Standing in the snow near the barn where his beloved mule Fanny is stabled, Canadian comedy legend Tom Green is on a tear about algorithm-created divisiveness. He recites a line from one of the country songs he’s been writing since buying a farm and returning to Ontario from Los Angeles three years ago.
“I’ve moved back to Canada to live my American dream,” he says, with a slight drawl to match his long greying beard that’s halfway toward mountain-man territory.
There is no joke here – no bug-eyed punchline. The lyric is from the theme song for Tom Green Country, a docuseries that is part of a flurry of self-produced content the comedian has coming out, including a stand-up special and a documentary for Amazon’s Prime Video.
That Canada is a country where you can live your dream is a serious theme within the TV show, which on the surface chronicles Green’s new life in a 1857 farmhouse on a 150-acre rural property, where the 53-year-old says he is settling down for the rest of his life, near his beloved family and with a fiancée he hopes to have kids with.
“The show is about something,” Green insists, explaining that any description of the warm, ambling, sometimes sentimental series as reality television is “factually incorrect.”
That something is that Canada is still the True North strong and free.
“We’re living in a time right now where you’ve got a lot of weird misinformation flying around on the internet in regards to Canada and what we’re all about,” says the self-described patriot, who set up a Canadian production company for his new shows.
“It’s completely motivated to surprise my American audience with what Canada is all about, when they’re misinformed by podcasts and the like that Canada’s a communist socialist country.”
Those Americans would include Green’s friend Joe Rogan, who makes such claims on his popular podcast – a podcast that is just one of the many aspects of our current entertainment culture that Green can be partially credited (or blamed) for.
Reality television, TikTok pranks, unfettered chat fests between know-nothing stand-ups – we’re living at the toxic intersection of tech and comedy that Green helped create. Can he really counter it by coming home?
Green now lives in an old farmhouse on a 150-acre rural property, with a bust of Freud from the movie, "Freddie Got Fingered," placed near his baby grand piano.Kaja Tirrul/The Globe and Mail
It’s not just Canada that some people have wrong, according to Green. Many folks have him wrong too.
“There’s a lot of misinterpretation of who I am,” he says, during an ATV tour of his vast fields and forests with Charley, his well-tempered rescue dog.
For instance, in the current youth culture, Green is primarily known through the lyrics of Eminem’s now quarter-century old classic The Real Slim Shady – as a “cool” comic who humped a dead moose. That was a notorious moment on The Tom Green Show, his wild 1990s Ottawa community-channel program that turned into an MTV hit and was a particularly “influential protoreality series” per Cue the Sun!, New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum’s recent history of reality television.
These days, he’s much more focused on living wildlife. Bears, bobcats and packs of wolves and coyotes roam his acreage. Green professes to have always been an animal lover, and Tom Green Country provides evidences in the tears he sheds for coyote-eaten chickens and the special connection he has with Fanny. (He boasts the 1,500-pound animal is the “tallest ridable mule in Canada”.)
Viewers get to see something of the country boy and Cub Scout who read Farley Mowat, adored the movie Never Cry Wolf and was cleaning largemouth bass from age 6 at the cottage – the kid who predates the twentysomething ur-content creator steeped in urban skateboarding youth culture seen on The Tom Green Show.
“I’m not sort of some city kid that was sort of squeamish around creepy crawlies,” he says.
This is the Tom Green Documentary, which Green directed and is now on Prime, is a further vehicle for him to tell the world about who he believes himself to really be – although he acknowledges in its first moments his account may be whitewashed.
It follows his first forays into stand-up at 16 in his father’s blazer (at Yuk Yuk’s in Ottawa where he idolized Norm Macdonald) and hip-hop (his group Organized Rhyme was nominated for a Juno) and retells the well-known bits from the height of his fame at the turn of the century: starring in The Hangover director Todd Phillips’s first hit Road Trip, hosting Saturday Night Live and marrying Drew Barrymore.
The doc covers The Tom Green Cancer Special, the 2000 episode where he showed in gory detail his surgery for testicular cancer and which was widely praised for saving lives.
And it also shows how quickly the narrative shifted around him while he was still dealing with the physical and mental after-effects of that brush with death.
He divorced Barrymore, received negative to nasty reviews for his self-directed 2001 film Freddy Got Fingered and faced a quick cancellation of his late-night The New Tom Green Show by MTV.
But that wasn’t the end of Green’s cultural relevance.
Green takes his dog, Charley, everywhere with him, including on tour for his recent stand-up special.
