This Is What Tom Green Looks Like Now

When Tom Green comes on stage to a raucous standing ovation for his new special, I Got a Mule!, we see a man, now 53, with a long beard with plenty of gray in it. He’s wearing cowboy boots and jeans. It’s almost a shock that he doesn’t have a lasso as well. The daredevil look that was once his trademark — the one we saw him wield on The Tom Green Show, first in its original Canadian iteration and then, later, on MTV — is long gone, replaced with a warm, weathered smile. He grabs the mic and the first thing out of his mouth is more a statement than a joke: “This is what I look like now.” Many things may have changed about Green, but that ironic, slightly antagonistic, disarmingly funny tone of voice is still evident.

I Got a Mule!, which premiered on Prime Video last month, is but one of three new salvos on the streamer directed and conceived by Green that feel like his reintroduction to the world. As its title suggests, This Is the Tom Green Documentary is a look back at the Canadian comic’s life and career, encompassing his early days, his successful and risk-taking talk show The Tom Green Show, the 2001 movie Freddy Got Fingered (which took risks but failed with critics and audiences), his cancer scare, his brief marriage to Drew Barrymore, his constant reinventions and, now, his return to Canada after living in Los Angeles for decades. 

This brings us to his stand-up special I Got a Mule! and his reality series Tom Green Country, which both chronicle his new life on a farm in Ontario. But this is hardly a retirement or a retreat from the limelight: After all, he’s been busy on the road as a stand-up for the past 20 years. In fact, when he calls me up last week, he puts me on speakerphone because he’s at that moment driving through Texas in the midst of his current leg of tour dates. He’s in an upbeat mood.

“I’m loving my life out on the farm,” Green tells me. “And everything is going really good with the touring.” There are other reasons for him to be happy. Sitting next to him in the car is Amanda Nelson, to whom he got engaged at the end of last year. And he curbed his drinking. “When I started doing stand-up, I realized that I didn’t like being on stage hungover,” he says. “As you get older, those hangovers last a little longer. I didn’t quit drinking, but I really cut back on drinking a lot in the last few years. That’s really helped bring a lot more of a positive attitude — and then just being settled in my life, getting married, it’s really a nice thing to know that I have my personal life sorted out.”

Green’s three Prime Video series play like a then-and-now of the comic, an examination of where he’s been and where he’s at today, both mentally and creatively. In I Got a Mule! and Tom Green Country, you won’t see him engage in the mad pranks of his youth. (No, there’s no sucking milk from a cow’s udder.) But he hopes that this calmer Green is still a very funny Green. He and I had a long chat about leaving L.A., loving the great outdoors and when he realized he couldn’t do on-the-street bits anymore. Along the way, we also discussed his friendship with Monica Lewinsky, his health post-cancer, the pains of being a comedy trailblazer, Trump’s plans for Canada and his feelings about his hero David Letterman.

“Let’s talk about it all,” Green says enthusiastically as we start our conversation. “What do you want to know?”

We’re talking while you’re driving. How’s the open road?

We’re doing this tour right now with my camper van. We’re between shows right now and taking a few days off to do some photography and filming some stuff, and then I’m back on the road in Colorado in a few weeks. We’re going to be going into Los Angeles for my first time since I left Los Angeles. I haven’t been back to Los Angeles in three-and-a-half years. Actually, almost four years — time flies, it’s crazy.

How are you feeling about coming back to L.A. after living here for so long?

Definitely bittersweet. It seems like it was just yesterday that I left, but I guess it’s because I’m having so much fun in my new place on the farm. I’m going to go back and stay in my old neighborhood where my house was for 18 years. Amanda’s never been to Los Angeles, so it’s going to be fun to show her around. We’re going to do a bunch of podcasts and see a bunch of old friends. I’m excited about seeing some people I haven’t seen in a while.

Was your old place in the path of the terrible wildfires we had in January?

Fortunately, it wasn’t affected by the fires. There was a moment where the fire was possibly getting close to that part of the Hollywood Hills. But the house still stands.

