Tom Arnold recovering from broken back

Comedian and actor Tom Arnold, a native of Ottumwa, is even able to joke about breaking his back in August in an Iowa City hotel room.

“I fell out of bed,’” he told MSN, calling it “a terrible old man injury.”

“Thank God I broke my back in Iowa because they did a great job,” he said on a recent podcast.

The 66-year-old actor, known for playing Arnie Thomas in “Roseanne” and starring alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis in “True Lies,” is still recovering in Los Angeles, where he lives. He canceled a speaking engagement in Lincoln, Nebraska, this week because of health reasons, the Omaha-World Herald reported.

Arnold was scheduled to speak about addiction, hoping to inspire people and help save lives. The actor — who has had a lifelong struggle with addiction — celebrated nine years of being “clean” on July 17.

Before he was injured, Arnold was on a national stand-up tour titled “My Crazy X-Wife.” The show is about his co-parenting struggles with his fourth ex-wife and not his marriage to comedian Roseanne Barr in the early 1990s.

Arnold said he woke up in the dark in his Iowa City hotel room to use the bathroom.

“I didn’t turn the light on and fell backwards onto the floor and I couldn’t get up,” he said. “I tried for four hours. It was so freaking painful.”

Arnold had fractured a vertebra near his tailbone. The bone shattered and nearly pierced his spinal cord. He underwent emergency surgery at the University of Iowa Hospitals, he said on the “Unleashed” podcast.

Arnold also said on the podcast he’s getting ready to have heart surgery but provided no details.

In a January interview with The Gazette, Arnold talked about how it was his childhood dream to leave for Hollywood, though he’s retained his lifelong affection for the Iowa Hawkeyes, attending numerous football games over the years.

Arnold studied business administration and writing at the University of Iowa before moving to Los Angeles to work as a stand-up comedian. Barr hired him as a writer for her sitcom, "Roseanne," which debuted in 1988. The blue-collar comedy was the highest rated show on television in 1989 and 1990. Arnold worked on scripts but then began performing on the show when he and Barr were dating.

Arnold has appeared in hundreds of films.

“But only about four are good,” Arnold told The Gazette. “I was at a Comic Con with John Cena, and we were both in ‘Fred 3: Camp Fred.’ I remember saying, ‘This is the biggest piece of crap!’ But my daughter loves it. When she’s over at her mother’s house, she insists that her mom play it, so the movie is good for something.”