It's the "backward man, the backward man," Mr. Freddy Got Fingered in Auckland for this year's Comedy Fest, Tom Green.

Green lurched on stage to an excitable mob, at times shouting, wobbling, glaring, picking on victims in the audience. His persona and opinions seem unchanged in the last 20 years, covering everything from what's wrong with the U.S.A. , the youth of today to the important chair beer balancing issues.

What became apparent half way through was that the audience here were die hard Tom Green fans, shouting out requests for pieces from his 1995, critically slammed, publicly loved, self-produced movie, and now cult classic, Freddy Got Fingered. He had to call a time-out on interjections, only to do a crowd controlled medley of anything the audience could throw at him at the end of his set.

It was like a rock show.

He finished with a challenge to audience: "Name me one line from the English Patient", no response, case closed.

Tom Green plays this Friday at Sky City. Get along!

Tom Green’s show was like no other comedy gig I have attended. With non-stop (positive) “heckling” from the crowd, it definitely felt more like a Freddy Got Fingered catchphrases and appreciation night than anything else.

While his film roles and MTV show precedes him, Tom is a skilled and superb stand up comedian in his own right. His unique brand of “shock humor” sits well with a Kiwi audience as does his cynical but comical thoughts on many things, like getting high on twink (the old school kind that came with a brush) and my personal favorite of the night – the discovery that there is no cheese in Chinese food.

Tom’s comedic style is edgy and “in your face” but not overly reproachful – put simply, he’s just bloody entertaining! His material is made up of intelligently written one liners that sit in snappy scenarios rather than long drawn out anecdotes which means a lot is covered within the hour.

What I particularly enjoyed was his brilliant delivery of some really engaging social commentary which he incorporates seamlessly in to his set. His thoughts on what if suicide was made to be illegal and how we reward bad behavior by “failing upwards” not only rouses much deserved laughs but is surprisingly insightful.

Judging by the popularity of his show and the exuberant vocal nature of the crowd, his arrival on our shores has been long overdue. Let’s hope he returns for an encore.

Welcome to the cult of Tom Green. His disciples whoop, cheer and worship their leader. This counterculture hero is in New Zealand for the first time and man did his fans appreciate him!

Walking on stage to raucous cheers and applause it felt as if Tom Green needed to do no more. However this talented and much loved comic played with his crowd and delivered wonderful clever social commentary. Reflecting on ‘how fast the world changed’ he dissected our obsession with social media and the digital age. From reality TV, celebrities, airports, porn and Donald Trump’s hair; he came to the conclusion that the world was far better ‘way back when’.

His lively and enthusiastic audience spoke to him throughout the show shouting catchphrases or simply joining in. This was an interactive show where he happily gratified his fans requests. A couple of audience members needed to be even closer to their hero, leaving their seats to sit on the stairs by the stage.

With 20 years in the business Tom Green has definitely left his mark. As the founding father of the MTV shock humour generation he will always have an anarchic feel, and that’s what you get at his show. He says of his cult film hit Freddy Got Fingered ‘it was one of the most vilified films ever. Yet everywhere in the English speaking world people don’t stop quoting it’. Expect lines from the film to echo around the SKYCITY Theatre!

Tom Green couldn’t be more comfortable being Tom Green. Intelligent disorder from a fantastic comic mind.

WHAT kind of a world are we living in when people are actually screaming for lines from Freddy Got Fingered, one of the worst films ever made?

That would be Tom Green’s world. The Canadian, ahem, film star and MTV comic is in town to party (the verb) and his adoring, boisterous Gen Y crowd are doing their best to help out, even fetching beers on request.

Green also wonders what kind of a world we’re living in.

Like a growing number of comics entering their 40s and playing to younger audiences, he finds good material in lecturing the kids how life used to be before Facebook, mobile phones and the internet came to dominate Gen Y social interaction.

This yearning for simpler, more innocent times yields some nice material about being back in school: clumpy Liquid Paper; the pointlessness of the compass.

Elsewhere Green tries on some mild political humour about global homogenisation, but the most political he really gets is a jowl-wobbling Richard Nixon impression.

