Tom Green review

Tom Green may have been a dreadful film star, but he knows how to win over an audience. Out bounds the gawky comic to blaring rock guitars, with high-fives for the front row, then the next few rows, then those quite a way back, all the while sporting the half-crazed facial expression of a man just released from several years of solitary confinement. That's the effect a first Fringe show can have on a person.

Actually many of those in attendance are clearly avowed Green fans already, either via his genuinely subversive early work - on Canadian public access television, then MTV - or gross-out movies like Freddy Got Fingered. He now does a web-based show from his own living room, and readily admits that the career has, perhaps, plateaued. Watching him cavort around the stage though, great bug eyes bulging, you can see how he ended up in films: physically and facially he's fascinating to watch.

The show is largely that stand-up standard: a guy getting older and railing against modern society, like Geoff Boycott moaning about modern cricketers, but he siphons some fine material from it. A routine about female teachers sending pictures to their pupils may not sound particularly inspired but there's a clever premise buried deep within, while a bit about how text messaging will affect our eventual evolution may have been done before, but not this well: Green milks the thumb theme with some truly spectacular physical comedy, which only he could do.

There are a good few pointlessly tasteless gags along the way, as you might expect, and an odd film-based coda, but also an oddly affecting sequence about testicular cancer, which he battled and beat a few years back. Nothing about Drew Barrymore though, who Green was once (unfathomably) married to. It might require a well-placed heckle to get that one going.

It's probably best to avoid this show if you're blissfully unaware of Green's previous work. If, on the other hand, you're one of that small, slightly odd band who loved Freddy Got Fingered: you'll laugh 'til you hurl.

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Tom Green: World Comedy Tour listing