Artie Lange resurfaces with message for Howard Stern: 'I love him to death and I miss him'
Comedian Artie Lange, who’s completing a drug court rehab program in New Jersey, is missing his old friend Howard Stern.
Lange was captured on video, in a clip his team shared on social media, working at a gas station as part of a drug court rehab program. A noticeably slimmer Lange had a message for Stern, his former boss on The Howard Stern Show.
Lange was Stern’s sidekick from 2001 to 2009, when he took what was originally a hiatus to deal with his addiction to drugs and alcohol. After a January 2010 suicide attempt, he never returned to his position, although Stern said Lange wanted to be back on the air. It was messy.
Both have kind words for each other now.
“If this gets back to Howard, tell him I love him,” the Crashing star said in the new footage. “I love him to death and I miss him.”
We at #TeamArtie wanted to share this with everybody. https://t.co/PvWScP7DOQ
— Artie Lange (@artiequitter) May 15, 2019
The team at the Radio Misfits podcast first shared the undated video on Wednesday. They described it as having been taken “recently.”
Just a week ago, Stern spoke out about his relationship (or lack of one) with Lange in the New York Times Magazine. The shock jock was asked if there was a possibility Lange could ever come back on his show.
“I choose my words about Artie carefully, because I love him,” Stern said. “What’s happening with Artie makes me very sad. We’ve lost touch, and that’s my doing. I got my fingers crossed for the guy. And it wasn’t a clean break. It was many years of wanting Artie to get help. I know that a lot of fans want me to talk about Artie and feel it’s a cop-out for me not to. I’ll take that. I don’t want to do anything that would rock his boat. I get sad talking about Artie. He was a tremendous contributor. But we had to move on.”
This is quite a change from their relationship in February 2017, at least according to Lange’s words to Philly Voice. He had been asked whether the two spoke after his departure.
“No, no. We hate each other’s guts. It had a terrible ending,” Lange said. “I became a heroin addict. I fell asleep on his show. That led to a fight and that’s what happens — then you go into rehab and, you know, they tell you, you lose friends.”
Lange was sentenced to four years of probation in 2018 for heroin possession. After he was found to have violated probation by testing positive for cocaine during it, he went to jail for roughly two weeks in January.
Lange assured the person behind the camera in the new video that he plans to return to comedy.
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