I had some people that are close friends who lost their homes — and also a lot of people had to evacuate that I knew but didn’t lose their homes. It’s a terrible situation, and shocking. I feel horrible for everybody that’s had to go through that.

Obviously what happened here with the fires has been awful. But did it in any way vindicate your decision to leave L.A.?

I lived in Los Angeles for a long time, and there’s always things that you have to worry about — there were fires before, and earthquakes. Things happen in life that are random and terrible, and it could happen at any place and at any time.

For me, the decision to leave Los Angeles had nothing to do with Los Angeles. I love Los Angeles. I really had a good time in the city — I’ve had so many great experiences with so many great, talented, incredible people that I got to know. I became more confident as a stand-up comedian being able to get up at the Comedy Store and Laugh Factory and do improv every night in Los Angeles and working with all the great comedians there. I loved my time in Los Angeles. But I was there for 20 years and I had just turned 50 when I left. I just wanted a change of lifestyle. I wanted to live closer to nature, and I wanted to live closer to my family. It was more about wanting to be near my parents and my brother. I really love living in Canada — I’m a Canadian and I love Canada, and I wanted to spend this next chapter of my life at home, not away from home.

Growing up, were you that way, too? Have you just always preferred the country?

I have always loved to be outside the city, to be in nature. When I was a kid, our family had a very rustic cabin. My dad would go work on it every weekend — it was falling over half the time, but it was fun. It was on a little lake in Canada — there’s so many lakes, but it wasn’t what you’d describe as a “lake house.” It was just a little cabin on a lake a couple of hours from where I lived. We had that from when I was about four until about 14 years old. It was a very significant time of my life — I would go fishing with my dad, and we’d be out there every summer. I spent a lot of time out in the woods — it was a very calming place for me. 

Even when I lived in Los Angeles, I always liked to make it a point to drive out to the desert. Then when COVID happened, I got this camper van — my tour had been canceled, so I decided I wanted to go explore the desert and do some photography. Really, it was a filmmaking mission I went on to really get into the weeds of learning camera/photography stuff that I’ve always meant to do. I did a bunch of things during the pandemic that I had put off — I got back into really learning the guitar, learning to play piano and learning some filmmaking stuff that I always had in the back of my mind. Driving out into the desert and waking up every morning with a cup of coffee and looking at the sun coming up over the mountains — being all alone out there — I really loved that peaceful feeling. Not having the pressure of living in a giant city. When I lived in Los Angeles, there was this pressure that I would put on myself: “Well, I’m here in Los Angeles, so I really have to work today. I’ve got to make shit happen, because I’m away from home.” It justified being away from home, and it’s funny: I still put that pressure on myself, but at least I’m at home while I’m doing it. 

I think COVID was the thing where a lot of people realized you don’t really need to be anywhere anymore. We’ve got these Zoom calls — you can take meetings, and most films and television shows aren’t filmed in Los Angeles anyway. If you’re a stand-up comedian, you’re always traveling anyway, so there was nothing really holding me there in the city. The only thing that made logical sense to me was to go live near where I grew up and live near my parents and be out in the country where I feel very at peace. Got a beautiful farm, it’s 150 acres — I get up in the morning and I get on my mule and I ride off into the wilderness and take a deep breath. It really helps me think about what I’m doing with my comedy and my music and my shows.

Your parents have always been supporting characters in your work, and it’s great to see them in Tom Green Country. Did your sense of humor derive more from your mom or your dad?

I’d say it was equal. They’re both very funny, in different ways. I was really lucky to have two really funny parents, but not typical funny. My dad is a little bit more silly. He likes interacting with people. He’s always joking around and had a reputation in the military as being a prankster. My mother is much more analytical and can be a little more sarcastic and cynical and observe things more from an antisocial perspective. I’ve got these two influences, and just being at the dinner table with them, from an early age, there was always this hilarious banter that went around, which still continues to this day. 

