An Oral History Of ‘Freddy Got Fingered,’ Tom Green’s Glorious Broadside Against The Fame Industry That Made Him

https://uproxx.com/movies/freddy-got-fingered-oral-history-tom-green-20th-anniversary/

When Freddy Got Fingered opened on April 20th 2001, it’s probably no surprise that the world, by and large, didn’t know what to make of it. It was told in the format of a traditional comedian-vehicle comedy, in which Tom Green’s “Gord Brody” must grow up and set out on his own and realize his dream of becoming an animator. The conflict, between slacker protagonist and his traditional parents (played by Julie Hagerty from Airplane! and Rip Torn), had the same rough blueprint as countless studio comedies.

The pitch also describes Freddy Got Fingered only in the loosest sense. Tom Green’s entire persona was essentially the “interrupting cow” joke made flesh, a conceptually calculated, deliberately dumb kind of mooing in the face of convention. The format of Freddy Got Fingered, characteristically, seemed to exist solely as another thing for Tom Green to mock.

Moving-the-plot along montages became bits themselves. In one of its signature scenes, Gord resolves to move to the big city to get his big break. It’s the kind of scene that most comedy movies would gloss over with a montage and a jaunty score or an upbeat pop song. In Freddy, it starts off that way, complete with Gary Numan’s perfectly on-the-nose rendition of “Cars.” Then suddenly, Gord screeches off the road mid-transition, when he sees a pair of horses mating, all as a lead up to a stunt where Tom Green grabs an erect horse penis while screaming “Daddy I’m a farmer!”

“Going off the rails,” of course, was the whole point. This was Freddy Got Fingered in a nutshell: an attempt to remove the “filler,” to take all the normally mundane elements of a studio comedy and turn them into anarchic madness.

Comedy was undergoing a revolution in verisimilitude at the time. The lines between non-fiction and fiction had blurred, with the more unplanned, unstaged reactions suddenly prized above all else. This kind of thing had existed before in embryonic form, on Candid Camera and in David Letterman’s man-on-the-street bits, but didn’t achieve full flower until skateboarders started picking up video cameras in the nineties. Tom Green’s entire career, red hot thanks to The Tom Green Show on MTV, was built on guerilla comedy, like when he turned his father’s car into “The Slutmobile” or his almost indescribably insane dadaist sketch “How To Make A Cow Brain Boat.” (I’d list more here, but the only way to catalog these things is from memory or from scattered clips on YouTube, the originals not being available in either streaming or on hard copy). As Green describes it, even before he had developed his showbiz persona, he and his friends would go out into the street and “razz,” harassing real people in order to provoke a reaction.

By 2000, when Freddy was being filmed, the film industry, still in the business of fame, needed to capitalize on Tom Green’s fame. Yet doing so required turning Green’s brand of spontaneous, real people, real-world comedy into something staged, with a team of actors, everything meticulously planned down to the dollar amount. Tom Green was neither a traditional actor nor a sketch comedian. Rather than turn his man-on-the-street act into something more traditional, like Adam Sandler or Chris Farley, he did, to some extent, the reverse. He adapted the format to his shtick. He had to make comedy so outrageous that the audience would become the razzee, the street to Green’s man.

Which is to say: Freddy Got Fingered is anti-convention and anti-authority partly by necessity. And also at least a smidge anti-capitalist. During the scene in which Gord Brody takes a job at the “cheese sandwich factory” (the very existence of which is a joke about how all jobs sound kind of stupid) he puts a voice to the id of low-wage workers everywhere. A customer comes in to complain about having no cheese on his cheese sandwich.

“You can’t have complaints there’s not enough cheese in the cheese sandwiches,” Green sputters at the man, his eyes going buggy beneath the mop of his penis-shaped hair. “I mean, if there’s no cheese in a cheese sandwich, that’s just two slices of bread. If word of that were to get out, well, I could lose my job. I could lose ALL OF THIS!”

At this, Green stacks roughly three pounds of cheese on the man’s sandwich. “What am I supposed to do with this?” the man asks. To which Green responds, “Well, you could stick it in your bum-bum.”

On paper, “Tom Green retaliates against angry customer by putting a comical amount of cheese on his sandwich” doesn’t sound that funny or groundbreaking. Yet the manic stare, the sarcastic call and response, the massive, teetering stack of cheese that borders on slapstick, they all add up to something iconic.