Saturday Night Live legend Chris Farley served as the best man in comedian Tom Arnold’s wedding. If you’re assuming there must be a story there, you are, of course, correct. The funnyman apparently got the entire bachelor party kicked out of a strip club after he got on stage and took off his clothes.
Tom Arnold was recently on The Howard Stern Show and he reminisced about his buddy Chris Farley. During the conversation, he mentioned that Farley was his best man. The radio host asked him if there was a bachelor party and out came the story, which was sadly a bit light on details. You can read the basic outline of his version of events below…
We did it at Scores… David Spade was in the wedding, there were a lot of guys (there). Farley disappeared and then came on stage naked, and then they ended up kicking everyone out. He was a big guy. He did not mind being naked… He was naked a lot. There was no shame in his game.
Obviously I wish this story was ten minutes long and included way more details, but the basic framework here is just amazing. I love the idea of people sitting in the crowd, waiting to see the next dancer at Scores take the stage and suddenly being blindsided with a naked Chris Farley living it up. What must have been going through their heads? Did he do the Chippendale's routine he did on SNL? Was he asked to get off the stage and he refused, which led to him being kicked out? Or was it just an immediate ejection since he wasn’t one of the designated people that was supposed to be naked? I have so many questions.
Chris Farley was definitely a man capable of pushing things to the edge. That’s actually how he became friends with Tom Arnold. Longtime SNL headman Lorne Michaels apparently pushed the two together because he thought it would help the troubled comedian stay sober. Arnold later became his sponsor and helped him through a lot of ups and downs, but unfortunately, Farley ultimately passed away from a drug overdose. He was just thirty-three.
He’ll always be remembered first for how far he was willing to go for a joke. A lot of his most famous SNL sketches and movie roles involve doing things and pushing comedy to places many others would have been uncomfortable with. Even amidst those over-the-top jokes, however, there was always a more touching and vulnerable side to his comedy. He was able to be very emotionally affecting when he wanted to be, and some of his best work could be subtle and quiet (like in some moments in the Chris Farley Show sketches).
Long story short, Chris Farley is missed by fans and clearly remembered very fondly by those who knew him. I’m convinced there were some really incredible Jim Carrey-style dramatic performance in there somewhere we never got to see, but thankfully, there’s plenty we can still watch and plenty more stories still left to be told, some of which probably involve him getting naked.
