Tom Green's Weird, Fine Line

Tom Green says he doesn't intend to offend.

He's OK with his audience being "disturbed and confused and surprised and grossed out and shocked even."

But offended? No.

In his new movie, "Freddy Got Fingered," the 29-year-old comedian plays an aspiring animator who eviscerates a dead deer and frolics in its carcass, manually pleasures two other (living) animals, bites an umbilical cord in half after delivering a baby, whacks his wheelchair-bound girlfriend in the legs with a bamboo stick (that's her idea of foreplay) and lies about his father (Rip Torn) molesting his younger brother, Freddy - hence, the title.

Green, who co-wrote his directorial debut with childhood friend Derek Harvie, thinks religious, racial and ethnic humor are offensive and can leave people feeling "emotionally hurt," so he stays away from that.

"I think there's sort of a weird line," he says in an interview during which he comes across as nothing but subdued and sincere - he's even a little shy about asking a waiter to bring him a cup of coffee.

"I like to try to walk this line, you know, where I like to push the envelope as far as I can," he says, sitting in a fancy hotel restaurant. "I think you're actually able to push the envelope a little further if you're not being offensive in those sort of typical, obvious ways. Because once you do that, you kind of become a bit more mean-spirited, I think, with your comedy, and people don't want to rally behind you."

Green, who tongued a live mouse in last summer's comedy "Road Trip," also says he doesn't strive to shock for shock's sake; he wants to get the laugh - something he thinks certain comedians lose sight of. "I actually do put a lot of thought into these sort of fine lines," he says.

Green's biggest influence, he says, was probably "Monty Python's The Meaning of Life," which he stumbled across in a video store as a kid. He remembers thinking the 1983 movie was "the craziest thing I had ever seen. And I remember that was the first time I laughed so hard that I didn't stop laughing." The involuntary organ donor scene particularly fractured him.

"Here we are in the past five years, all of a sudden you hear this label 'gross-out comedy' - it's like it's a new thing ... The concept of vomiting or pulling out somebody's guts on camera and bloody stuff, that's no grosser than anything in my movie," Green says.

"I just think it's sort of time for that term to disappear - you know, 'gross-out comedy.' Because what we're talking about has been going on. ... A pie in the face was probably pretty gross when somebody first did it. That was crazy, you know; I mean, all dripping all over the place, all gooey and gross, you know."

The reality, he says, is that to make people laugh "something has to actually happen - something pretty extreme, to be honest ... You got to do something that really strikes people. Slapstick comedy - sometimes things tend to be a little bit gross."

"A little bit" might be open to interpretation. One time, Green wanted to fry and eat a benign cyst from his father's head.

He showed up at the doctor's office with an electric frying pain and barbecue sauce - then found out how funny his father could be.

"He looked at me and said: 'Oh, didn't I tell you? Today's my hemorrhoids operation.'"

Growing up in Ottawa, Green was a classic class clown in school. He took that talent to Canadian cable television before landing at MTV and scoring with a hit show. His father, Dick, a retired army captain, and mother, Mary Jane, a former communications consultant, often have been the targets of his pranks. He's turned their house into a petting zoo while they were away, painted a pornographic scene on their car and put statues of them having anal sex on their front lawn.

Somebody always has to be, in some way, the brunt of the joke, Green thinks. He can make himself the brunt, too - most famously in his well-regarded special on MTV last year after he was diagnosed with testicular cancer. "I think it was all right to make jokes about cancer in that case because it was me that had it," he says.

He and his collaborators found that the show had a serious impact - encouraging young men to examine themselves for the disease - and they got letters thanking them for "saving my kid's life."

"Wow, you know, we were just trying to make a stupid TV show here, and we actually kind of for the first time feel some real positive impact," Green says. "I don't think we want to get into the business of trying to change the world with our comedy, but I think that was kind of a neat feeling."

Green is "essentially, completely, 100 percent cured" of the cancer. But he and newlywed wife Drew Barrymore are still recovering from a Feb. 18 fire that gutted their home north of Beverly Hills. They're renting a house in the Los Angeles area for now.

"It's been certainly a shock to the system, especially for Drew," he says, since that was her house for a long time before he moved in last year.

Still, life isn't so bad for the couple, who eloped barely a month ago after goofing in public about whether they were or weren't married. "We really didn't want to make a joke of the actual, real wedding," Green says. (Barrymore has a cameo in "Freddy Got Fingered," and he had a small role as her boyfriend in last year's "Charlie's Angels.")

Within days, Green will start work on a film titled "Say Uncle," co starring Jason Lee. And he'll begin writing another comedy with Harvie.

As he gets ready to leave the restaurant of the fancy midtown hotel where he's been talking, Green addresses his un-Tom Green-like demeanor throughout.

"I didn't know if it would be appropriate to jump around and slather myself in cream cheese in the Four Seasons," he says.