‘We probably won’t fall through,” Tom Green said as he stepped out onto a frozen lake that sits along his 150-acre farm in the hinterlands of Ontario, periodically stamping his foot to be sure. I followed his lead, bundled in a snowsuit for this expedition.

A few decades ago, this easily could have been a setup. He was, after all, a guy who became superstar famous for audacious pranks that captured the bubbling, cheeky rebellion of Y2K-era youth. But that absurdity was kept at bay that frigid day in January. Green, 53, is not quite the same troublemaker who crawled around on the street, interviewing unsuspecting passersby with a “piece of poo on a microphone,” as he did in one of his most memorable bits.

He has since moved on from those high jinks, even as similar content has proliferated across screens.

Other antics from his greatest- hits reel that made him an unlikely face of MTV include the time he swam in water fountains in full scuba gear, collecting change; airbrushed a pornographic scene on his father’s car; and suckled at the teat of a cow.

These days, suckling is out, nuzzling is in. “I love Fanny,” he said later, cozying up to a mule that is one of the many animals I saw him gently tending to as he found joy in the little details of farm life.“To me, I thought the weirdest thing that I could do is get a farm and a mule,” he said. “That’s kind of what makes it fun for me is that this is ridiculous. Can you believe this? I’m riding a mule.”

Green is returning to the spotlight with a flurry of new projects for Amazon Prime Video, including “I Got a Mule!,” an aptly titled hourlong stand-up special that recently premiered. “Tom Green Country,” a charming four-episode reality show that follows Green as he gets his farm in order with the help of friends, neighbors and his parents, and “This Is the Tom Green Documentary,” which recounts his dizzying rise to fame, are now streaming too.

“People are probably going to be surprised that I’m not, like, completely crazy,” he said of “Tom Green Country.” “There’s a sort of a wholesome heartwarming thing to this — that I have a close relationship with my family, that I love animals, that I enjoy doing a lot of things that a great many people in the world enjoy doing, like getting out into the woods.”

After 20 years in the Hollywood Hills of California, Green realized that there was a misperception hanging over him. “I’m not really a Hollywood guy,” he said. “I started to feel like I wasn’t being true to my authentic self.” So he moved back to Canada in 2021.

“Tom is actually really reserved, usually. And serious,” Glenn Humplik — his sidekick on “The Tom Green Show,” the straight man to Green’s madman — said in a phone interview. “He’s very analytical about every single comedy bit and thing that he does.”

“The Tom Green Show” started in 1994 on Canadian cable access television, half talk-show fever dream and half on-the-street mischief. It moved to Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Television and then to the Comedy Network before Green entered the U.S. in 1999 like a wrecking ball, cracking the perfectly polished pop ecosystem dominated by the likes of the Backstreet Boys, ’N Sync and Britney Spears.

“The way it hit MTV just at the right time and the way that they blasted it out there,” he said, “to be able to, that quickly, permeate into pop culture in the biggest country in the world for media, I realized this is different.”

Back in those whirlwind few years, Green hosted “Saturday Night Live,” graced the cover of Rolling Stone, and had a high- profile relationship and short-lived marriage to Drew Barrymore. He wrote and directed the 2001 film “Freddy Got Fingered,” which seemed to set a new standard for how much a movie could be reviled by critics.

Green has alternately been called groundbreaking or juvenile; avant-garde or disgusting; ahead of his time or out of his mind.

Today, it wouldn’t be a stretch to call him the father of cringe-core, acclimating audiences to the gleeful discomfort of bits taken too far for too long, clearing a path for comics like Nathan Fielder, Sacha Baron Cohen and Eric Andre, and shows like “The Office” and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”

When Green was a teenager, his brain was shaped by “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” and “Candid Camera,” but mostly David Letterman, his idol then and now.

Green started doing stand-up when he was still a teenager, but his first taste of fame came as a member of one of Canada’s first successful rap groups, Organized Rhyme. Green soon shifted his focus to comedy, but being part of an underground scene that combined hip-hop, punk and skater culture helped define his outlook.

Technology was also an obsession of Green’s since childhood, and later, inspired by these scenes, he started hitting the streets with a camera in tow, an uncommon sight in the 1990s.

Pioneers don’t always get the credit they deserve, his mother, Mary Jane Green, told me. “I think he felt that. But he has this ability to reinvent himself as he goes. And every time he does, it seems to become something.”

That’s just a drawback of pursuing unproven ideas, Green said. “That’s happened several times with me. When something works, it gets repeated, you know?”

He is in part referring to “Jackass,” the MTV skater- boy prank franchise that MTV swiftly installed when Green’s show went on hiatus after he was diagnosed with testicular cancer in 2000. As Green recovered, a new batch of stars was minted. Some segments on “Jackass” were clearly inspired by what Green had done.

He says he holds no ill will toward the “Jackass” cast. But it is one of several instances when he hasn’t been able to capitalize like others have, especially financially. “Look, I have done well. I’m doing fine,” he said, “but, you know, a $1 billion franchise is a lot different than ‘The Tom Green Show.’ ”

Aside from “Jackass,” or the abundance of prank content that now populates YouTube and TikTok, Green is also referring to his early forays into streaming: He started uploading audio clips to the web around 1999, and by 2003 he was uploading and streaming video. Then in 2005, Green began streaming shows and segments from the web-optimized TV studio he’d built in his living room, including what would become “Tom Green’s House Tonight,” “Tom Green Live!” and “Webovision.”

“I was always looking at where technology was leading, and I was going ‘How can I use that to make some art with it?’ ” Green said.

He interviewed celebrities like Pamela Anderson, Steve Carell and Flava Flav. One guest, Joe Rogan, credited Green with introducing him to podcasting.

Except for putting a cow’s head in his parents’ bed as they slept, a nod to “The Godfather” that didn’t go over well, Green doesn’t have many regrets, he said. More so there were choices he wish he’d been more thoughtful about, namely taking opportunities to show audiences that he wasn’t an idiot, he was just playing one.

“I have probably thought about it a lot over the years,” he said of showing up in character on the late-night circuit.

“The thing that I was maybe miscalculating was that my show was so outrageous that it probably would have been more interesting for me to have gone on the show and just sat back like this and talk and be myself.”

Although Green has stayed a pop culture presence, he has never fully recovered from “Freddy Got Fingered” in terms of mainstream success. And, perhaps bittersweet, the film is now considered a cult classic.

As for his next prediction, well, he’s living it.

In 50 or 100 years, “cities may no longer be as relevant,” he said. “People may start to realize that there’s a lot of space. We’re all connected now electronically, so we don’t need to be all sitting on top of each other.”