Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf

Hank received widespread media coverage in 1998 when he won a People magazine online poll asking the public to vote for the most beautiful person in the world as part of the run up promotion for the magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People" issue. When the public was given the option to submit a write-in candidate, the magazine had not counted on 230,169 votes for Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf—beating out assorted celebrities by a wide margin. In third place was Leonardo DiCaprio with 14,471 votes. In the relatively still early years of public participation on the Internet, various media critics picked up on this, wondering whether this was evidence of an emerging digital democracy. Talk of Hank's death in the media was cut short by the events of 9/11. Early in the 8 O'Clock hour of the Stern Show on 9/11, Stern was interviewing an executive from the E! channel who said that they were going to produce an E! True Hollywood Story about Hank and that Hank actually had quite a few friends in the entertainment industry. (The first plane crashed into the World Trade Center at 8:46am). The episode, "Hank the Angry Dwarf", aired February 20, 2002, according to TV Guide On the afternoon of September 4, 2001, Hank died in his sleep at the home he shared with his parents in Fall River. His mother discovered that he had died when she went to wake him. He was 39 years old. His death certificate listed his immediate cause of death as a seizure disorder, with ethanol abuse and chondrodystrophy as contributing factors. Hank is buried at the Notre Dame Cemetery in Fall River, Massachusetts. The next day, Howard Stern devoted most of the show to Hank.

Hank's mother, Claudette, called into the Stern Show on September 10, 2001 to publicly thank everyone who attended Hank's funeral and wake. She also thanked everyone who e-mailed, and sent their condolences. She told an anecdote about how someone in the family had put a can of beer in Hank's casket. She said that "someone else slipped a bottle of Jack Daniel's in under Hank's coat."[41] She ultimately left the items in the casket because she said that's what Hank would have wanted.