Tom Green trades shock comedy for life on the farm

National Post

3 days ago

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THIS WAS TOM GREEN THEN. This is Tom Green now.
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For many who remember the late 1990s and early 2000s, the comedian is synonymous with The Tom Green Show — a manic master class in shock comedy that influenced such series as Jackass and Punk'd. But now, 25 years after it ended, Green is more measured.
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At 53, he's back in Canada and living on a farm. Yes, a farm.
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He's also working on the interview series Tom Green's Funny Farm as part of a development deal with Bell Media. The company announced the news in June, and the show will stream on Crave during the 2025-26 television season. Guests will visit Green at his rural Ontario home, digging into one-on-one discussions and countryside shenanigans. And yes, they will be Tom Green-style shenanigans (if not TOM GREEN-STYLE shenanigans).
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'I get up in the morning and I sit with Fanny, my 1,500-pound mule,' says Green. 'We have this really amazing, calm lifestyle on the farm. So I want people to be part of it and enjoy some interviews. It's going to be a funny show. We're gonna do funny stuff, we're gonna talk about funny things. We're gonna do it in a funny place.'
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Green's journey to the farm started during the pandemic, when the Pembroke, Ont., native found himself with a break in his schedule after his standup tour was cancelled.
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'I was in Los Angeles,' he says. 'I thought I might be a good time to sell my house of 18 years and move back to Canada and be close to my family. I didn't want to live in the city — I wanted to live in nature. I wasn't specifically (looking for) a farm, but I found this place, which is a log farmhouse that was built in 1857. It's in the wilderness of Ontario, and it spoke to me.'
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Much of Green's journey was covered in three projects he launched with Prime earlier this year: a comedy special (Tom Green: I Got a Mule!), a docuseries (Tom Green: Country) and a career-spanning documentary (This is the Tom Green Documentary).
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Among other things, the years between The Tom Green Show and now have brought movie cameos, a late-night MTV talk show, an internet talk show and Freddy Got Fingered, the 2001 movie he directed, co-wrote and starred in. Off screen, he was briefly married to Drew Barrymore and was diagnosed with testicular cancer at age 28.
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Relocating north of the 49th parallel is more than a homecoming for Green — it's a chance to reinvent himself and flex the broadcasting skills he honed at Algonquin College in Ottawa, years ago when he was a self-described 'complete lunatic' onscreen.
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'Now I'm also excited about the filmmaking side of things, making the show look cinematic, and having interesting, funny conversations with people — bringing comedians on and letting them shine, letting them be funny, and just doing things that are a little bit more accessible to everybody and not necessarily polarizing,' Green says. 'I think when you're young and doing standup comedy, you want to be confrontational, you want to be polarizing. You want to piss off half the audience — excuse my language.
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'Now when you do stand up, you want everybody in the audience to laugh. You don't want to divide the audience to the point that only half the people laugh. That's called bombing, by the way.'
Green has another reason behind his transition from all-caps comedy to something more along the lines of sentence case.
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'The world's changed, too,' he says. 'And with things being so negative, with the division that's in the world, with politics and everything that's going on, I want to be doing stuff that's fun and not divisive. I want to make stuff that's an escape from this argument.'