Source : Globe & Mail

Entertainment: Green's comedy routine can be hard to stomach

by Alexandra Gill

Tom Green has the potential to become Canada's next big comic export, some say. But after a three-day publicity stunt in Toronto last week, the 27-year-old star of The Tom Green Show says he is worried about being typecast as a shock jock. Wonder why?

Excited about appearing on Mike Bullard's Open Mike (on CTV and the Comedy Network) Wednesday night, Green wanted to do something a "little extra" for his host. So he brought along his own show's "mascot" – the rotting carcass of a raccoon, squirming maggots and all. Bullard was so disgusted by the stench that he raced out to the alleyway behind the Masonic Temple studio and threw up for 10 minutes while the crew sprayed air freshener around the set.

"I didn't go in there intending for Mike to throw up," explained a disappointed Green, adding that he himself has become "desensitized" to the smell of his show's furry friend (which he had intended to shave on air). Green spent the next day drinking milk from a live cow's udders outside the Eaton Centre.

The critter and the cow will make return appearances on Green's own show, which begins its second season on The Comedy Network next Friday, four years after its debut on Rogers Community Cable in Ottawa. The Tom Green Show has built a cult following, with his Candid Camera-style street performances and a roster of sidekicks who helped the host terrorize his parents – by painting their house plaid and airbrushing the hood of the family car with a graphic lesbian love scene.

His sophomoric brand of insanity didn't impress CBC talent scouts, who turned Green down after a pilot episode in 1996, but it seems to be working elsewhere. Next month, The Tom Green Show will be airing on thecomedychannel in Australia. This past summer, Green guest-starred in two movies: Clutch, featuring The Newsroom's Tanya Allen, and a Saturday Night Live spin-off called Superstar, directed by former Kid-in-the-Hall Bruce McCullough. And Green recently arrived back from Los Angeles, after the folks at MTV flew him down for a talk.

As the show evolves, Green sees it turning into more of a road show. He spent seven weeks this summer on a cross-Canada jaunt, capturing surreal slices of the great outdoors. One segment involves the confused reaction of a truck driver, who pulled over to see what the heck Green was doing to a dead moose on the side of the road.

"I was kind of humping it, basically," explained Green, with his usual deadpan delivery. "It wasn't a sexual thing. I was just trying to get it's heart going again. It didn't work."

And he's surprised when journalists call him a shock comic?

Who's fooling who?

Robert Lantos, the feisty former head of Alliance Communications Corp., hasn't always seen eye-to-eye with Michael MacMillan of Atlantis Communications Inc. But now, three months after the two companies merged under MacMillan's direction, they're singing the same tune in defence of Canada's broadcast regulators.

MacMillan was in the audience at Ryerson Polytechnic University two weeks ago when Lantos, now head of Serendipity Point Films, lashed out at "certain self-loathing elements in Canadian society whose slavish worship of all things American knows no bounds." Lantos was making a backhand reference to Global chairman Izzy Asper, who recently attacked "socialistic" Canadian-content rules.

Four days later, during a luncheon speech to the Canadian Club, MacMillan warned against listening to "those self-loathing cynics and defeatists who say only Americans can make entertaining television ... the naysayers whose free-market worship is so dogmatic that it fails to notice that there are some things in this world that are not the natural result of market forces."

Hmmm, sound familiar? According to officials at Alliance Atlantis, MacMillan wrote his own speech, but was "inspired" by Lantos and asked if he could borrow a couple of lines. As the head of Canada's highest-profile production company, it's not surprising to hear MacMillan tout his own cause. But it was awfully brave of him to use such pointed language, even though he didn't mention Asper specifically. Atlantis has, for many years, supplied Global with many of its Canadian-content programs, including Traders. Not exactly a relationship you'd want to jeopardize.

And that speech MacMillan borrowed from? It was penned by Pauline Couture, who, as well as being a consultant to Lantos, is the chief lobbyist for CTV, which has spent the last year blasting its rivals at Global for their weak patriotism. Couture's husband, by the way, is Ian Morrison, head of the public television lobby group, Friends of Canadian Broadcasting – which has praised CTV lately for spending more on Canadian programming than Global does.

A lucrative day's work for Couture, some might say.

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