Written by Nick Krewen
Tom Green has been many things over the years: talk show host, prankster, actor and comedian … but brewmaster?
True enough, through a partnership with close-to-Ottawa Beau’s Brewery, Mr. Green has had his own milk stout out on the market for the past three years – called, ironically enough, The Tom Green Beer!
According to the 44-year-old Green, it’s the best beer ever.
“The beer is delicious,” says Green over the phone from a recent stopover at his Ottawa home. “It has a really amazing flavour to it. They use a milk stout because it’s lactose sugar. When you brew beer with sugar, you usually don’t have any of that flavour or sweetness left in the beer. With lactose sugar, the sugars don’t break down the same way, so it leaves this coffee sweetness to it that’s very, very tasty.”
Why a milk stout? Green says the origins came in tribute to his earlier days “when I used to squirt milk bags all over my guests on my TV show. They (Beau’s) suggested it.”
Ah yes, The Tom Green Show. It first appeared on basic cable locally on Rogers in Ottawa, and Green’s propensity for staging pranks – sometimes at the expense of his parents – brought him national notoriety.
Some of the more shocking, extreme and bizarre stunts involved roadkill and sucking on a cow’s udder – and eventually helped pave the way to his own internationally popular MTV show called … The New Tom Green Show.
That notoriety also made Hollywood sit up and take notice, offering him a chance to write and star in his own Razzie Award-winning comedy Freddy Got Fingered and roles in the comedies Road Trip and Stealing Harvard, as well as a cameo performance on the hit blockbuster Charlie’s Angels, starring his future wife, Drew Barrymore. (They’ve since divorced.)
Nowadays, however, Green has left the video pranks behind.
“Am I going out on the street and shooting pranks on video anymore?” he asks. “No, I’m not. It’s not like I’m trying to get away from it. I did it for 20 years, and now we’re in a world where everybody has a video camera in their cellphone, and an editing system in their laptop computer or their phone.
“There are millions of people doing it on YouTube. And I’ve always tried to be somebody who stands out from what everyone else is doing. Stand-up is the place right now where I’m able to do that best. There are so many people doing pranks now I feel like I’d just be following the herd if I kept doing them.”
Green has also turned to the Net for some of his more recent successes: from 2006-2011, he hosted Tom Green’s House Tonight in Los Angeles – literally from his living room – and later a weekly talk show called Tom Green Live On AXS TV.
Currently, you can find more stuff on the TomGreen.com website, which includes several videos and his podcast of the Tom Green Radio Show.
As much as some observers may think of his current stand-up comedy tour as a new platform of expression for Green, it’s actually a return to his roots.
“I was doing stand-up long before I was doing that other stuff,” he admits. “I was at Yuk Yuk’s here in Ottawa as a teenager. And a lot of the roots of The Tom Green Show were based in stand-up. I modelled the show after (Late Night with) David Letterman in a lot of ways.
“I was always into outrageous comedy, so I’m trying to incorporate my sensibilities into my stand-up show. I’m standing at a microphone. I don’t use props. I’m telling jokes. I’m telling stories. I’m throwing myself into the world of social commentary, talking about how we’re living in 2016 and all the absurdities and things I find ridiculous.
“Hopefully, people will leave thinking about the world differently than when they walked in.”
“I want my stand-up show to be the most outrageous and ridiculous night of comedy that you’ve ever been to.”
He then makes an interesting point: with the current fragmentation of TV audiences and the fact that US news outlets are worried about ratings to the point where they lobby softball questions at potential presidential candidates, Green has no such worries of being censored on the stage.
“Stand-up comedy is one of the last podiums where you can speak your mind and not fear getting cancelled,” he explains. “I have no boss, no executive producer, and no network head telling me what I have to say in order not to offend anyone.”
For more information on Tom Green, please click HERE
