Tosh talks comedy

“Tosh.0”

Wednesdays at 10:30 p.m.

Comedy Central

Daniel… “Tosh.0”

Wednesdays at 10:30 p.m.

Comedy Central

Daniel Tosh has had a hard week.

“I got in a lot of trouble via announcing on the show to encourage people to go on my Wikipedia page and change things,” Tosh, the star of the Internet-themed comedy show “Tosh.0,” said in a conference call last Friday. “They said that I used to go back to Germany to get these hormone treatments because I was trying to have a sex change to compete in female athletics. So that whole Wikipedia thing has kind of backfired.”

For Tosh on TV, this kind of online mischief should be commonplace. But the attitudes of the cardigan-decked TV prankster differ in real life.

“Confrontation is something I certainly don’t do well with,” Tosh said.

Regardless, Tosh has made a career out of humor with a bite. Tosh started performing standup in the mid-’90s while a sophomore at the University of Central Florida.

“I wanted to give it a shot, see if I enjoyed it, and didn’t take it very seriously,” Tosh said. “For that matter, I still don’t.”

Like most college students, Tosh was looking to escape a potentially numbing 9-to-5 job. Without money, and consequently, obligations, Tosh slowly advanced through the local comedy clubs doing 5-minute sets. When he gained a substantial following, Tosh graduated to driving around in his Honda Civic, working “insane, crappy Holiday Inn comedy clubs.” Inevitably, he attracted the interest of the college crowd.

“The rest is not that interesting,” Tosh said.

Tosh became a TV host after he performed a live version of “Tosh.0” in front of Comedy Central executives. The show has since flourished. Featuring humorous breakdowns of viral videos, cheeky quips, and perhaps most famously, “Web Redemptions” — segments in which humiliated viral video stars are given a chance to redeem themselves — its 30-minute lineup is to the Internet what “The Daily Show” is to politics: a mirror to expose the absurdity of the system.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that everyone’s a fan. Tosh’s acidic humor is a magnet for criticism.

“[The response is] nothing but hate mail,” Tosh said. “Sadly, it’s the only stuff that I really respond to.”

Tosh recalled an incident in which he parodied a rapper’s video on air. The rapper immediately posted a response threatening Tosh.

“I don’t travel with any type of security, but I definitely will look over my shoulder when I’m in Atlanta,” Tosh said.

But he believes he’s uncovered a dirty little loophole about to what people take offense.

“People only get offended by jokes that personally impact them,” Tosh said. “They don’t care if you’re making fun of some horrible tragedy that didn’t affect them.”

For its part, Comedy Central goes out of its way to avoid offense — a process Tosh often finds baffling.

“You never know what they’re going to censor,” Tosh said. “If I ever hint that John Travolta may like the company of men, holy cow does that immediately get cut out of the show. So it’s very funny the things that are okay to do, and the things that they’re like, ‘No, there’s no way.’”

With the inevitable storm caused by Tosh’s political incorrectness, it’s a wonder he remains lighthearted.

“I just want [audiences] to laugh,” Tosh said. “My show is certainly not serious in any way. I don’t want anybody to get too upset if one of their videos appears, and I make fun of it. It’s really just a group of buddies now, every week, trying to come [up]with new ways to say horrible things about people. It’s meant to be jokes.”

When asked where he’d like to be in 30 years, Tosh’s response was blunt: He’d like to be dead, but remembered.

“I would like people to be like, ‘Oh, that guy was really funny,’” Tosh said. “The idea of being alive, though, and still having to keep doing it — that seems a bit overwhelming.”