Comedian on the Art of survival
ARTIE LANGE nearly crashed for good. The sometimes calamitous comic says he’s lucky to be alive after collapsing during a show in Chicago last month, which led to emergency surgery for an infection stemming from years of drug abuse. “I’ve got nine lives, I guess,” Lange (inset) told Daily News reporter Amy Rowe on Wednesday night at the Bell House in Brooklyn, where he and his partner Pete Holmes performed standup for “Crashing Comedy Night.” Lange and Holmes are currently filming the second season of the Judd Apatow HBO project “Crashing.” “They had to open my chest to get a bunch of badness out of there,” according to Lange. The troubled comedian has a well-documented history of substance abuse, including a March arrest for heroin possession, and missed his June court date to answer to those charges. Lange tweeted at the time that the missed court date was a miscommunication and he planned to make things right with the Hoboken police.
Lange doesn’t speak like a man who is at the end of the rope.
“I’m looking to spread my seed,” he joked. But first, he has to get healthy.
“I’m like a defensive back for the Jets,” he said. “I’m still taking antibiotics to get rid of the infection. It was harrowing, this time it really scared me.”
That’s saying something for the 49-year-old comic, who attempted to kill himself in 2010 by drinking bleach and repeatedly stabbing himself with a kitchen knife. That was his second suicide attempt. Lange is slated to perform standup in Fairfield, Conn., on Aug. 19. While he may be a questionable role model, he says he’s always happy to spread wisdom to an up-and-coming comedian.
“I really do have a thing in me where I try to be generous to younger comics,” Lange says. “I feel really bad for them, especially people who have to move from another state, because I didn’t have to do that.”