the Artie Lange appreciation thread

i love artie. i'll always love him, for ruining joe buck's horrible show. lmao @ jeff's gif upthread

He really should get back on Stern it's so boooring without him.

agree maresnest!

On another note I was really happen to realize, about halfway through the show last week, that Artie is still really funny. He's committed a ton of weird shit to his brain (cf the Raiders poem, lines from Raging Bull) and his subtle self-deprecation is great.

To be honest it sounds like the last year and a half never happened.

what thread were we talking about the nick and artie show on?

i still love it.

i love the can't-tell-if-it's-real bitterness between nick and artie. when artie busts nick's balls for doing p90x or dyeing his hair and there seems to be real conflict between them. nick becomes genuinely upset talking about things like talkshow appearances or artie talking about his bigtime radio days. i love nick trying to talk about college basketball and giving up, saying, "hey, we're trying to get more sports stations to come aboard. i'm trying, upper management... i'm trying..." while artie does lines from the pope of greenwich village over a sinatra song or talks to a caller from union, new jersey, asking about specific streets, "ah, so you went to school with sheetrock jimmy, right?"

and i dunno, there's something about him... a new meanness that i never heard before and this weird resigned sadness that's not sad like he was before, where you wondered why he was so fucked up and sad. you know he tried to cut open his stomach and all the details of the last five years of his life. i don't know, he talks about the tragedies of his life and it's this inexpressibly bitter fucked up thing he went through but he's okay and alive, even if he sounds a bit sad. i can hear that he's happier and more self-aware, i guess.

i like the regulars... the guy that called up who had pancreatitis and artie counselled him to quit drinking because it'll fuck up his pancreas and try snorting painkillers. the guy sadly answers, yeah i tried that. mike in milwaukee. the guy in south carolina whose wife called up and busted nick's balls. the kid with the guatemalan girlfriend that came up to the studio.

it's everyday so you hear the same bits worked over and over again and that gets kind of old.

download a few third hours of the show, where they just fuck around.

thanks, sounds like I will have to jump back into this

Is it worth listening to if I don't care about sports?

If you're a fan of Artie, I would give it a try. The sports theme is just to provide structure and a topic to fall back on.

Ah cool, thx!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuGaDjX9cn8

the sportstalk thing has fallen away fast. it's more gossipy stuff about pro sports culture if anything.

the last time dude from yahoo sports called, artie derailed the conversation by asking if he'd ever slept with a black woman.

and a lot of the time it's like this:

nick: okay, we're back. twenty five past the hour. artie, there's talk wes welker could be moved to the bengals.
artie: who's that?

then an anecdote about a diner on the jersey turnpike or WHATEVER

nick: "i think it's clear that they don't intend to use tebow as a backup. they'll use him as an h-back, tight end, wildcat..."
artie: "wildcat like that goldie hawn movie? you ever see the end of the wildcat movie with goldie hawn? look that up. wesley snipes is currently in prison. i lose sleep over that."

They should devote a show to the movie Running Scared

http://https%3A//p.twimg.com/ArSnr1fCMAAUbPP.jpg

okay fine

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/ArSnr1fCMAAUbPP.jpg

who dat?

ahem

chapter six: fucking making straight up decisions now, dude. as my epic comeback nears its zenith, I can't help but look back at the low times when there was no hope or light. there's an old expression that's got at me through the dark valleys and hazy cul-de-sacs of life: nut up or sack up. it means when life gets you all swirly and thought-ridden, shut it out. let the two spherical sperm factories underneath your dick take over. they don't think, they don't get confused. they churn and attack. and in moments of doubt, my default setting is always to attack, whether it be a hitter or an ump or a loved one who has stepped out of line. not everyone can achieve their dreams in this world. that's because most people have things like feelings and sentimental attachments, nagging shit that keeps them from making the tough decisions that are necessary to get to the ultimate top. unfortunately, in the rocket ship of fame there's only room for one. any added baggage will just weigh you down, hold you back from shooting for the fucking stars. blast off bitch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51JSNYsF5fI

i've got a lot of time to kill at work right now and i've just sat through a 78 hour "best of artie lange" compilation on youtube. it wasn't edited very well but it had the highlights and a few appearances on bubba and other shows that i hadn't heard before and i enjoyed it.

i checked out the first week of the artie lange solo show, after nick left, and i wasn't into it. nick dipaolo was a creepy racist sexist prickly presence and the obvious tension with artie, especially toward the end, made me deeply uncomfortable. but he kept things on track. the new show, without nick, i hate the way the studio looks, i find artie boring as hell, the guests are weak and he has no rapport with them. it's one thing to relisten to old stories but hearing him recycle bits i've heard a dozen times... i find it sad-- not just sad to hear him talk about doing coke and madtv for the hundredth time but... i can't fully explain it, but there's a difference, the way he retells the stories now, a different mode of storytelling, a different voice. i think the show is a disaster. that's what i want to say.

calstars, have you seen any of the show?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8Ui3RNaFWY

dana :((((

this fuckin chaunce hayden guy. this fuckin interview.

