The anomaly in question is Tom Green. I’m sitting here watching the “highlights” of the New Tom Green Show on MTV because…well, I have no fucking life and I am so mystified by this guys seeming popularity that I thought I’d ask the teeming millions if they could account for it.
I mean, I’ve just seen Tom do what looked like his best impression of a preying mantis while wearing a cheap latex horse mask, confront his mom with the details of his first lay, pretend to brand himself while making bizarre, freakish cow noises and humiliate his stooge, a fella named Glenn, by having his credit card and cell phone bronze plated.
The only reaction of those around him seems to be profound embarrassment. His mother looked like she was about to burst into tears and Glenn just looked plain pissed off. This of course assumes that they weren’t in on the joke but even if they were it would still be about as funny as a drano enema.
So what’s the deal? Is there some ironic post modern subtext going on here that I don’t get, or is he just shit?
If it makes you feel better, he is actually Canadian. It doesn’t explain why Americans feel the need to watch him, but at least we don’t have to claim him.
-Lil
When I’ve seen Tom Green, I’ve thought, “That’s clever, in a really cruel way. What kind of ass would do that to people and expect to ever have them speak to them again?” I would have basically disowned him if I were his dad. Have you seen some of the other stuff he’s done? Seriously, to let him come around when he continues to do that stuff sends the message that it’s really ok, it’s not a big deal.
I knew a chap who apparently thought his MTV television show was the funniest thing to come down the pike in years. I tried watching it, once. I sat through a whole episode. I tried to watch other episodes, but durned if I could see how this was supposed to be entertaining, and I never managed a whole episode again.
As has been previously stated… I guess he found a market SOMEWHERE. They let him make a movie. Then again, I understand the movie bombed rather badly, so maybe I’m not as clueless as I think…
I see the commercials or clips from his show and it looks annoying as hell, but when I actually watched the show once (also, no life) it was pretty damned funny.
I like him in a weird way. I think his act is sort of Kaufman like. Andy Kaufman always got a kick out the way that bad guy wrestlers would work get negative heat from audiences. There is something strangely funny about seeing someone deliberately provoke and audience into a rage.
Diogenes, if you make another comparison between Andy Kaufman and Tom Green, I shall be obliged to kick you square in the nuts. Nothing personal, understand, it’s just a rule I have.
I used to think Tom Green was the very bottom of the comedy barrel. Then I saw Jamie Kennedy, who seems to have totally refined the gimmick of being as obnoxious and embarassing as possible for a few minutes, and then suddenly saying “Hey everybody! I’m Jamie Kennedy! And this is my show!” Good for you, now bugger off.
Honestly, people will watch any old shite, it seems.
Tom Green is absolute shit for the most part, but I have to admit he was funny in “Road Trip” and “Stealing Harvard.” That’s because he wasn’t being, well, Tom Green. I haven’t had the pleasure of seeing “Freddy Got Fingered,” though. Probably for the best.
Part of the humor in Kaufman’s act was in the audience themselves. People would look at their dates and say, “Do YOU get this? What’s he DOING?”
…and that confusion was part of what he was doing. It was hip. It was different. And yes, I thought it was funny as hell. Part of the humor arose from the idea that either you didn’t get it… or that the comedian himself was not entirely sane.
Tom Green, on the other hand, seems to be satirizing things that people do that are irritating… by exaggerating them.
I don’t find this funny. I do find it irritating. It is good, however, in that I can turn it off whenever I like. But Green does not fill me with the urge to pay him money and say to him “Do more!”
I’m with Diogenes on this one. Green’s schtick is performance art, which at times can reach, or sink to, levels of genius. The mystery is why he gets lumped in with comedians, and why bulletheads watch and laugh as if he were funny.
That said, I find his show unwatchable; not because it’s poorly done, but because it’s either embarrassing or disgusting and I get edgy and nervous. But being embarrassing or disgusting doesn’t disqualify art.
I respect Green for the fact that he never, ever gives us the literal or figurative wink that says, “Hey, it’s OK, I’m just kidding.” Unlike for example Jimmy Fallon, who can’t get through a single skit without cracking up (which can be really funny, of course), Green never does anything to let us know he’s “really” just a normal guy and knows how outrageous all his stunts are. He never acknowledges his own act, because that would break the internal logic of it.
The NY Times review of Freddy Got Fingered had some interesting points to make on this, phrased better than mine. (Link requires free registration.)
I’m going to bite the bullet and make an admission. I, along with many of my friends at the time, used to watch Tom Green’s first show. Granted most of them were high as a kite at the time, and maybe I might have been too,
It was kind of fascinating in a I think this guy is insane kind of way. I was always wondering if he was this mental and how had he talked someone into giving him a TV show. I tried to watch him on TV recently and it wasn’t very funny. It was interesting for a short time, but his schtick is the kind that will get old very quick.
If I’d been his mother I’d have slapped him hard over the head and thrown him, and the cameraman, out the house. She certainly didn’t seem amused or to be in on the joke. He was being a rude jerk and she was letting him get away with it.
And the French-Canadian lighthouse woman should have pushed him off the top.
All in all it was the kind of thing that is a pain from a show-off 10 year old. So I can’t see how it’s funny in an adult.
Tom Green is pure, unstructured, not-mentally-censored expressiveness.
He does what all of us deep down want to do but don’t do because our social learning stops us from doing.
Him and the UK’s Vic reeves and Bob Mortimer are geniuses of comedy. (Vic and Bob were better on their namesake show than they are on shooting stars because on shooting stars they are restricted by the format (a gameshow) but on vic and bob they were free to act completely insane)
It is the same thing that makes us want to post gibberishPLOOM! WAGGA WAGGA FLIF MEROKEO;JG0-9 SLPLEOKL FROGHEAD!
Everything Green does is structured and planned out, just like Robin Williams rarely “improves” when he’s doing a comedy tour anymore.
And speaking for myself and what I can assure you are 100,000,000’s of others, deep down inside we have absolutleyNO desire to do any of the crap that Green does, simply because we learned that there are certain things one just does not do under any circumstances.
That Green willingly chooses to ignore that fact does not make him a rebel or hip or cool, it just makes him a spoiled brat who refuses to grow up.
That just proves my point. Surely if you’ve learned not to do something then the desire was there to do it before you learned it.
I am damn sure that desire is there, even if you deny it, you might not even know about it, but it’s there.
I am not saying having learned not to be an ass is a bad thing, just that Tom Greene is simply expressing the raw silliness that we are all probably capable of, but don’t because we are acting sensibly.
We’ve been acting sensibly for so long that it feels like we are not acting, and that being sensible is the natural state. I don’t think it is the natural state. The natural state is to be impulsive.
