"I don't know what's going on up there, and I'm a little concerned," Tom Green said the night before jetting from his new L.A. stamping grounds to Toronto.

Seems his Ottawa pal Glenn Humplik had passed along the news that the burning of the Canadian flag on an episode of his MTV series had surfaced in news reports here, and that some people were pretty upset.

That was then, and despite his initial fears that, "I'm going to be stoned at the airport," his homecoming appearances have gone on rather uneventfully. He appeared as a presenter at the Gemini Awards Sunday, and the worst he did was ignore the teleprompter and say things such as, "Mr. Dressup taught me how to hump a moose."

And last night he returned to Open Mike With Mike Bullard, where he had once favoured the host with a rotting raccoon carcass. This time, with Green accompanied by longtime on-air stooges Humplik and Phil Giroux, the only thing that lay there dead was Mike's monologue (kidding, Mike).

Green did "hump" Humplik overly affectionately on camera, and in a clip of a marshmallow factory tour, Green was seen deep-throating a tubular mallow hunk. The crowd ate it up.

Still, Green, the self-proclaimed "Captain Canada," was clearly a bit upset over how the flag-burning 'gag' had been received.

"I'm hoping it airs in Canada soon, so people can see the context," he told us. (The Comedy Network hasn't announced a decision on whether it will air the offending episode. It starts airing the MTV episodes Nov. 19.)

"I didn't even light it, first of all. Scott Thompson lit it. I held the flag and waved it. I mean, yeah I gave him the lighter."

The sketch was part of the first episode of Green's gonzo talk show to be produced in L.A. (the first half-season of Tom Green on MTV was taped in New York). Green flew the deadpan Humplik and Giroux from Ottawa, dressed them up in weird Alpine yodeller outfits and played The Devil trying to lure the innocent Canadians into moving down with him.

"Episode after episode, the whole point of the show is to get a reaction from Glen. I was decked out Miami Vice style, with a fake tan. I kept referring to myself as an American. I was playing the complete nightmare of what everybody thinks happens when a Canadian entertainer moves to the States.

"There's a huge extra level to the joke -- a whole audience of American kids chanting 'Burn, burn, burn.' They're going nuts and Glen's completely freaked out, because he knows who I am and what I really feel about Canada. It was a joke over the heads of the MTV audience. It was for us, really.

"The other thing about the joke is nobody ever says, 'Canada sucks' or burns the Canadian flag -- except for the South Park movie that just came out. And that was a joke too."

In fact, so thickly does the maple syrup flow through Green's veins that he claims to like L.A. more than New York "because it's a lot more like Ottawa. That's a weird thing to say, but it's definitely a lot more like Ottawa than New York. I have a car, I can drive to work. I have more space. Especially the (San Fernando) valley, I call it Vanier with palm trees."

While he can still fly in Humplik and Giroux for abuse, other staples of the Tom Green Show -- like the ongoing torture of his parents -- fell by the wayside when Green went South. Instead, the show became more mobile. Last week, Green and company hit Roswell, N.M., where "we talked to UFO experts and stuff. It's gonna be a pretty crazy show."

Did the UFO experts have a sense of humour?

"No, it was perfect, they didn't!" he enthuses. "The whole (show) is tighter now. We have more time, more writers and editors, and a few more laughs per episode."

Which gets to the rub of why people in Canada think "shock comic" when they think of Green (a term he resents). Much of the time, he says, the shocks were born out of desperation. "When we did the show on the Comedy Network, sometimes we got weird 'cause it was me and another guy writing it. I edited it myself. And we'd sort of run out of time and have to put stuff on we weren't necessarily 100% signed off on.

"But even on the Comedy Network, the show was not all dead animals. It was probably only about 5% dead animals."