Hank the Angry, Drunken Dwarf is dead.
The 4-foot-1 Howard Stern sidekick, known for being, well,
drunk and angry, died Tuesday at the
age of 39. The cause of death was not immediately disclosed.
Born Henry Nasiff, the diminutive performer got his break in
1996, when he and a friend from Boston
dinner theater (yes, Hank was in dinner theater) drove to New
York City and decided to try to get on
the Stern show. Hank's vigil at New York's K-Rock studios began
at about 5:30 a.m., and the Stern
crew quickly took notice.
As Doug Z. Goodstein, Hank's manager and the producer of Stern's
E! TV show, once recounted to
E! Online, "There was just a compelling feature of a drunk,
belligerent midget." (As Hank was fond of
yelling, "I'm not a midget, I'm a dwarf, you a--hole.)"
He soon become a recurring member of Stern's so-called "Wack
Pack," joining the likes of Crackhead
Bob and the Elephant Boy in Howard's pantheon of oddballs.
Hank appeared more than two dozen times on the Stern show, most
notably outfitted in a pink bunny
suit and always sounding off in his inimitable way.
He parlayed his fame into a Website, www.hankthedwarf.com (where
fans could snap up official
"Hank Says: Don't Drive & Drink" key chains), and a side
career entertaining at parties (for a fee, he'd
karaoke, lapdance, bartend or hurl insults at guests).
Hank hit his pop-culture high point in 1998, when, thanks to
a grassroots campaign by Stern faithful, he
was named the Most Beautiful Person in the World per a 1998
People online poll.