Tom Arnold says Chris Farley dancing naked on stage got his bachelor party ejected from strip club
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Tom Arnold had a bachelor party to remember, thanks to his best man Chris Farley.
The comedian revealed that ahead of one of his weddings in the '90s, the Saturday Night Live breakout got the entire group, which included David Spade, kicked out of the strip club Scores following a risqué move.
"Farley disappeared and then came on stage naked, and then they ended up kicking everybody out," Arnold told Howard Stern in an interview posted on Wednesday. "I mean, he was a big guy. He did not mind being naked."
While Farley didn't mind showing skin, the former Roseanne star said the actor confessed he was "embarrassed" by the now-famous Chippendales sketch that featured him and Patrick Swayze dancing shirtless.
"He called me that week and he said, 'I am so embarrassed. They wrote me this thing and it's [embarrassing] because I'll be the fat guy next to Patrick Swayze," Arnold recounted.
Farley then asked Arnold what he should do, and the actor encouraged him to do it.
"I said, 'If you could be the funniest fat guy ever doing this thing, then you should do it and you should really go for it,'" Arnold continued. "He was naked a lot. There's no shame in his game."
Recently, longtime SNL writer Robert Smigel went on The Howard Stern Show and defended the Chippendales sketch, calling it "very empowering." His fellow SNL alum Chris Rock had another take.
"I'm not going to say Farley dancing as a Chippendales dancer isn't funny. But at the end of the sketch, the guy comes up to Farley and goes, 'You're fat, disgusting,'" Rock explained.
In his interview with Stern, Arnold also revealed that his friendship with Farley began thanks to SNL's Lorne Michaels. "Lorne Michaels called me. He says, 'You have a lot in common with Chris Farley, would you please spend time with him?'" Arnold said. "He wanted to be sober, and I think Lorne really worried about that, and so I was his sponsor for a few years."
Both hailing from the Midwest, the pair would go to football games together, and they became "very close," Arnold explained. Farley would stay with him too when he was in town to appear on Arnold's show.
Berliner Studio/BEI/Shutterstock Tom Arnold and Chris Farley
"I got to know his whole family. And you know, he'd like to have fun and he had too much fun. Very sad when he died," Arnold said.
Farley died after a drug overdose in December 1997, and Arnold said he was "on his way to his 17th rehab."
Prior to that, Arnold said the two had grown apart, surmising that it was because Farley didn't want him "to see" and disapprove of his lifestyle.
"I always told Chris: 'You can't be fat and do drugs, you just can't be that fat. You got to pick one and I know, I speak from experience - pick one. You just can't do everything,'" Arnold recalled. The actor, who's now sober, has spoken about his past addictions.
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