Clarke Less Than What He Appears

Meet Lenny Clarke. Stand-up comic. Sitcom actor. Diet guru.

No, this is not a joke. While Clarke spends much of his time on “The Job” playing languid detective Frank Harrigan--who’s constantly stuffing himself with doughnuts, Chinese food, birthday cake or whatever else he can inhale--these days he just plays a funny fat guy on television.

Off-screen, the actor has dropped nearly 100 pounds since November, from tipping the scales at 326 to recently weighing in at 230. And he’s dropping weight daily, with a strict diet and exercise regimen, aiming to slim down to a svelte 200 pounds. It’s all he can talk about these days, and he’s finding plenty of willing listeners.

“He was talking about it on ‘The View’ today,” Denis Leary said during an afternoon phone conversation from New York a few weeks ago, after he and Clarke wrapped up their chat with Barbara Walters and company for what was supposed to be an appearance to promote the new season of the salty cop comedy (created by Leary and writer Peter Tolan), which returned to the ABC lineup in January.

“It was really funny, because when we got up there, he sat down on the couch and just kind of took over and started talking about his diet, and all these women in the audience couldn’t wait to hear about this guy’s diet,” Leary said.

“I’m seriously thinking about writing a book,” Clarke said enthusiastically on the phone from New York. “You know Richard Simmons dances around in his little hot pants, and he’s still kind of chubby-looking to me. This is a guy who made billions of dollars trying to get people to lose weight. But I don’t know a lot of guys who want to dress up in hot pants and jump around to oldies music.”

For the remaining eight episodes this season, Clarke will look like his old self. But Leary is already making plans to let Clarke flaunt his new physique next season--assuming there is a next season--if only for a short time.

Said Leary, “We’re writing an episode where Frank’s been on vacation for a few weeks, and he comes back having lost all this weight, and we’re all like, ‘Oh, my God!’ And he says, ‘Yes, I feel like a new man.’ So all of us, individually, decide to quit our main vices. ... Then he goes away for a couple more weeks of vacation and comes back with all the weight gained back, and we’re like, ‘Oh, great!’”

The issue of a third season for “The Job” remains up in the air. Consistently bested in its 9:30 p.m. Wednesday time slot by NBC’s White House stalwart “The West Wing,” “The Job” has yet to find a sizable audience.

Talking about the wretched ratings game, Clarke said, gives him a weird sense of a deja vu to his own self-titled CBS series “Lenny.” CBS’ answer to ABC’s hit blue-collar queen “Roseanne,” the 1990 sitcom starred Clarke as a working-class stiff from Boston, juggling two jobs, a wife, kids, his parents, a no-good brother and an onslaught of money problems.

“Lenny” premiered to generally good reviews and plenty of hype from CBS but a tepid audience response--perhaps abetted by constant time shifting and preemptions for coverage of the Gulf War. By March 1991, the comedy was yanked off the air.

“I felt ‘Lenny’ was a great show. I felt it was a quality show. That’s why I hope that ABC gives us time to develop an audience [for ‘The Job’],” Clarke said.

Hollywood was--and still is, to a certain degree--a bit daunting for the Boston native, the oldest son of eight children from a working-class, Irish-Catholic family. But then again, he never actually thought he’d be in show business in the first place.

While studying political science at the University of Massachusetts, Clarke worked as a janitor in Cambridge City Hall. One night he went to the Ding Ho Chinese Restaurant in Boston to watch some comedians perform and decided to give stand-up a try.

He returned the following week, telling the owners he had lots of experience working the Las Vegas club circuit. They gave him his first shot onstage. But because he hadn’t developed any of his own material, he stole a routine he’d heard days earlier from a Woody Allen album.

“Everyone told me I was great, and then this little man came backstage and said, ‘Mr. Clarke, you’re very, very funny, but you don’t need to be doing other people’s material.’ From that day on, I’ve never done anyone else’s material. But I bombed for a long time,” Clarke said.

It took 15 years of stand-up to lead Clarke to the Montreal Comedy Festival in Toronto, launching his television career. Still, with two failed shows under his belt (the other a short-lived Fox variety series, “The Sunday Comics,” of which he was host), Clarke found his personal life spiraling out of control.

“When I started ‘The John Larroquette Show’ [in 1993], if you can believe this, I was 176 pounds,” he said. “I’d gone through a divorce. I had lost ‘Lenny.’ I had lost ‘The Sunday Comics.’ I had lost my nice house in Marina del Rey. I’d lost everything. I was so depressed. Then I get ‘The Larroquette Show,’ and I was really into craft services. I just went nuts. I gained 200 pounds doing that show.”

Clarke now eats one meal a day, works out three times daily and can be seen swimming, surfing or jogging near his Martha’s Vineyard home, which he bought five years ago with his second wife, Jennifer, a charter fishing boat captain.

As for his career, things are good, Clarke said. Last week, he was in New York taping his first stand-up special for “Comedy Central Presents ... ,” which begins its new season this spring. He also has a cameo role in the film “Baby’s in Black,” with Dustin Hoffman. “I play a loud, drunk guy in a bar. Not a big stretch. But I’ve got to tell you, it was a really enjoyable experience,” Clarke said.

In the meantime, he’s waiting for word on “The Job”--and whether he’ll have one this fall. “I just hope and pray that we make it,” Clarke said, “because I’ve never had more fun doing anything in my life, except for sex.... Even when it’s bad, it’s great.”*

“The Job” is shown Wednesday nights at 9:30 on ABC. The network has rated this week’s episode TV-14-L (may be unsuitable for children under 14, with a special advisory for coarse language).