Life was too burdensome, and the drugs were too sweet. On one episode of Stern he speculated that an unsuccessful 1995 suicide attempt had in fact been successful and that he was in Heaven. By anyone’s standards, Lange had extraordinary luck. From there, he was hired by Stern, whose controversial, irreverent radio show he had listened to with his dad many years before. He became part of the cast for the first series of Mad TV, and, having been fired after being arrested while in the middle of an enormous coke binge, was befriended by the great comedian Norm MacDonald, who got him a role in his film Dirty Work and his series The Norm Show. He had died sometime in the middle of the night while I was at my friend’s house doing shot after shot to deal with the fact that I had lost a bet on a fucking college basketball game.’ After working as a longshoreman, Lange turned his comedic and storytelling gifts into a career. As he wrote in his brilliant memoir Too Fat to Fish: ‘…there was my hero, the toughest motherfucker I would ever know, lying there, lifeless. Lange’s father died of complications from the accident some years later, and the young man never recovered. Lange grew up in a working class home in which his hero, his father, fell off a ladder and became quadriplegic. Radio was the ideal medium for him, providing an unstructured environment in which to shoot the shit and allow gold to be formed amid the daily babble. Having said that, he is a great raconteur. In truth, Lange is a better raconteur than comedian. But with hard drugs, a redemption story only ends with a relapse or a sober death. Such a mammoth intake of calories and chemicals should have killed a young, robust hippopotamus, but somehow Lange had walked out of it looking trim, healthy and happy. On The Howard Stern Show, where he worked alongside Stern and his gaggle of unlovely eccentrics between 20, a favorite topic of conversation was how much food the obese comedian had endeavored to put away in the course of the show. Lange had not just been a prolific drug user but an enthusiastic gambler, drinker and eater. Somehow, he walked out not just drug-free but thinner and fitter than he had been before. (According to Lange, the obliteration of his beak was the result of snorting drugs mixed with broken glass.) Lange was arrested, not for the first time, and forced into rehab, after which he did community work as a trash collector and gas station employee. The comedian has emerged out of the depths of an addiction so dramatic that his nose imploded like an overripe tomato after years of snorting cocaine and heroin. Lange has been flitting in and out of rehab for the past 25 years. You needn’t be Sherlock Holmes to be suspicious about his absence. The legendary comedian is apparently ‘sick’ but fans suspect that something else might be going on. His social media is hardly being updated.
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