Comedian Tom Green: Trump 'fired me because I went out drinking with Dennis Rodman'
You likely know Tom Green from movies like “Road Trip” or “Freddy Got Fingered,” or from “The Tom Green Show” on MTV.
But that was 15 years ago.
Now Green is focusing on standup comedy, which he has enjoyed since he was a teenager. (He says, in fact, that he had never intended to have a film career.) Green is kicking off a new world tour that will run through December and take him to Israel, Amsterdam, Ireland, England, and Sweden.
The first stop on Green’s new tour is New York City, where he’s performing a series of standup shows at Carolines on Broadway. He stopped by Yahoo Finance to discuss his career trajectory and the business of comedy.
“Standup is probably harder” than movies, Green says. “But my first love was always standup comedy, and making videos and talk shows.” Green says the shift to the Internet, and to digital video, has changed the way live comedy is performed and consumed—and not always for the better.
“Sometimes I’ll be doing a routine in my standup about how we’re all addicted to our cell phones, and then I’ll see someone in the audience filming the set with their phone. That can be a little annoying… But I live a bit of a hypocritical existence because I go on stage and I rant about social media and how it’s messing up our heads, and then I go out and I post everything on my Instagram. Follow me on Instagram, everybody!”
Even though Green hasn’t been in any major films in a decade, he didn’t disappear: he’s done a digital show, “Tom Green Live,” from his living room, and in 2009 he was a contestant on “The Celebrity Apprentice.”
From being on that show, he knows Donald Trump, though he says he avoids partisan politics in his standup.
“He fired me because I went out drinking with Dennis Rodman on the night I was the project manager,” Green says. “So, you know, how disrespectful was I to the president! I do make some political commentary in the show, because I think the times we’re living in are very strange. But I don’t want people thinking it’s a big rant for or against anything.”
After sitting down in studio, Green went live from the Yahoo green room and answered fan questions about everything from Canada (Green hails from Ottawa) to the scene in “Road Trip” in which he put a mouse in his mouth. You can watch that video below.
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Daniel Roberts covers sports business, tech and media at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @readDanwrite.
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