I am revisiting the second Fight Week from a couple of years back, has the great 'you're not my bro' Stern v Artie blow-up

I think the problem is that artie is probably the world's best ed mcmahon, but he's no Johnny or Howard.

I saw a 15 min clip of the new show (who's the guy co-hosting?) and it was snoozesville. As long as Howard is still on, I'm not going to spend another >10 hours per week listening to Artie.

i just listened to the bro fight again last night, too. i always felt artie was completely justified in being insulted by the whole bit.

i mean, this was some fucking girl bob levy found on the internet with a supposed fat fetish. hearing robin intentionally returning to the conversation over and over to stir things up is distasteful.

"bob levy is basically jeffrey dahmer, if he read a joke book. and, you know, that sounds a little harsh but i love the guy. and, uh, he gets out there on the internet and stalks these women and throws out this web of... deceit and sleaziness and hair dye and bad coke, whiskey beer breath, and cheap fuckin target shirts and coupons for sizzlers two-for-one steak on a wednesday, forty thousand dollar house just outside of philly, which somehow has a built-in pool [gary: it came with the house], have no idea what the fuck that looks like... uhhhh... his poor child who's being raised by a father who's just not there and a mother who hates being with the father... the father's in the basement, it's damp, clearly doesn't have the proper heat or air conditioning, somehow he gets over to this disgusting, jizz-drenched, stinky, whiskey-sodden computer board and types out, 'who's out there? who's out there in fuckin virgin creep land that i can try to fuck with my web of grossness?' and eventually he gets some takers, some poor women who have a background that's clearly, uh... troubling... this girl has father issues, her father is some mad irish drunk and uh [gary: we don't know that] she has dyed black hair...."

lol, classic rant

gary such a moron

"it's damp"

the bro fight was so entertaining because it was a great example of when staff break through the sycophantic bubble around Howard. Fred and Robin would never do something like that now, they're too dependent on Howard's good graces for their retirement funds.

which makes the show less interesting

robin is such an important part of the show and i'll always defend her when criticisms beyond "she's a cunt" or "she just parrots what howard says" come up. but man oh man the way she treated artie during the bro fight and during that time period was greasy. despite howard claiming to have teared up during the argument, artie was hitting him with hard reality and he could only retreat behind "yeah, it was a bit but hey, i thought you might really like her."

as much as sadsack artie means to me, i've always liked him getting out the poison in venemous sprees of ballbusting. i find it easier to say i like it when he goes up against worthy targets, who can hit back in some way, even if they're hacks like levy or sal or dice. but it's still enjoyable to see him unleashing on guys like high pitch mike.

You can really hear Howard reaching to make a memorable bit out of the whole sitch, constantly returning to 'how dare you call me a jerk, no more hookups for you' which is of course fine by Artie, I had a look on YouTube and was kinda shocked at the state of him (Artie), that must have been when he was at his largest, he's like a big somnambulant balloon. is this The Stern Show at it's ugliest?

when i go back to a lot of the artie incidents, i have a lot less sympathy for the key players. when he offers subutex to the homeless kid, the way that howard and robin alternate between sympathy and relentlessly dragging the story out of him-- maybe it's because i know what came next, the facts behind his fucked up life at the time have come out, and he later talked about his discomfort with the reaction, for example, the series of "artie's on heroin" songs that came out immediately after... it's an uncomfortable experience to revisit those episodes.

I have a feeling that when it's all over there might be a torrent of embittered books and articles from the key players, and probably the periphery.

artie loves pancakes
he eats them up with chocolate cakes
he's gaining so much goddamned weight
cause artie loves pancakes

http://youtu.be/w21T5eLN1T8

The new WTF podcast with Maron is excellent. This man has some stories.

Someone on SFN said they were the same old stories

http://blogs.wsj.com/dailyfix/2014/03/23/kentucky-derby-watch-chitu-we-miss-artie-emerge-as-contenders/

now I have a horse to bet on

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BlSVo1cCYAEHruQ.jpg

Oh shit. What happened?

Diabetic shock whilst on tour apparently.

hmm

He's so lost, wish he was a happier dude.

back on the show after two weeks (one scheduled vacation week): "i don't have wake up calls, i tell people i've had wake up calls... but this time it's different, this is a real wake up call."

two days into the return, he's done.

What's the story now?

Yeah did he announce something on the show?

not really.
direct tv wants out of the deal, a few months before the deal actually expires.
he's got another deal in the works, noting that his new project would allow him to swear again, advised a caller that sometimes makes prank calls to stockpile new calls.