Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
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.
Comedy is delivered to people in the same form that music is being delivered: by YouTube. People are sharing music and comedy in the same way now.
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.
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 started doing stand-up again, a lot of it was coming from an angrier place, and I quickly learned that doesn't spell a good time in a comedy club.
Vegas is exciting, and it's nice to be somewhere on a regular basis rather than just criss-crossing the country. It allows me to have a semblance of a life.
Certainly, every movie has to be looked at differently. But I think what happens is, every couple of years, a movie comes along that everybody then tries to copy.
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.
I think I always enjoyed the energy of a crowd, of being onstage. It started when I was even younger doing public speaking at school and just kept going from there.
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 definitely think L.A. would be a very difficult city to move to and try to make it in. There's a lot of people down there, and it's tough to stand out in the crowd.
If I ever interview somebody, I make sure I listen to them. As a comedian, I've gone on so many shows, I've wanted to take things to a crazy place. Sometimes the hosts don't like that.
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.
All of my old videos and the things I did on MTV, my old public access show - it was sort of all made for the Web, even though they were made before the Internet was broadcasting video.
I could sit here and say, 'What would have happened if I hadn't made that crazy television show, if I hadn't made those crazy movies?' Well, I'd be back in Canada working at Dairy Queen.
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.
It's such a huge endeavor putting a full movie together, especially an independent movie. I tend to kind of do them when they come my way more than something than I go out and actively pursue.
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 recommend people don't get in high-profile marriages. There are a lot of people in the world. You don't have to marry someone with their own team of publicists, managers, agents, and lawyers.
I'm incredibly proud to bring back 'Tom Green Live' for a third season on AXS TV. AXS TV's commitment to unique, out-of-the-box humor, in a completely open and uncensored format, is unparalleled.
I had a real passion for performing. I craved the attention. I was a goofy kid just like I am a goofy adult. So as soon as I got the bug of getting laughs and getting on stage I just couldn't stop.
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.
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 don't really like to just sit down at a computer and write because that tends to be a little forced. Sometimes the funniest ideas just happen in the moment, when you're talking to people, or you notice something.
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.
I think all comedy has victims, really. Even if it's not a victim that appears on camera, usually there's a victim. If it's political comedy, if you're talking about the president or whoever, there's a victim there.
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.
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've always tried to do things a little bit before they were being done by the mainstream. I challenge myself to do that in stand-up also, to talk about things that I'm not hearing anybody talk about onstage and in the media.
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.
My show on MTV, as outrageous as it was, it was also making a point, which was, 'Look at what we're doing here. This is something that you don't see on television every day, because you're not allowed to do this on television.'
When you get older, you look at who has power differently. When you're 21 years old, and you do something ridiculous at the National Art Gallery and get kicked out by the security guard, in your mind, you're speaking truth to power.
I always try to approach things from the point of authenticity. I've done that for my short films, working with non-actors from the real environments where you go exploring and placing them into the cast alongside professional actors.
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.
When I started my show, it was a public access show in Canada, and I was a broadcasting student in the early '90s, years before I was on MTV. We were kids sort of experimenting and trying to take on the system - you know, the media machine.
I'm talking about some real subjects and issues in my standup. I'm attempting to make a point about technology and how it's changing our society and our lives, and our addiction to social media, and how it affects marriages and relationships.
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.
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.
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.
When you work in television, working for a big corporation, no matter who you are, you can always get cancelled. That sucks. Do you really want to work with an axe over your head for the rest of your life? Not me, not really, and not if you don't have to.
I've always got a whole bunch of things in the works. That's sort of the nature of the business. Even when you're doing something you love doing, you have to be plotting and scheming and writing and preparing for what you're going to do when that's finished.
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.
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.
Everybody gets inspired by different things. I grew up wanting to go up the street with a video camera because I liked watching David Letterman yell out of the ninth floor of Rockefeller Center with a megaphone at people on the street. I thought that was a riot.
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.
It's exciting to be able to do something completely independent without anybody challenging it, and it's a big part of the reason why I'm enjoying doing the stand-up comedy, is I'm able to go out and interact with people one-on-one after the show. It's very punk-rock.
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?
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.
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.