I wanted to try to capture that in the show, and some people think they’re the stars of the show. They’re just hilarious on camera — I think everybody relates to that, because you know what it’s like when you go home to your family and there’s this shorthand that everybody has. Everybody is just so comfortable with each other that there’s this real beautiful thing that happens — everybody is just able to be very natural and themselves. 

The Tom Green Show was all about its chaotic energy, whereas Tom Green Country finds you being much more relaxed and laidback. Is this the person you are nowadays?

This (new show) is a reflection of who I am, (but) I’ve always been that person. When I was doing The Tom Green Show when I was 24 or 28 — when I wasn’t covering myself in cheese — I was calmly trying to figure out, “What would be something that would be hilarious to do? Well, it would be hilarious to go into the National Art Gallery and hang a painting on the wall and get chased by security guards.”

But when I’m a 53-year-old man thinking, “What would be hilarious to do?,” it’s not even just about my age, but also in the context of where the world is today with media. In 1994, 1995 when we shot those bits — or in 1999, when we shot “Undercutters Pizza” — there was no TikTok, there was no YouTube. There were not a million (people) running around with cellphones filming pranks on their parents or on the street. There was nobody doing that — literally nobody, not even on TV. There was only me. What came close to it was maybe The Real World and Road Rules, but that’s not what I was doing, so it was exciting to do it because I thought it would be funny to watch. Now we’re living in a world that is just a sea of cellphone content. Is there any reason that anybody would think that they would want to see more of that? 

I want to deliver something that is a contrast to what’s going on. It’s a strange thing to say, but I thought the weirdest thing I could do was go do something normal. That’s not to say (Tom Green Country) is not hilarious — there are lots of really funny, funny moments in the show. But I think people that have grown up with me — who have been watching me for the last, hell, 30 years, even going back before MTV — this is something that is interesting. To my audience, it’s a very broad show, but it’s not just appealing to people that want to see some crazy shit — it’s actually kind of interesting. Johnny Carson had a sign that hung in his office for 30 years that said, “Make it interesting, and it will be good,” and that’s been my modus operandi, even when I was doing my interview shows. It’s not necessarily always about just being shocking — it’s about “Let’s try to do something that’s interesting.” There’s a lot of humor in (the new show), obviously, but it’s also just neat to see how it works to get a mule — or how it works to get chickens and have eggs. 

Freddy Got Fingered got savaged by critics when it came out in 2001 and bombed at the box office. How do you feel about Freddy in 2025? 

There’s so much more to filmmaking than just writing it and filming it and editing it. There’s also negotiating with the people that pay for it, the studio, and releasing it — and that was the first time I’d ever been through that process. I was quite young at the time, and I’ve learned a lot about that process. 

The movie did have to go through some substantial edits and changes after we did the director’s cut of it. There is a different version of the movie (that) was my pure expression — unfortunately, there’s not any way to (restore) the director’s cut of the movie. I don’t even know where the footage is. It’s not something that’s possible, so that’s not in the cards. 

That first director’s cut, I screened at New Regency (with) Arnon Milchan and Sanford Panitch and Peter Cramer, who are all incredible film producers and studio heads. Arnon Milchan stood up and did a slow clap (after the screening). Everything went perfectly. But then what ends up happening is it goes to this focus group, and when they focus-group it, you scare people a little bit. 

(The original cut) had even more crazy stuff in it. When you take a film like that and you fly out to Phoenix and you screen it for 200 people (in a focus group) and you have someone stand up in front of the room afterwards and say, “Tell me what you don’t like about this movie”… You shouldn’t be focus-grouping a movie like that, because it’s supposed to be pissing people off. But they raise their hands and say, “Well, this pissed me off, this pissed me off, this confused me and this riled me up.” (Those comments) would get written down and given a score, and then you get this low score because all these things pissed people off. But that should’ve actually been the high score — the whole point was to piss people off and confuse people. So through the mechanism of how movies get edited and released, some things got changed in the film. 

