Emma McAlpine attends the celebrity comic's London gig and finds herself adrift in a sea of fans...
I can safely say I have never witnessed a comedy gig quite as extraordinary as Tom Green at the Greenwich Comedy Festival. A standing ovation before a comic even enters the room is quite something, let alone a stage invasion at the end, as audience members fall over themselves, desperately trying to cling to a piece of the US comedy hero that is Tom Green. So what comedic insights has he left us with? What boundaries have been explored? What have we seen tonight that we haven’t seen before? The answer is, not a lot. Green is a celebrity and a movie star, but his performance tonight could barely be classed as stand-up comedy. Not that it matters a jot to the legions of fans that have turned out to see him and are recording his every word on their phones and camcorders.
Green probably has about 10 minutes of passable material which is almost all dispensed with at the beginning of the show. A joke about Colonel Sanders’ grave being under security alert after 9/11, and a good line about what he would trade his experience of testicular cancer for, are enough to raise a smile, but these are fleeting rays of light in an otherwise murky cloud of inanity. Occasionally, he attempts some sort of cohesive thread. “I’m 39 and the world is changing,” says Green, before launching into a rant about modern day music and technology, ticking off the contemporary touchstones of Facebook, the Black Eyed Peas and that most recent invention – mobile texting.
Then the show completely unravels. With no obvious material left, he resorts to random prattle about his video website, his time on Celebrity Apprentice and a myriad of other references to American shows we haven’t seen. This could well be a scene out of Celebrity Apprentice. Green is handed a mic and a guitar and given the task of improvising a stand-up set. In between stories about finding porn in the woods and finally giving in to the merits of dope (cue raucous cheering and a fight between two audience members about the best American slang for a spliff), he plays that salmon song from Road Trip and one I haven’t had the pleasure of hearing before, to which the main refrain is “My bum is on the cheese.”
It’s like watching a series of brain farts being released, each one worse than the next. He rolls the word ‘water’ around in his mouth a few times and at one point gargles into the microphone repeatedly for several minutes. If there is a case for humour increasing with repetition, this isn’t it. He obediently takes audience requests to re-enact bits from his films and ‘down’ pints like a performing monkey in front of a crowd of baying hyenas. It’s so bad, it’s almost good. I’m actually beginning to enjoy this. What will he do next? Rapping, that’s what. Followed by some jingoistic crowd-rallying:
“I say grapes, you say grapes!”
“Grapes!”
“Grapes!”
“Grapes!”
“Grapes!”
“Alright! - we just said ‘grapes’ 16 times!”
Green has potential as a stand-up. Pacing around the stage, wild eyed and hyperventilating, he has a stage presence somewhere between comic and manic that could make for a compelling performance, if only he had some decent material to back it up with. An hour after the show, fans are still queuing to have their pictures taken with him and to his credit, he is thoroughly obliging. However, apart from the stoners and the students, it’s hard to know whom else he would really appeal to. Amusing celebrity he may be, but he’s got a long way to go before he can be taken seriously as a comedian.
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