Green’s decision to leave his Hollywood Hills home in Los Angeles after 20 years is multifaceted, but the closing of the border at the beginning of COVID-19 made him more conscious of the distance between him and his ageing parents and his brother, Joe, who lives in a small town nearby.
For those who remember Green waking up his Godfather-loving parents with a severed cow’s head, the picture of him as a devoted family man may be unexpected.
But what was hidden from view is that his pranks were easily undone. The pornography he painted on his father’s car, for instance, was actually on a hood he had custom-made to match the vehicle’s – and he switched back to the original immediately afterward. Likewise, when Green painted the outside of his parent’s Ottawa bungalow plaid while they were on a canoe trip in Algonquin Park, he carefully avoided the bricks and had it back to white by midnight.
This isn’t always the case with today’s TikTok tricksters. “I’ve seen people do a similar joke on social media where they paint the bricks too, and then, it’s really ruining something right?” Green says.
“Or they do pranks on the street where they’re violent and are actually hurting someone, which – to me – it’s obvious at that point it becomes not funny.”
Green sits behind the desk of his living room talk show set in his Los Angeles home Wednesday, June 14, 2006, the day before debuting his new talk show, Tom Green Live!Branimir Kvartuc/AP
A big part of what allowed Green to break through the noise and into American television was his quick embrace of emerging technologies. Ottawa in the 1980s and 1990s was known as Silicon Valley North and filled with innovative telecom companies. His father, who learned to program for a Department of National Defence job, was a subscriber on the groundbreaking NABU Network, which Green describes as “internet in Ottawa about 10 years before the internet.”
Green, who studied television production at Algonquin College, was always looking for creative ways to use new technology, be it making rap beats on a computer for Organized Rhyme or capturing people’s reactions on a home video camera at a time when the streets weren’t filled with amateur videographers.
“I realized if you used new technology to do something, you could kind of be ahead of the curve,” he says.
And this is what he did again after his MTV days, with what he then called “Web-o-vision.”
Back in 2006, Green built a studio in his L.A. house and became a pioneer in live streaming with a call-in talk show he broadcast on tomgreen.com. This was, keep in mind, a year before Justin Kan started “lifecasting” on Justin.tv, the site that eventually evolved into Twitch.
Tom Green Live!, which had many iterations and was intermittently syndicated on cable, was also a kind of prototype for a genre of podcast that dominates the form today. ”When we were doing Web-o-vision, there was not a show on the internet that you could go on and watch two comedians talking to each other about comedy for an hour,” he says.
Indeed, it was guesting on Tom Green Live! that gave Rogan the idea to start The Joe Rogan Experience, now one of the world’s most popular podcasts in both video and audio formats. “Your show, that was 100 per cent a major inspiration for me to do this,” Rogan said when he last had Green on as a guest in 2024. He went so far as to credit Green (who is younger than him) as the podcast’s “granddaddy.”
Rogan was not as respectful in other parts of that podcast appearance, however.
When Green proudly drew attention to the Canadian Army jacket he was wearing, Rogan jumped in: “They didn’t fight too hard against tyranny.”
“Well, we did actually,” replied Green, whose great-uncle died in Italy in the Second World War. “We fought pretty hard against the Germans in ...”
“I meant internal government tyranny,” Rogan cut him off.
The two ended up arguing over whether the 2022 Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa could be compared with the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters in Washington. The conversation was unusual, as Green is adamant he doesn’t want to talk about politics.
It’s no surprise then, that a notable omission from Green’s auto-documentary is his 2009 appearance on The Celebrity Apprentice, where he got up close and personal with Donald Trump.
Green says he used to joke about the experience in his stand-up, but he now stays away from talking about the President of the United States. “It’s not fun when you see people coming out to see your show or a huge fan of you and then they they kind of end up having to think, ‘Oh, I was just arguing on Facebook all day about that.’ ”
While Green’s refusal to take sides publicly will no doubt irk those who feel the times require it, it’s in keeping with the son of two Ottawa civil servants. He’s not interested in capitalizing on social media’s divisive algorithms, even if it means a smaller audience for his work. He just wants to unabashedly showcase Canada and ride his mule off into the sunset.
“In this current day and age, doing something normal actually flips over and becomes kind of weird because you’re in a sea of people trying to be weird,” he says. “Why not go out and be normal?”
One can only hope Green is ahead of the curve again.
Green with a new brood of chickens that replaced the ones that coyotes recently ate.
