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have to spoil it for everyone!’ I loved it.” On the second night, a small German man rushed the stage wielding a penknife and threatened, I CAN’T TAKE IT! NOW GET ZE HELL OFF! Vince Prentice, who had taken over Cliftonian makeup chores, apprehended the perpetrator, whom security mistook as a plant. Clifton then dodged exploding beer cans and a bottle of Southern Comfort—“That was a glass bottle and you’re a fuckin’ asshole!” he brayed at the assailant, then elected to sing his final three numbers while hiding in the wings. On the third night, triple-folded fishnet would be lowered in front of the stage and Clifton would don a riot-squad helmet with plastic face-guard, which was most advisable, because fruit and vegetables were now on sale in the lobby and much produce was heaved, as were coins and eggs and banana cake. It was a blistering apple, however, that tore through the net and crashed squarely into the faceguard and disintegrated on impact—which sent Clifton teetering offstage, where he completed his performance and retreated to his dressing room. Hirshey found him there, crowing triumphantly about the whole experience. But Clifton also warned him, “Watch yerself! You print that I’m Andy Kough-man and I’ll sue yer ass! I’ll sue Bowling Green’s ass!” Meanwhile, Hirshey had received a phone call in his hotel room earlier that day from Andy, who said he was down in Los Angeles. Hirshey mentioned that someone had thrown a bottle at Clifton the night before. Andy said, “Really? Are you sure it wasn’t his manager?”

On Friday, February 20, the disregard found new plateau. Saturday Night Live had left him to twist alone toward madness; he had not been asked to return since the wrestling anticlimax fourteen months earlier. (Moreover, the show had fallen into notorious disrepair after the abdication of Lorne Michaels in May 1980.) Thus, Andy trucked with the upstart enemy: He hosted ABC-TV’s Fridays—a Los Angeles-based live sketch-comedy replication whose limp ratings invited drastic attention-getting measures. He began plotting with producer John Moffitt on the Sunday before the broadcast and said he wanted to open the show by bombing so as to challenge the audience from the outset. George, who was present, tried to convince him otherwise: I had a disagreement with him again because we both know I hate the bombing routine and he thinks very highly of it. I find it boring—if you do not entertain an audience, you fail as an entertainer, and I do not want him to fail, even if he is willing to fail. (He would settle, in the end, for opening as Laughing Man, deliriously convulsed and blithering incoherently, whose first intelligible words were Ohhh, I need help, I need help.)

He also proposed a piece called the Masked Magician, wherein Zmuda would disguise himself as a disgruntled illusionist (barely obscured in a ski mask) and reveal the secrets of the interlinking rings and basic sword-swallowing; Andy would help plunge a sword—a bit overzealously—down Zmuda’s gullet, and Zmuda would then regurgitate blood and intestinal matter and Andy would vomit vegetable soup. (By airtime, network censors would permit Zmuda only bloody spittle and no guts or vomit whatsoever.) Fridays writers, meanwhile, prepared two sketch pieces for him—a Point/Counterpoint debate with himself concerning federal arts-funding and a show-closing restaurant sketch called “Marijuana” in which he and three regular cast members, as two couples, would each take turns going into the bathroom, ostensibly to smoke dope, then return to their table quite stupefied.

Andy called a private meeting midweek and suggested a notion to Moffitt, coproducer Jack Burns, and network executive Vic Kaplan. “It was his idea,” Moffitt would recall. “He presented it in a very straight-ahead and serious fashion. He said, ‘This is what I’m gonna do. I want to rehearse the marijuana sketch as planned until we’re on the air and then I want to break out of it. I’m gonna say—but only on the air—that it’s a silly sketch and I’m just not gonna finish it. I want to break the wall of reality