Mostly though, Green’s bits tend towards the crass (and unprintable), which naturally his fans eat up.

An endearing, rock ‘n’ roll style comic, Green actually works damn hard to hold our attention, often crouching at stage’s edge to ram home his gags or engage the front rows. I laughed a lot.

Tom Green has used new-fangled technology to make a success of himself in this big bad world we live in.

And judging by the sold-out crowd at his first New Zealand show, the former MTV larrikin, comedian, actor, and ex-husband of Drew Barrymore, is still doing fine following his return to the stand-up stage a few years back.

The thing is, he worries (quite a bit) about what effect technology - from Facebook ("the conspiracy of our time") to camera phones (dangerous and manipulative, in his mind) - has had on the world.

And in that trademark unhinged and mischievous style of his, that's what he raves about mostly during this show.

Also, to please his many MTV-era fans and devotees of his infamous 2001 film Freddy Got Fingered, he also delves into "the hits", like "humping a dead moose" (which Eminem referenced in his song The Real Slim Shady) and trading Freddy lines with the many rowdy fanatics in the crowd.

For such a slow-moving and dopey looking character, Green is wild and intense.

He goes in for the kill early on when one punter takes a photo of him, blinding him with the flash, and calling them "a f***ing pr***". He's only joking. Kind of. And tells the culprit to post it on their Facebook page because there are still tickets left for his next show.

The thing is, Green hates Facebook and implores the crowd to boycott it and "deactivate" their page. He prefers a far simpler time, like the 70s and 80s when he was growing up. A time, he says, when a kid could get high on Twink (yes, he did his Kiwi homework) and run around with a "lethal weapon" like a compass.

While topics such as Facebook and harking back to the good old days might seem like old comedy fodder these days, Green carries it off well by mixing his immature schtick of old with his, well, slightly more mature perspective as a 41-year-old ("I'm practically f****** dead").

The more puerile elements are for his cult fans (of which there are many), but there is also something for everyone, with many of the show's highlights being his random observations about everything from putting his beer down on the soft cushion of the bar stool ("you worry about it") to pondering why there's no cheese in Chinese cooking ("You eat a tiger penis. But no cheese?").

Tom Green also performs tonight, 9pm, SkyCity Theatre

Check out more reviews on www.nzherald.co.nz

The Invitation: I was pleasantly surprised with an invitation to see Tom Green’s live stand up comedy located at Auckland’s Skycity Theater on Wednesday night. The invitation came to me suddenly and unexpected which meant that I was not prepared in knowledge, perspective and direction to write this review. In desperation I found myself illegally parked (in front of a school) and staring blankly into space (probably at some freaked out students) seeing if I had any recollection of this guy. All I came up with was a faint memory of a young Tom Green in a chick flick I saw eons ago and a lot of images of him with animals for some strange reason. But since I had a blank slate I decided to attend this show with nothing in mind, just to see what he is about.

The Comedy: Often I see comedians on television hop on stage with loud applause and a general “thank you, glad to be here”. You see them wait out the applause humbly or snuff it out with some tongue and cheek comment while poking fun at a few members of the audience. Not Tom Green, lets say that the introduction to the show was somewhat a loud rallying from one guy, kinda like a one man rock band. Nothing wrong with that, he surely knew how to work his audience. As he worked his magic over the cheering crowd I couldn’t help but think “wow, he looks nothing like what I recall at all, does he have more white hairs or is the lighting washing him out? And MAN this lighting is hurtfully intense..”.

The Opinion: If you were expecting me to say that I was laughing my butt off from beginning to end, I would say not quite. A way to describe his show would be entertainingly course and impromptu like, he had a way to say things that most Kiwis would dare just think about. After a good five to ten minutes into the show I warmed up to his humour, he would have loud outbursts that would send shock waves through the ears but still have the crowd roaring. In all I say I was quite entertained in this show, his view on social media, cultural foods, strange sexual encounters is a must hear. However, I feel that you should know more of his television and movie presence and personality to get a lot of his jokes and references, but other than that, I was very much entertained.