EDMONTON - Rapper/comic Tom Green's "hip-hop" show was one of the best jokes ever heard ... unless you paid for a ticket, in which case you were part of the joke. Somewhere, drunk on his tour bus, Green is laughing at your expense.

Green and his posse were in Edmonton Tuesday night at the Kingsknight Pub, barely laying down rhymes for a full room of frat-packers. When I say packed, that's no joke. According to the bar's management, in 11 years Green was the first act to have sold out in advance. Yes, he even beat out Warrant.

If he didn't occupy a place in Canadian entertainment folklore as the absurdist king of gross-out comedy, Green and his crew, who are presumably just his drinking buddies, would have been booed off the stage seconds after they started.

Or so you'd hope.

Let's face it - nobody was really there to hear numbers from Green's new rap album, Prepare For Impact (my guess is you're readying for the poop to hit the fan). People were there to see what the quirky, irreverent and off-the-wall Green would do.

It's like a car accident: you can't turn away, nor should you actually look. Either way, it's tragic.

That said, it was sort of brilliant, too. P.T. Barnum's adage that "there's a sucker born every minute" is evidenced by anyone who shelled out to see Green.

In November, Green was in Edmonton on a press junket promoting the new album. Across the country, the press has demanded to know what the joke is. He's adamant there isn't one - he's serious. Really serious about rap - get it?

With last night's ouevre including inspired lines like "I like to write rhymes and act like an a-hole" or, perhaps more accurately, "Enough of this silliness. This sucks," the true depth of Green's commitment wasn't hard to fathom.

Before he took to the stage, three "ex-presidents" wearing masks of Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan came on. Merely nodding their heads to some filler beats and flat vocorded vocals was enough to frenzy the crowd.

When Green finally came out, responding to feverish chants from the throng, he was wearing a a T-shirt that said "Get out and vote." According to Green's website blog, the tour is sponsored by CPAC and he's seemingly working hard at getting young people involved in the political process.

That's sort of admirable, though you can't help but think true "Green" disciples inspired to vote might be scouring ballots on Jan. 23 for their riding's Marijuana Party candidate.

When Green does rap, he actually isn't all bad. Songs about sticking his butt on your lips or crowd singalongs about scuba gear (that's "Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus," he educates) are sophomoric, sure, but he can keep time.

The moments he didn't bother to are when the show felt all the more tedious and, gasp, conventional.

To distract everyone from those pitfalls, he'd routinely incite the crowd to drink as much as humanly possible. To help them along, Jagermeister flowed freely off the stage.

Some have likened Green's act as an homage to the work of the late Andy Kaufman, whose entire life was one long shtick.

While I was a fan of the Tom Green Show, I'm more inclined to think of Green's crap, er, rap in the same breath as William Hung, the dorky Asian kid who bastardized Ricky Martin's She Bangs on American Idol a couple of years ago. Like Hung, Green's 15 minutes of fame are up - or at least they should be.