(The changes) didn’t make (the movie) any less weird — it just made it choppier, and the story didn’t flow as smoothly. It was a little bit more of an avant-garde-art type of film before, with darker music and things like that. I sometimes go, “I wonder what would’ve happened if I actually got to put that exact movie out.” Maybe Roger Ebert wouldn’t have been so hard on me, would’ve seen what it was trying to say a little easier. He said it was choppy — he just saw some crazy pieces and decided to trash the thing. But that being said, the movie that it ended up being, those scenes were all still in there, and I’m really proud about the set pieces and the way that I designed all those scenes and those props and those shots. Everything still existed — maybe not in the exact order and smoothness that I wanted it to be, but the scenes themselves were just outrageous enough that I’m really proud of them all as individual scenes.

In recent years, though, there’s been this critical reassessment of the movie, which you discuss in This Is the Tom Green Documentary. 

I do understand why people have now found it and really gravitated to it. But it’s weird to go through a thing like that in your life. I was flying high with The Tom Green Show — why else would 20th Century Fox have let me direct a movie? Then, to have it turn on you a little bit — to have people try to take you down because of a film — I don’t even know if it’s an exaggeration to say it was a traumatic experience. It was a very devastating experience for me. 

There’s not been a single day in my life in the last 25 years when I’ve been in public where somebody hasn’t come up to me and said, “Daddy, would you like some sausage?” People quote Freddy Got Fingered to me as much as they quote The Tom Green Show, if not more. It has been strange knowing that people loved it, but then also you sometimes will read people saying that they hate it. I guess that’s just the nature of the business. It is what we set out to do, right? I set out to make something that was polarizing, and mission accomplished.

I want to understand: Because you were consciously trying to make something polarizing, what made the response traumatic? Critics by and large trashed the film — was it that you felt like you didn’t achieve the right balance of people who got it versus people who didn’t get it? 

That’s a good way of describing it. I honestly thought that the media — meaning, the critics and the people that reviewed it — were smarter than that. I honestly thought that some guy like Roger Ebert or (Richard) Roeper would have been smart enough to say, “Oh, look, this kid is 28 years old — he’s fucking with us and, wow, he did it well. This is crazy.” Instead, they just looked at it at face value and said (dismissively), “This movie is crazy.” I just thought people would have been able to do the math and see that it was purposefully polarizing — and, therefore, valid. 

It was a wake-up call for me. “You’re Roger Ebert, you don’t want to be the punchline. You don’t want to be made fun of.” That’s essentially what I was doing with that movie — I was making fun of them. I was daring them to watch this thing and have to talk about it. It was a lot for them to probably process. We were at a stage in media, too, where everything was funneled through the same channels as far as how things were made. It was before video became flooded on the internet where we have all these huge numbers of eclectic voices and people good, bad and ugly. There’s so many different ways of expressing ourselves now that we’re used to seeing things that are kind of nuts — whereas then, it was like, “No, you’re supposed to make a movie this way,” and when a reviewer would watch a movie, they would basically be trying to say, “Okay, how well was this made in the way that it was supposed to be made?” That was a weird time. I think people are a little bit maybe more accepting of odd things now than they ever were.

How frustrating was it to feel like you were a bit of a trailblazer in terms of making intentionally, provocatively weird comedy? Like you said, that brand of comedy is much more prevalent now, thanks to people like Tim & Eric or Eric André. Do you think, “Hey, guys, I took a bunch of arrows for you because I was the first one doing stuff like this”?

There were times early on where it was frustrating. But a lot of time has passed and the truth is, I can now look at people that came after me — they’re not doing it anymore, but here I am. I’m on a sold-out tour. I’ve got three new (Prime Video) shows. I’m living on a beautiful farm, and my life is great. I’m engaged to this beautiful woman who’s sitting beside me. I look at some of the people that came after me — some of them, not all of them — and they may have a little run with something. But I don’t feel like I’ve got any arrows in my back right now. I feel like I’m on top of the world. So you get through that initial hump of “Oh my god, people are doing what I did.” 

