LOL WITH IT: Tom Green @ Helium Comedy Club

POSTED: Wednesday, November 14, 2012, 11:35 AM

Filed Under: Comedy | LOL With It Stand-up

The man who invented jackass comedy is still kicking, and has been on tour performing standup comedy for about two years. True to form, his standup act is very strange. It’s funny in the same vein as his patently asinine antics, thanks to an unfathomably weird delivery. The subject matter of his act is fairly unoriginal (“Things were better when I was a did, before texting.”) Still, Green's honest chaotic mania lets you know he's genuine, even if it’s unsophisticated.

For all his weird "alien inhabiting a human body" shtick — which he's still unofficially doing at 42 years old — there are a few surprising and impressive nuggets of cerebral philosophy to be found in his routine. A bit about how robot servants and texting will start to reverse evolution recalls the existential backdrop of Wall-E. And his rant about how married people shouldn't have Facebook has roots in Judeo-Christian ethics, despite being intentionally buried in overtly obnoxious profanity.

We asked Green what it was like moving from his online talk show on The Tom Green Channel to the world of standup comedy. "The transition to standup was real good. I did it for a while as a teenager and loved it, but stopped doing it when I started the original Tom Green Show. There are some similarities between standup and what I was doing on the show. After doing the show for a decade, you really get into the rhythm of understanding what it is that my audience likes, what kind of weird things make people laugh. You have to work hard to come up with ideas, they generally don't write themselves — not the good ones, anyway. So you have to get into the work ethic. But I always loved getting on stage and performing, so it was pretty seamless."

Green's pastiche of purposefully obnoxious Canadian-punk shenaniganry has earned him a very specific fan base over the years. His unfortunately over-simplified opus, Freddie Got Fingered, has reached cult status on the Internet and truly separates the Green-intolerant from the hardcore fan.

"I've been fortunate that I have an audience of people that really stuck by me. When I was doing my show on the web, we were getting tens of millions of downloads regularly."

You can check out his standup comedy show at Helium Comedy Club tonight at 8 p.m. For tickets, visit heliumcomedy.com.

(ryan.carey@citypaper.net) (@slackerdiytoday)

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