Life is short, comedy is hard

Comic actor Arnold ponders Prince, death

Tom Arnold is in the middle of discussing how comedians need to have a thick skin on social media when he suddenly veers to another topic. It’s not an unusual occurrence during a conversation with the actor and comedian, who has an endearingly manic energy on the phone.

But at the time of this interview, news that musician Prince had been found dead in his Paisley Park estate in Minnesota was only a few hours old. The death of a celebrity of that magnitude has a long reach, of course. But Arnold, while remaining jovial on the line from his Hollywood home, is taking it hard.

“It threw me for a loop this morning,” he says.

There are personal reasons for this. While he is an Iowa native, Arnold began his career as a standup comedian in Prince’s hometown of Minneapolis.

He worked and performed at the music club First Avenue and was heavily immersed in the scene by the time parts of 1984’s Purple Rain were shot there. The two entertainers met and got to know each other.

In 1997, Prince invited Arnold on stage to sing 1999 with him at the Hollywood Bowl. Somehow Arnold managed to forget the eight or so words to the chorus, so Prince “danced around me and mocked me.”

Just a week before this interview, Arnold was interviewed for a book being written about First Avenue. He talked at length about Prince.

“It’s a sad day,” says Arnold, 57. “When you get to my age, you look around and you say ‘Who is still doing it? Who is still youthful? Who is older than me who is still just doing it?’

“Because when you have little kids, you have to be youthful at least until they are in college. That’s a long time. I’ve got a threeyear-old and a three-month-old. It was always Prince is older than me ... Madonna is older than me and Sharon Stone is older than me and they’re all doing it.

“It’s just, you know, life is short,” he says. “Enjoy it.”

Such things make him think of his own mortality.

Back in the days when Arnold was a drug- and alcohol-addled, overweight, paparazzi-attracting husband (and then ex-husband) of comedian Roseanne Barr, it’s safe to say not many were predicting his own longevity.

But he has proven to have a proverbial nine lives in show business, graduating from that early famousby-association status to become a surprisingly effective character actor, TV host, author and celebrity in his own right. Through it all, he has maintained his first love of standup comedy.

Arguably, one of the reasons he endures is because he bases his comedy on honest appraisals of his own life. That includes not only the universal stuff such as relationships, fatherhood and health, but the stuff everyone wants to hear about: the fame, the drugs, the recovery, the marriages, the weight loss, the tabloids.

“So you can talk about how bad things were and have fun with that for quite a while if the audience knows that, at the end of it, it turns out OK. The audience is with you, they don’t want to just hear about failures. But, to me, comedy is about the MC giving you an intro that is fantastic about all the things you’ve done — the 130 movies, the Golden Globe, whatever — and then you spend the next 75 minutes destroying everything good he has said about you and making fun of yourself. That’s really what comedy is.”

That’s certainly the approach Arnold takes in the 10th season of the Canadian cult series Trailer Park Boys, now streaming on Netflix. He plays what he calls a “hyper version” of Tom Arnold for a threeepisode arc.