You mentioned Eric André. He’s my friend — he openly talks about how much he loved the show. It’s not like I’m sitting here working at Subway — I have no problem with Subway, but I’m directing and doing comedy and sold-out shows and having a blast and actually continuing to come up with new things that people might decide to replicate. It’s a little ahead of things again — moving up to the farm — but I wouldn’t be surprised if, 20 years from now, you’re going to have a lot of people living out in the country, out of the city, and doing exactly what I’m doing.

Do you see that as your legacy? You’re the comedian who saw trends in comedy, the internet and social media before others did? 

I was a skateboarder, and when I was a kid, I made rap music when rap music wasn’t the No. 1 kind of music — it was a new, underground thing. I always liked alternative media, before the internet. (I was) listening to rock bands that most people have never heard of. And I always loved the rebellious attitude of skateboarding. I would see all the cool kids in school and I’d think, “Well, I’m going to show up with a weird skateboard thing going on.” I’d be shopping at the thrift shop, wearing weird hats and old ratty sweaters and shit that I bought that I thought was funny-looking. I wasn’t a loser or anything — I was elected to student council in school — but I would use this out-of-the-box approach as a way to make friends and make people laugh. 

My heroes in life were people like that as well. David Letterman, of course, went on to become one of the biggest broadcasters in history, but when I first heard him, he was doing a little show at 12:30 (that) was, essentially, as weird as Eric André is today. It was a crazy thing to see. Monty Python and SCTV, these were my heroes.  

But skateboarding (was) even weirder than SCTV and David Letterman and Monty Python. That’s even rawer. It’s not necessarily as curated or as comedic, but it was definitely more anarchic. It was no rules. The ways that skateboarders are creative is not “comedy,” but deciding to ollie onto a curb and grind across it, scratch up the front of their board — they’re not even on their wheels — that’s actually comedy, because it’s ridiculous. Somebody invented a skateboard — it’s got four wheels on it, and between the wheels there’s this piece of metal that’s holding everything together. You’re supposed to ride on the wheels — you’re not supposed to ride across the metal part, but that’s hilarious. “I’m going to ollie up onto a thing and ride across on the metal part — or flip the board over a rail and slide across the center of the board and scratch it all up, not even use the wheels.” The first time somebody did that, I can guarantee you everybody watching laughed: “Holy shit, what’d he just do?” That’s comedy.

Skateboarding’s a rebellious, anarchic thing, that’s the same with punk rock music and rap music. (At the beginning of) rap music, somebody said, “Okay, let’s take two record players and make music out of it by repeating a beat over and over again.” I’m sure the first time somebody did that, they must have just laughed — that’s hilarious. Same thing with punk rock music — you’re not supposed to play your guitar like that, you don’t put all that distortion on it. The first time somebody did that, they probably laughed. That is a form of comedy — then it became cool. The on-the-street pranks that I did, initially it was funny, but then it became cool to go on the street and do pranks. It wasn’t supposed to be cool in the beginning — it was supposed to be funny.

You often talk about your reverence for Letterman, who started out as anarchic. What do you think of his post-Late Show career as he’s become more of a beloved institution?  

Obviously, he’s the man, right? I can’t even imagine what it must be like to have had that level of success in this industry. I’m a huge fan still. I love watching those (Netflix) interview shows, and I think he’s so intelligent with the way he approaches his interviews. 

He’s a bit older than me — I’m enjoying moving out to my ranch and being in nature and still continuing to be creative, but I can only imagine how much more I’ll enjoy that when I’m Dave’s age. I don’t know him well, but I know he’s got a ranch and horses up in Montana. He probably has a very nice balance in his life. (I’m) aspiring to have a nice balance in my life where I can get up in the morning and find a lot of calm and look at the beauty of the world, and also go out and work on my artistic endeavors at the same time.

