

GAZ: Well, for you, having your privacy invaded and having your life out there for the public — a lot of that comes from the nature of being a celebrity. I’d imagine it’s pretty impossible for you to escape that.

TG: I guess that’s kind of what’s happening now to everybody. Everybody’s sort of experiencing what it’s like on a smaller, more microscopic level. They’re able to be a public figure within their own group of people. You’ve got 200 people now who can watch you and see what your photos are and see what you’re putting out every day creatively. It’s a creative process putting a Facebook page together. And then they can have feedback and it can be commented on by the public. It really becomes a microscopic look at what it would be like to be on television or be a traditional public figure, a celebrity, a famous person, whatever you want to call it. There’s a lot of downside to that that people might not think of at first. It’s an interesting time. I think it’s really changing the way everybody looks at celebrity and fame because everybody gets a taste of it now.

GAZ: Is this when Tom Green gets serious and starts talking about life issues like this? So many people know you well for the outrageous comedy that you used to do on your TV show. Is this when Tom Green starts talking about life a little bit?

TG: It’s a very outrageous show and it’s a very high energy, silly show. But I’m talking about things that are real. That’s always been true of what I did on my old show too. I would always like to bring reality into the mix. Whether it was waking up my parents in the middle of the night — the underlying sort of idea of that was ‘hey look, I’m living in my parents’ basement.’ It’s fun to show that we can all sort of lash out at authority. When I would take on security guards and people like this, there’s always sort of been an element of taking on the status quo with my show. That’s what I think my standup is about too.

GAZ: Right on. You’re coming to London next week to do some standup. What do you like about coming to London?

TG: You know, I’ve also done a couple of performances there with my rapping when I was with Organized Rhyme and with my recent tour with the Keeping it Real Crew.

I think a lot of people might not necessarily know what to expect with the show. I hope that everybody who came out to the rap shows comes to this show because it’s going to be a similar kind of experience as far as it’s going to be a fun, crazy night. It’s definitely going to be a lot different with the show as well. Anybody who loves stand up should come out. I’ve had a lot of fun in London before, doing some smaller, more punk rock kind of shows. Call the Office is where I played last time. But we’re going to do something a little bigger this time and have a fun night.

GAZ: I’m impressed you brought up Call the Office — that’s a cool venue. Being in a university town around students does that bring back some memories from your days in Ottawa working at campus radio stations?

TG: Oh yeah, absolutely. I grew up doing college radio. Even when I was in high school I was doing college radio. I’d go down to the University of Ottawa station when I was in high school and do a show there and I loved that. So it’s good to be up and doing comedy in front of students. A lot of my shows I do in front of college crowds. It’s fun.

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