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Posts tagged as tom green

Tragedy Plus Time

Finding the Humor in Cancer

by | February 5th, 2013

Welcome to our new series Tragedy Plus Time. Each segment will focus on a particular ‘life crisis’ — sometimes globally tragic, sometimes more of a personal affair — and we’ll explore how many of the comedians we know and love have dealt with it.

Cancer is the disease that perpetually reminds us that we are all a bunch of vulnerable, fleshy meat sacks, and that everything we touch, eat, breathe or spend too much time standing near is eventually going to kill us. It affects millions of people every year. A late diagnosis is effectively a death sentence, and the variety show of pain it has provided humanity [...]

Interviews

Talking to Tom Green About His Absurdist Legacy, 'Freddy Got Fingered', and Andy Kaufman

by | November 20th, 2012

For most of his career, Tom Green’s product could be summed up in one word: asinine. He was selling pure obnoxiousness, and satisfying that voice in our heads as we go through highscool, college and cubicle which asks — what would it be like if I never stopped acting like a nine-year-old?

Bizarely, though — and perhaps troublingly — Tom Green is not an idiot.

This notion is difficult to swallow, because what made Tom Green’s shtick funny was that, in concept, it was never more than shades away from being completely and genuinely pointless. In a pitch meeting, nothing he ever did would have been funny on paper. [...]

Movies

Reconsidering Freddy Got Fingered

by | October 10th, 2011

In 2001, a critically loathed, sparsely attended movie born out of a hit, hip cable show became synonymous with bad movies, failure, and struck a blow against edgy and weird comedy infiltrating the mainstream.

That movie was Pootie Tang, eventually a cult hit, written and directed by Louis C.K., who eventually became president of comedy. But that description back there also fits Freddy Got Fingered. Directed by, co-written by, and starring Tom Green, famous for his strange and surprisingly popular MTV man-on-the-street show, Freddy Got Fingered upped Green’s penchants for irony and gross-out humor. It more or less killed Green’s career for a while and became shorthand for shitty [...]

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