As it turns out, he didn’t–but stay tuned, he’s still got a long career ahead of him. After just six episodes, Green’s MTV show, a blend of pretaped stunts and in-studio shenanigans that airs Thursday nights at 10:30 EST, has become the network’s highest-rated regularly scheduled program. The slight, goateed comedian has also been visible during the NCAA hoops tournament, bellowing through a bullhorn in a series of garrulous Pepsi One ads. Parents may find Green sick, silly or just plain unfunny, but his young audience can’t get enough. “He’s become famous faster than anyone I’ve ever been associated with,” says MTV programming head Brian Graden, who also recruited the “South Park” boys for Comedy Central. “We go out and try to shoot segments and he gets mobbed.”

What teen could resist a guy who paints his parents’ house plaid while they’re away on vacation? Green’s long-suffering folks, retired government employees from Ottawa, awoke another morning to find that their son had commissioned an airbrushed portrait of two women in flagrante delicto on the hood of the family Honda, freshly dubbed “The Slut Mobile.” And then there was the time he burst in on them at 3 a.m. and flung a cow’s head into their bed. “This is a message from Don Corleone,” Green announced, as a camera-toting pal caught the reaction. “In the heat of the moment, there’s genuine anger from my mom, and genuine frustration from my dad,” says Green. “But it’s great television.”

It is great television. Green may occasionally (OK, frequently) overstep the bounds of taste–as a guest on a Canadian talk show last fall, he whipped out a decaying raccoon, prompting the host to flee the set retching. But seldom is grotesquerie the sole point of a joke. His antics are merely the setup; it’s the reaction of his audience–generally some unsuspecting bystander or riled-up authority figure–that provides the punch line. In that sense, there are elements of “Candid Camera” in Green’s shtik, but then again, Allen Funt never tried to serve anyone a chest-hair sandwich. Indeed, the best of Green’s man-in-the-street segments are reminiscent of David Letterman in his transgressive prime. “I’m probably doing what I do because of what he did,” says Green, who also cites the subversive ethos of skateboarding as a primary influence: “It created an attitude like ‘Let’s go out in the streets and mess with people’.”

And mess with people he does. In one recurring bit, the comedian pretends to mistake passersby for celebrities. Rarely, though, does Green’s humor come across as mean-spirited. He wisely aims his most aggressive gags at his hapless cohost, longtime pal Glenn Humplik, who knows what he’s in for. He ought to, anyway: Green has been gearing up for his full-frontal comedy assault since childhood. As his dad did a stretch in the service, young Tom ended up moving every six months. Each new school brought a new audience to conquer. “I knew I wasn’t like a complete loser, but I knew the situation was one where I was definitely going to be thrown into a loser category–a new skinny kid walks into class, everybody already has their friends,” he says.

Green quickly won over peers with wisecracks, and soon began to show a flair for performance. In sixth grade, he represented his school in a public-speaking contest–with a speech about comedy. He began doing stand-up at 16, and, after flirting with a career as a rapper (no kidding), he got into broadcasting, first on radio, then on public-access cable, then on Canada’s Comedy Network. Now Green’s on MTV, where his buffoonery has found a fresh class of kids to win over. “I think people under the age of 30 get this,” he says. “Once you get over 40, there are people who really don’t understand why it’s funny. It just doesn’t register as comedy to them, which to me is hilarious. That’s what it’s all about, confusing conservative people.” And, of course, amusing the rest of us.