Promising plenty of laughs, outrage and originality, Canadian actor/writer/comic Tom Green has included Red Deer on The TomGreen.com World Stand-up Comedy Tour.
Best known for his shock humour brand of comedy, Green performs at the Memorial Centre June 14. Showtime is 8 p.m.
“People how have only followed my career casually never really know what to expect when I do one of my stand-up comic shows,” he explains during a recent interview.
Green has enjoyed a career that has garnered attention from virtually every corner of the world. He’s spent the better part of the last two years touring, and is thrilled with the feedback to the material which runs the topical gamut from politics, life and death to his thoughts on entertainment and social media.
“I’m really loving it, it’s high energy and ridiculous but there is also social commentary. Plus it’s very topical. It’s very intense, but we’re going to party.”
Green’s comic roots stretch back to his childhood in Ontario, where he was always bent on getting laughs and entertaining his classmates in particular.
“I was always silly, goofy and high energy – trying to get laughs every chance I could.”
It certainly got him noticed, although his folks weren’t always appreciative of his increasingly shocking attempts to stir up a commotion. “They were in kind of conflicted situation, because once I painted their car (with explicit images), another time I brought farm animals into the living room. There was no logic to it.”
Still, he always had his sights set on bigger and better things. “I was always very, very focused since I was a young age on trying to break into various forms of entertainment.”
While attending Algonquin College, Green hosted an overnight call-in show on the University of Ottawa’s campus radio station.
The show, originally a rap music show entitled The Rap Show, was followed by an electronic music show hosted by Glenn Humplik. Green and Humplik became friends based on a common love of zany antics. Green’s radio show soon shifted formats to a call-in show and the two joined forces to host The Midnight Caller Show.
The basic format was to have listeners call-in with the guys making fun of them and soon hang up. It became an underground hit in the Ottawa area.
But Green would first vault into mainstream prominence via MTV on The Tom Green Show. He was also in the public eye for his brief marriage to actress Drew Barrymore plus a slate of roles from Freddy Got Fingered and Road Trip to Stealing Harvard and Charlie’s Angels.
In 2003, Green had the chance to guest-host the Late Show with David Letterman which led to him hosting his show on MTV called The New Tom Green Show. Later came his free-wheeling popular Internet talk show Tom Green’s House Tonight.
But these days, it’s all about stand-up comedy, with Green sharing his “brilliantly cracked view of the world around him”.
He’s also committed to entertaining folks on an international stage as well, having recently returned from performing for the troops in Afghanistan. Green was traveling with a contingent of professional hockey players, MMA fighters and other Canadian performers.
For Green, exploring several means of self-expression has been a creative wonderland, and he struggles to pick one as being more to his liking than another. “I do enjoy them all, and it’s been fun to be able to shift gears from one thing to the next. Each thing I do also helps me with the others, too.”
But there is something about standing in front of a live audience that ultimately just can’t be beat.
“You really can’t have much more fun than during a live performance,” he says. “You are there in front of a real audience, and everyone is there to have a good time. You also get that immediate reaction.”
For ticket information, call 403-347-0800 or check out www.centralalbertatheatre.ca.
mweber@reddeerexpress.com
