There’s no Chris Farley story that I won’t read, especially if it involves him getting kicked out of a strip club for dancing naked.
Tom Arnold was a guest this week on The Howard Stern Show, where he talked about his friendship with Farley, including when he was the late SNL great’s sober sponsor. “Lorne Michaels called me and said, ‘You have a lot in common with Chris Farley. Would you please spend time with him?’ He wanted to be sober and I think Lorne was really worried about that, so I was his sponsor for a few years,” the Roseanne star recalled. His advice for Farley: “I always told Chris, you can’t be fat and do drugs, you just can’t. You gotta pick one. I can speak from experience. Pick one, you can’t do everything.”
Later in the interview, Arnold discussed one of his favorite memories with Farley.
Farley wound up being Arnold’s best man at the actor’s 1995 wedding to Julie Lynn Champnella. Tom told Howard that they had a bachelor party at Scores strip club, where Chris stole the spotlight. “What happened was, all the guys, David Spade was in the wedding, there was a lot of guys… and then Farley disappeared,” Arnold recalled. “And then came on stage, naked.”
Everyone in their group got “kicked out” of the strip club due to Farley’s antics, but Arnold wasn’t mad. “He’s a big guy and he did not mind being naked,” he said.
Farley taking his clothes off at a strip club of course brings to mind the famous Chippendales sketch on SNL, where he dances alongside peak-hunk Patrick Swayze. Arnold remembers his phone call with Farley about the sketch. “He called me that week and said, ‘I am so embarrassed. They wrote me this thing, it’s embarrassing because I’ll be the fat guy next to Patrick Swayze, what do you think?’ I think if you could be the funniest fat guy ever doing this thing, then you should do it and you should really go for it,” he said. “He was naked a lot. There’s no shame in his game.”