TORONTO -- By the time Tom Green throws down the gauntlet and declares, "I'm No Comedian," you'll know that the film and television funnyman's forthcoming CD, "Prepare For Impact," isn't a bunch of stand-up.

Written and produced with DJ EZ-Mike (a.k.a. Mike Simpson - one half of The Dust Brothers), the 34-year-old former star of MTV's "The Tom Green Show" aims to resurrect the slow-driving beats of rappers who were dropping rhymes in the early '90s.

He mimics the slow-stroll swagger of Cypress Hill's "I Ain't Goin' Out Like That" (from 1993's "Black Sunday") on "Write Rhymes and Act Like an A**hole," and nods his b-boy cap to the Beastie Boys' "So What'cha Want" on the old-school flavoured "Mike Check."

On "My Bum Is On Ya Lips," he gets a little more contemporary, tag-teaming one of Eminem's coarsest lyrics (which itself is a play on Green's earlier Total Request Live smash, "The Bum Bum Song") with beats and lines that have the same appeal as Slim Shady's vulgarly hooky "I'll S*** On You."

It's all pretty much par for the course. Green says that from the get-go the pair wanted to keep things light.

"Mike and I wanted to make a fun record," he says over breakfast at a trendy west-end eatery in downtown Toronto. "But we didn't want it to look like we were taking the piss out of hip-hop. The record is not a parody and it's not a comedy album. It's just some fun lyrics backed by some beats that have a good groove."

Though the record clearly shows imprints made by Public Enemy, Eric B and Rakim, A Tribe Called Quest, Cypress Hill, Beastie Boys and De La Soul, Green knew he couldn't act like he came from the mean, inner city streets. "I'm a goofy white kid from Ottawa rapping," he deadpans. "It's never going to sound like Chuck D."

So instead of rapping about guns and girls, or slogging other rappers, Green busts some seriously funny lines about where he's from and what he likes. "I met Fred Durst at the lineup to the movies/ He asked for my number, but then he never calls me," he rattles off on "People In My Neighbourhood," before boasting that he "likes looking at boobies" on the funked-up, "I Like Hooters."

Green's no stranger to hip-hop (he was a founding member of Organized Rhyme in the early '90s, who earned a Juno nomination in 1993). But while he's been busy writing and directing films in Los Angeles for the last six years, meeting EZ-Mike during the scoring of Green's 2000 comedy smash, "Road Trip," and again on 2001's "Freddy Got Fingered" reinvigorated the shock comic's inner-rap star.

"When Mike contributed to "Freddy" (which Green directed and starred in), he and I wound up working pretty closely. I was still making beats and ended up playing him some of my old stuff from Canada. He was kind of stoked on it, so we collaborated on some stuff for fun."

"After a couple of years we had a ton of songs," he continues between sips of orange juice. "So we picked the ones that we thought were the right combination of funny, but still had good flow and jacked beats."

While he allows that he spent ample time freestyling many of the new CD's rhymes, Green says that Simpson was more than willing to let him know when he started taking himself too seriously.

"Anytime I wrote a rhyme that sounded like I was being too deep, Mike would tell me to ease up," he laughs.

So far, fans have been eating it up.

As the album was nearing completion this past spring, he road-tested the tracks in select cities across Ontario with his Keepin' It Real Crew (which includes EZ-Mike, pro-skateboarder 'Playboy' Jeremy Klein and MC Shawn Anthony). "We've got jackets," Green quips.

And he can't wait to get back out on the road. "We're coming to a town near you with some slick rhymes and dope beats," he spits in true MC fashion.

Just not before he finishes post-production work on his next film, a "dark comedy" tentatively titled, "Infamous."

"Pretty well everybody out in Los Angeles tries to give me scripts," he laments. "I don't even read scripts because I find it such a waste of time. I write my own stuff and make it happen. This next film is a cross-Canada road trip in which Canada gets to play itself.'

"And it's an independent movie," he adds. "So it's free from studio control."

Latching onto this thread of independence and creative autonomy, Green's etching out for himself with the CD and his upcoming film, one wonders how he ended up penning a song called "Teachers Suck" (the album's lead-off single).

"The song is tongue-in-cheek, but the amount of times I got reamed out for not knowing how to add X, Y and Z together is unimaginable," he recalls. "And as soon as they introduced letters into math, I checked out completely."

"I never felt encouraged creatively, but I still got up on stage and did these awesome shows for the rest of the student body," he recalls. "I put a ton of effort into this and I was suspended for throwing vegetables one year at our Christmas concert."

"'It's not a rock concert,'" he remembers being told by his principal. "It is a rock concert,'" Green retorted. "'It's a Christmas concert where the bands are playing rock music. You're supposed to throw things.'"

But maybe it wasn't the math at all. "I put far more energy into those shows than I did my schoolwork," he recalls. "So that could have had something to do with it."