Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [103]
Anyway, the audience in Burbank that night laughed with-Martin-at-him and, also anyway, this was as much unmasked truth as anyone needed to consider at present, if ever.
He conceived another one whom he felt was as lovable as the one they all loved a little too much. So he and Zmuda wrote a pilot script for a series about this other sort of hapless fellow and this fellow’s friend. ABC had promised him money as part of his deal to write such a script anyway and since they didn’t like the special maybe they would consider this and so he and Zmuda wrote through most of that January and completed their final draft on February 1 for a show called Fingers and Knuckles. The episode, entitled “Easy Come, Easy Go” (also an Elvis movie) introduced this pair of good-hearted New York street performers—one of whom (Fingers, a.k.a. Zmuda) was a savvy city-hardened operator and the other (Knuckles, a.k.a. Andy) was a sympathetic idiot whom, Andy said, had “just gotten off the bus from the Midwest.” (Privately, he believed Knuckles had incurred brain damage in an auto accident, though that would not be part of the script.) But they were inseparable and often said to each other, “You can’t have fingers without knuckles,” and in the story Knuckles was sent to the store to buy groceries (and not cupcakes, his staff of life) and mistakenly received the wrong bag of groceries belonging to their neighbor lady Mrs. Willowbee and her winning lotto ticket was in the bag and a mean guy then tried to rob them but they subdued him and Mrs. Willowbee gave them a reward with which Knuckles acquired a mountain of cupcakes. ABC hated it. And Andy would lament long thereafter, “Knuckles is my prime creation. That’s one character they will not allow on nationwide TV…. When they read the script and saw the Knuckles character they said, “Look, I mean, face it—this character can’t make it from here to the elevator’ And we said, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ I mean, neither could Lou Costello or Stan Laurel, none of those guys could make it to the elevator…. But this one guy actually said to me what I think is one of the classic lines ever by a network executive. He said, ‘But this is like Laurel and Hardy or something; we want something good like Laverne and Shirley!’ I mean, do you realize what that—? In a nutshell, that’s… Boy.”
Two nights after the visit with Steve Martin, Clifton returned for a three-night engagement as Andy’s opening act at the Comedy Store. “Mr. Clifton requests that all cigarettes and tobacco smoke be extinguished before he will perform for you tonight,” Zmuda announced to the house from backstage, whereupon customers grumbled and snuffed accordingly, whereupon the spackle-faced Clifton (eventually) stepped forth dragging fitfully on a cigarette—and fresh new hostility was minted. Four pedigreed comedy writer-producers, all former brain-trust alums of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, were present for one such performance, specifically to assess the potential of Foreign Man as part of a new ensemble situation comedy they had been given carte blanche from ABC to put directly onto the network air, no pilot script necessary. Their names were James L. Brooks, Ed. Weinberger, Stan Daniels and Dave Davis—all brainy TV golden boys of the highest order—and they watched Clifton and enjoyed Clifton, and George Shapiro, who knew exactly why they were there, whispered to Weinberger and Brooks, “You guys can’t acknowledge this to Andy, but he’s Tony Clifton.” “And that,” Brooks would recall “just blew our minds. Because we all thought of ourselves as pretty sophisticated in the realm of comedy theater