Book Review
written by Ken Carlson
You cannot overstate how popular Artie Lange is. Forget the press, forget the hype, forget how high his book climbed up the NY Times Best Seller list.
Talk to people from the industry who have had him at their place, like Caroline’s or Carnegie Hall. Talk to longtime comics with a couple of decades under their belt. They’ll tell you stories how they’ve seen grown men cry when he walks on stage. They’ll tell you how tickets for his shows sell out in record-breaking time. Hell, talk to a Howard Stern listener and ask him how much he means to them. When I interviewed Marc Maron about his radio days with Air America, he illustrated the amount of attention listeners pay. One day on air, Marc was complaining about a contractor who was coming in to install a sink. It was a side note, hardly took up more than a few moments. Months later, he was doing a show in a club. Afterwards he was shaking hands with the audience and a woman rushed up to him saying, ‘I love you. You’re so funny. I had to come tonight. Is everything OK with your sink?’ Through the personal connection that only radio can bring and Artie’s booze-and-drug comedy world he may be the comedian that fans empathisize with and appreciate the most in this country.
‘Too Fat to Fish’ is written in such a conversational manner that it’s easy to write off as a pop memoir. What’s staggering about it is what Stern alludes to in the forward; that Lange is a sweet, lovable guy who has everything to live for, and self-destructive appetites that astound over and over.
Lange has admitted openly, both on his show and in interviews to unfathomable drug problems and his attempts to stop appear half-hearted at best. On a recent NPR interview, paired lovingly with the intensely bookish Terry Gross from Fresh Air, where they played excerpts from an on air fist fight with his assistant, he admits his life is a mess and he’s been unstable for over twenty years. “I am not well. I am a disturbed person. I’m a maniac. I’m on drugs. I’m not stable... What can I say?
The book recounts the exclamation points in his life. That this man has gone so far in show biz, let alone, be alive, is mind-blowing. That he received opportunities almost every comedian in the world would kill for and did everything possible to sabtoge them is pathetic. But the fact that his friends give him chance after chance shows how beloved he is, and one could argue, why he’s never reformed.
‘Too Fat to Fish’ is a triumphant expose of the addict as a liar and delusional fool. It’s funny as a tale, frustrating as fact. Will there be a follow-up book as promised? Probably not.