America's Biggest Loser

In his foreword to Lange's book, Stern puts it another way. "He's fucked up!" he writes. "That's it. He's fucked up. He's just like us, only 10 million times worse."

Here are the ways that Lange is fucked up: He can't get into a relationship that lasts longer than six months. He likes to blame other people for his problems. He lies a lot. He eats a lot. His chin and cheeks are swollen from eating too much, giving his face the look of a pear. He ate a whole pizza the other night, just having the blues. He is uncouth and thin-skinned. He will do anything for a laugh. When he was younger and pulling goofs to get girls' attention, he once slipped a robbery note to a cute bank teller, in an hommage to Woody Allen's Take the Money and Run, resulting in one of his many arrests.

As in every good Italian family, Lange's mother is a saint, and his father was a scoundrel. On the day Junior was born, the elder Lange was on trial for keeping $200,000 in counterfeit bills at their house in Union, New Jersey, for a loan shark. "In my neighborhood, we were always taught that the mob didn't exist, but if they did, they were very nice people," says Lange. After his dad fell, Lange tried to be the man of the house — losing his virginity to a Brazilian hooker in the back seat of his dad's handicap van was the first step. He took a job as a longshoreman at Port Newark, where he unloaded orange-juice concentrate from South America between meatball breakfasts and visits to his bookie. At 24, he quit the union to pursue his dream of becoming a comedian, working as a cabdriver for cash. When he booked sets in Manhattan, he'd double-park his taxi in front of the club, run in for 20 minutes, then clock back into the job.

In 1995, after only three years on the stand-up circuit, Lange caught his break: He was cast as an original member of MADtv, the Fox sketch-comedy show. He moved to Los Angeles. For whatever reason — again, we could speculate on his deep need to screw up — he developed an addiction to cocaine, even drinking it in glasses of Jack Daniels when his nose became too sore for another line. At 28, he tried to commit suicide with pills and whiskey. "I was 100 percent serious about dying," he explains.

Lange didn't take rehab seriously — he paid off the director of the center to write him a note saying that he was able to take a role in the film Dirty Work — but Chris Farley's death, from booze and speedballs, shook him to the core. "I'd just been with him, and I'd even tried to bang the same hooker that he had — just so I could say I'd done it," says Lange. "I couldn't believe he died." He went straight for a while, until he began to feel lonely when he did stand-up. He started to take prescription pills to fill the void. "When I'm on the road, there's always some kid in the audience selling Percocet or Vicodin," says Lange. One night, a dealer gave him some advice. "All that Vicodin is bad for your liver," he told Lange. "Take heroin, man. It's better for your liver."

There's not much that's funny about Lange's heroin addiction, and even he doesn't seem to have a new joke about it. It's brought a fresh roster of shady characters into his life, like a drug-dealing ex-stripper from New Rochelle, New York, with whom he's having a fling. She shot him up in his sleep last year (Lange usually snorts the drug). "She said, 'It's just skin-popping, I didn't tie you,'" he says. "It was 12 hours of euphoria." Then there's the doctor whom Lange pays $1,000 a visit, for the comfort of knowing that he won't leak to the tabloids. A house call is extra dough, as he found out when he missed a Comedy Central roast for Bob Saget this summer, after a binge. "My agent called me and said, 'Comedy Central says you have to come to this thing,'" he says. "'They'll get you an ambulance to take you to a private plane at Teterboro, a private doctor on the jet, and if you still can't do the show when you get to L.A., they'll eat the $65,000 in costs.'" Lange turned them down. "I was like, 'I know these kinds of doctors — if I beg him to shoot me up with morphine, he's going to do it to keep Comedy Central happy. And I'll have a heart attack over Missouri.'"