With the long-format interview, I can get into really interesting conversations with my guests. You know what it's like to get the opportunity to speak to really interesting people and pick their brain about things. To have time to let a guest actually speak and tell a story and get into detail is really exciting.
— Tom Green
All comedy is really talking about social issues and things that are affecting our lives.
Before the cell phone and the Internet, you felt a more pure sense of liberty than we do today. Whenever you left the house, and the phone, in your kitchen attached to the wall, nobody was able to get a hold of you.
Steve Jobs is considered an amazing genius and made billions of dollars. Sure, we overlook that he didn't pay his share of taxes and didn't believe in charity. But other than these occasional rumblings of dissent, he is pretty much held in high esteem.
The easiest way to win the competition for eyeballs in the digital age is to broadcast bad behavior. People like watching train wrecks.
I found myself trying to work within the Los Angeles system. I had an agent and a manager, which I still do, and going to meetings with networks about game shows and reality shows and projects that weren't mine. It was fun, but it wasn't what I'd set out to do.
You might remember me from Eminem's rap lyrics.
I lived in my parents' basement until the age of 25 while I was trying to get my TV show off the ground.
I like to do something that gets a real reaction from people.
It's so nice to be able to get up on stage and just say the most disgusting, ridiculous, outrageous, offensive thing, knowing it's just between you and the audience.
I have the version of me where I'm interviewing someone, where I definitely am the straight man, and I like to show a lot of respect to my guest and let them take the reins. I don't like to compete with my guests. I don't like to be funnier than my guests or get into a 'Who's wackier?' sort of thing.
I don't want to make fun of somebody because of the way they look, where they're from, or their religion.
Whenever I do something, I tend to focus on it and spend all of my time and energy on it.
I tend to sit around with my friends a lot and rant and rave about things I think are ridiculous in the world, and I tend to make fun of myself a lot.
When I was younger, I was emulating David Letterman. David Letterman would yell out of his office window with a megaphone, and the next thing I'm doing is standing on the roof of a parking garage with a megaphone.
I'll be straight with you. It's not easy to sell tickets in Vegas. I'm up against Celine Dion and Britney Spears.
It bothers me when people say 'shock comic' or 'gross-out' because that was only one type of comedy I did. There was prank comedy. Man-on-the-street-reaction comedy. Visually surreal comedy. But you do something shocking, and that becomes your label.
I love playing in Vegas because you've got people from all over the world, and you're already accepted. It's kind of a great mixture of people that come out to the shows, and that makes it fun.
I have a different perspective on the world than the way I looked at the world when I was 20. I was kind of naive. I'm a cancer survivor, been working in this industry for a time, and older with more opinions, more experience.
How can we be free when we are prisoners to social media, in a world without privacy? How can we be free when our every movement is tracked and every conversation is recorded and can easily be held against us? How exactly are we free if we are tethered to our cell phones?
After my show and others like it began airing on TV, network executives started to see that there was a market for outrageous, over-the-top content.
Yes, I worked hard to put together an experimental show on a budget of zero. But I was not being exploited by anyone. I was in charge.
I've got friends all around the world, but it still never ceases to amaze me when I come to a place on the other side of the planet that I've always imagined going to, and to get there and be meeting people all over on the street who know me - it's very exciting and humbling.
If YouTube had existed in 1999, I wouldn't have had a show. And if YouTube had existed in 1999, I wouldn't have wanted to do the show, because I couldn't imagine clips from it following me a decade later.
If something becomes mean-spirited and hurtful, it's not funny.
I do sometimes talk about my cancer because that's something people relate to a lot, as we're all going to die. Because I've been close to death and won, I have strong opinions about it, and I've learned how to discuss it and keep the energy high in the show.
When my first show was on MTV, and it was this outrageous persona, I think people certainly didn't know what to think. But it was a performance. I'm sure people didn't know that it was a performance; they thought maybe I was just nuts, but that was all intentional.
I was a huge fan of Tom Snyder.
It would be a dream to perform at Radio City Music Hall.
I tend to find comedy in dark places. I also tend to find comedy in taking on the status quo - which has always been something I find important.
For about three or four years, I was in a lot more physical pain and stress than anybody knew. When I would meet people, I was kind of standoffish. That was because I was in a bit of a funk.
I do sometimes find it interesting when I look at a lot of the pranks that are out there, and I see kids doing the exact things that I did in the '90s. Like, I would go out on the street on crutches and fall down, and people would help me. Or I would paint my parents' house plaid; I've seen that replicated.
When I'm 65 and still performing every week, I'd like people to say, 'You know, when that guy was a kid, he made these weird, crazy videos?' And they'll have to go look for them - rather than it being the first thing they know about me.
I want people to know that I'm not just this crazy person flailing around. A lot of thought goes into what I do.
Social media is making us more anti-social.
I like keeping people guessing. I like to have fun with them wondering if I'm sane or not.
The dirty little secret that nobody likes to talk about is that things just might have been better before the Internet. We had more time to ourselves before cell phones and text messaging and Facebook consumed our lives.
In 1980s, I discovered 'Late Night with David Letterman.' It was on one of the 13 cable TV channels. They didn't have 25 late night talk show hosts trying to be the most outrageous. There was the likeable television genius Johnny Carson and his mad-genius counterpart Dave. There was nothing else crazy on TV every night, and there was no Internet.
I really missed what I'd done on Rogers Cable, which was shooting and editing all my own stuff.
It was just a very short period of time that I had a brief marriage.
Everyone on 'The Apprentice' hates each other. They put you in a room, and they don't give you anything to do. They leave you there for 10 hours... they don't give you any food or water, and you start getting angry and arguing with each other.
I think somebody getting repulsed is a positive reaction. Any reaction is positive.
Whenever you go on TV, there are so many checks and balances; it's a big business with a lot of rules. Stand-up is intimate and the freest, most lawless place I've ever been able to go.
The thing to keep in mind is that's how I started long before MTV and Twitter and Facebook. I studied at broadcasting school so I could learn how to shoot and edit videos, and tried to create my own television show so we could see through these wacky visions we had of funny bits we wanted to shoot.
Sometimes it's nice when you go out on the road, and you come back, and your girlfriend's left you. You have complete freedom at that point.
The moment for me, thinking I might actually want to do comedy professionally, was when I did public speaking at school. I found out I was good at getting up in front of class. In the fifth grade, I did a speech on comedy.
I don't really like to just sit down at a computer and write, because that tends to be a little forced.
Not many people get that chance to have multiple studios wanting you to make a movie with them.
When I was a television broadcasting student in 1993 up in Ottawa, Canada, and my friends and I started making a show, I consciously set out to apply comedy to technology. I started tomgreen.com back in 1994, and we weren't able to put video on there yet, but we were aware that that was coming.
As comedians, we all get into that mode of thinking of the worst thing imaginable - but you usually have the ability to pull back before releasing it to the world.
