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The Canadian comedian is proud of showing restraint.
"Well, there are no fart jokes," Green says when we demand to know if he has any self-censoring boundaries for his juvenile comic styling. "There is no poo or pee in the movie, I'm actually proud to point out.
"We made an effort to restrain ourselves in the poo and pee department. I thought we'd done a lot of poo and pee this year on the TV show," he says. "I thought maybe we would broaden our horizons and spread into other bodily functions."
Freddy Got Fingered -- which gets its title from supposedly 'funny' accusations that the father, played by Rip Torn, sexually molests Green's brother in the movie -- opens across North America on Friday. The movie, which he co-wrote, directed and shot with himself in the starring role as a semi-autobiographical goofball named Gord, is guaranteed to cause consternation.
Green admits 20th Century-Fox officials objected to almost every key comedy scene in the piece, including the birth scene in which he pretends to be a doctor and delivers a baby, chomping through an umbilical cord with his teeth and then swinging the kid around like a dead cat on a rope.
"Everything that is in the movie that makes you go 'Ohhhhhh!' and 'That's crazy,' somebody tried to take out of the movie," Green says in his usual odd, backwards way. "I honestly feel that, if I had not been directing, every scene would have been taken out of the movie."
The umbilical cord scene seems to be a particular flash point. Green, a rank rookie as a movie director, says there were "obvious pressures to soften the scene" and make Freddy more palatable.
Biting humour
"This is why I really wanted to direct the movie, because I wanted to be able to fight to keep the umbilical cord shot in. I wanted to make a weird movie. I wanted people to be able to come to the movie and see me bite an umbilical cord in half."
This is the kind of humour that has fuelled Green since public school, when his family -- his father served in the Canadian Armed Forces -- finally settled in Ottawa when Green was seven years old.
His parents, Dick and Mary Jane, still live there, half proud, half scared out of their wits that their 29-year-old son will do something crazy to them -- again. He once dropped a bloody severed cow's head into their bed in a homage to The Godfather. He painted a pornographic lesbian scene on the hood of his father's car and branded it The Slutmobile. He brought Monica Lewinsky, who was then dating one of Green's friends, to Ottawa to wake his parents up on camera for the amusement of fans of The Tom Green Show on MTV.
To the horror of others, because he did not just pick on his parents, Green plunked a maggot-infested raccoon corpse on Canadian talk-show host Mike Bullard's desk during an interview session. Bullard was not amused. Green interviewed people for his MTV segments by shoving an excrement-loaded mic up under their noses.
Here is the real wild and crazy guy. Steve Martin looks like he's performing to a Sunday School Bible class in comparison. Yet Green -- who claims to be newly married to actress Drew Barrymore and may actually mean it this time -- says there is no malice in his humour.
"When I went out on the street with a microphone with poo-poo on it and interviewed people and stuck it up in their face and talked to them and there's poo under their noses, maybe that's not mean. Maybe if I jammed it in their eye to get a laugh, that would probably be mean. The person would get hurt. There would be some permanent damage there."
But there is malice towards his parents. Parental figures are once again skewered savagely in the movie, Freddy Got Fingered, as they have been on the now defunct MTV show. Green says his parents deserve special attention.
Why? "Well, they made me do my homework," he says with a mock scowl. "They made me shovel the driveway and mow the lawn and stuff like that. And wash the dishes. They made me get up in the morning early during the summer (reportedly at 6 a.m. because of his dad's military training). They took my skateboard away one time and didn't give it back for two weeks.
"I always draw a different line with my parents, essentially because my parents deserved it, whereas the person on the street doesn't deserve it."
This gets us to the core of Green's comic theories and his feeling that he doesn't actually push the envelope to extremes. "Yeah, there's lines, for sure," he says of boundaries he won't cross to make a joke. "For me personally, I think it is important that nothing is ever completely mean-spirited. I think I'm walking along a line, and when it's comedy, it's different. In order to hopefully make people laugh, you have to walk along this line and flirt with this line.
Shock value
"It is an edgy movie, but is it a shocking movie? Maybe, sort of. But also, could it have been more shocking? I think so, if it was shock for shock's sake.
"Certainly, I like it when I make people feel a little bit uncomfortable. I like it when people aren't sure what's going to happen next, and that's walking along that line."
Taxi star and comic Andy Kaufman maintained that comedy existed even when people didn't laugh. Green agrees, to a point.
"I'm not necessarily out there just to get a laugh," he says. "I think laughs are great. I love it when people laugh really hard, which they do at many scenes in this movie. I like it when people scream. I like it when they roll their eyes or hide behind their knees.
"But I think it is important to get a reaction of any sort.
"I think if you go to a movie and pay $8 to look at the screen for an hour-and-a-half, it's fun if you actually get to see something that makes you react one way or another."
People do react to Freddy Got Fingered. Critics were howling in protest at a Hollywood preview screening. Green claims its target audience, college kids, have reacted much more positively at test screenings.
"It's a much higher energy. Whenever somebody screams, everybody screams. Whenever somebody laughs, everybody laughs. And it's very loud and exciting and fun."