But I also wondered if you see Letterman’s career as aspirational in terms of transitioning from edgy prankster to a more accepted, universally embraced entertainer.

So many of the people that we loved were outliers in their day, whether it’s David Letterman or Lenny Bruce or even Charlie Chaplin. So many people that are considered to be legendary, they did have their earlier moments where they weren’t widely embraced. I always remember when David Letterman hosted the Oscars, and he got all that backlash — I didn’t understand it because I loved David Letterman and was excited to see him and loved it. But people have always liked to tear down people that are doing things that are different.

The thing that I find inspiring about Letterman — and so many people that I look up to — is their resilience. It’d be very easy to just quit at any time, myself included. I don’t have to do what I’m doing right now. It’s not quite the level of financial success that some of the people we’ve talked about have had, but I’ve accomplished far more than I’d ever imagined. I could retire now if I wanted to — I want to keep being creative and doing things. When I see David Letterman, he obviously doesn’t have to go host an interview show — he’s doing it because he loves it. 

The documentary mentions your special 2000 episode of The Tom Green Show in which you stuck up for Monica Lewinsky at a time when the media was making her life miserable and the late-night hosts were dunking on her. I feel like this episode has been forgotten over the years — and I wondered if that’s why you included it in the documentary. Not that you wanted to pat yourself on the back, but to say, “This is the most provocative thing I did on that show that nobody talks about.”

That’s just an example of something that I think is ironic. I’m not going to speak about the media as a whole, but the media that was so quick to criticize some of my silly behavior was also the same media that was brutal about Monica. 

We happened to inadvertently get to know Monica — I haven’t stayed in touch with her for years, so I don’t like to go on and on about it because it’s a sensitive thing for her, I’m sure. I don’t really feel like I need to keep talking about everything that happened in her life — that’s for her to talk about — but we were absolutely trying to make a point. (It was) hypocritical: You can’t on one hand say, “We need to support women,” and then on the other hand be attacking women. I don’t know if (that episode) was something that was overlooked — or if people purposely just didn’t want to acknowledge the fact that we were calling out our society for being mean. They didn’t want to hear that from us.

But that episode reminds me of something I think doesn’t get mentioned enough: The Tom Green Show was crazy, but it wasn’t mean. You guys weren’t cruel.

That’s another reason why I can’t just go do the same thing anymore (in my comedy). It’s one thing for a 24-year-old who doesn’t have two nickels to rub together to go out on the street and create a scene and then get some security guard flustered and yelling at me — I’m a kid with no power, I’m speaking truth to power. For me to go out now as a successful person who’s got my shit together and (say), “Let’s go on the street and fluster some security guard,” that’s not the same joke. I’m not a kid who’s living in my parents’ basement getting yelled at by a security guard for skateboarding — I’m actually a successful individual who’s going out and riling up some poor security guard. 

That’s what became plainly obvious to me over the last years, and why I’m not continuing to go out in the street and do that exact thing. Back in the day, that was always something that we were aware of: “What is the power dynamic here?” (You can) dig into the archives where maybe we got it wrong — we were kids, and we were figuring it all out. But, ultimately, we learned as we did it, “Oh, this is funnier when I’m the victim here.” Even though I was creating a scenario, I was still probably the victim — I mean, I was getting chased with a hammer or whatever.

You also took time on The Tom Green Show to talk about having testicular cancer. That was a long time ago: How’s your health now? Have you experienced any relapses? 

I got the good cancer to get — it’s the most curable thing. It’s so isolated in your body, and if you catch it early, as I did, you basically are completely cured. It’s not like I’m in remission, even — it’s as if I never had cancer. So I’m feeling very healthy — I’m probably healthier than I’ve ever been. I’m outdoors all the time and getting lots of exercise. Amanda is a very healthy person and understands a lot of stuff about food and things like that, so I’ve been eating better than I’ve eaten over the last few years.

