His career went through two very distinct phases. In the earlier one he
was enormously fat, and most of the skits he acted in were played on
that; pretty famous was the one where he made an impression of the
100-pounds French singer Edith Piaf. In a second moment of his career
he lost, by diet or possibly surgery, about 110 pounds, and he became
mostly famous for his style in telling jokes. He used to refer to his
former career as "Cinquanta chili fa" (fifty kilos ago).