You recently wrote a song, “I’m a Canadian,” about what’s going on between the Trump administration and your country. Our president has said some bizarre things about wanting to annex Canada. Are you concerned?

Canada is going to be fine. Canadians are resilient and amazing people, and we’ve got an incredible patriotic upsurge right now because of everything that’s going on. 

I’ve decided, within my comedy and my day-to-day conversation that I’m having on stage and on social media, to not become a political comedian where I’m just constantly ranting and raving about politics. It’s my own way of being a bit subversive, which is to try to make everybody laugh and have fun and be inclusive of everybody, even people that I don’t agree with politically. People are profiting off of the division — it’s easy to pick one side and make them laugh by attacking the other side. But (I have a) new line (on stage) — which is maybe, politically, a little bit partisan — I said in Houston last night. It’s like, “Oh, I live in Canada now, the 51st state. It’ll be the first state in the union where nobody in it wants to be American.”

What was the reaction?

It’s a confused laugh at first, and then they maybe contemplate for the first time that it’s possible that an entire country of people would not just automatically want to be American. 

We love America. We watch American shows, we love coming to America on vacation, we have lots of friends who are American. As a Canadian, I don’t want to turn this into a Canada-versus-the-U.S. thing — that’s why I wrote that song. With music, I thought there was a way to express that in a way that is easier than in comedy, just in the subtlety of some of it. There’s humor in (the song), but (I also say) “We’ll never be the 51st state.” In one bar of music, you’re able to say, “Hey, we don’t want to be American, but we still love our friends in America.” It’s not a big slam — it’s just more “Hey, cut us some slack here, America. Why are you fucking with us? We fought shoulder to shoulder with you in wars. We’re not the enemy here — we’re your closest ally.”

I think about your career and moving to America to do The Tom Green Show on MTV in New York. That must have felt like a huge deal — like you had made it.

It was an amazing time. I remember when we first went to New York and we went out on stage at MTV — the crowd of Americans came out and were going just batshit crazy. American audiences can be a little more enthusiastic than Canadian audiences when you’re doing a television show. We’re a little bit more reserved when you go to a television taping, but (American) kids get all riled up because they were excited to be at MTV. I looked out at the audience and was like, “Wow, how cool is this? These Americans are loving what we’re doing.”

In the documentary, you talk about your early days of going to comedy clubs. But stand-up wasn’t how you really got your start — it was your talk shows. And yet, for most of this century, you’ve been out there touring, like you are right now. People might think of you as just the Tom Green Show guy, but you’ve had this whole other career over the last couple decades. 

I had quit doing stand-up when I was 18 or 19 because my rap group had got a record deal. I decided I would just go do that and quit doing stand-up, and then I never went back to it. I think I was afraid to go back to it — I was afraid to fail — so I didn’t go back to it until years later. 

When you dove back into stand-up early this century, was it a hard transition?

It might make me sound like an asshole but, no, it wasn’t hard. I thought it was going to be hard — I went down to the Comedy Store and jumped up on stage, and I had seven minutes of material that I’d written, and I was terrified. Then, seven minutes later, I walked off that stage. It was like this huge weight had been lifted, because I pretty much killed it. Obviously, I had things working in my favor that I didn’t have when I was 16 years old doing stand-up — the audience knew me, and I had things to talk about that they remembered. I was older and a little bit more confident in who I was. So then the challenge really wasn’t about “Can I do this?” — it was more about “How do I do this to the optimum level? How do I challenge myself to make this as funny as it can possibly be?”

I got into being a comedian because I like making people laugh. I wasn’t doing stand-up back when I was doing my show on MTV. We had a studio audience — it was great but not even as impactful as doing stand-up, where you’re just alone on the stage and then you kill it for an hour and a half and have this huge release of energy from the crowd. That’s therapy — that’s something that makes me feel great for the last 20 years now. 

I've become clear now at this point in my life that as long as I don’t quit and keep trying enthusiastically to create stuff for people to watch, it's going to work out. It has consistently worked out now, many times.