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and create a confrontation—and because I just ruined the show, it should end in a fight.’ He laid it out point by point, and we agreed to do just that as long as he promised no other surprises in the moment. And he gave his word.” No one else on the staff or in the cast would be told with the exception of some writers and the sketch participants, who were Michael Richards, Melanie Chartoff, and Maryedith Burrell—although many would claim that Chartoff and Burrell were also left in the dark. Chartoff, however, said Jack Burns told them just before the sketch, “Stay in character and go with it!”

And so, roughly two minutes into the sketch, it unraveled as planned when he returned from the restaurant bathroom and sat and paused and grinned helplessly and stammered, “I can’t … I can’t play … I can’t play stoned … I feel really stupid … I feel so stupid.” And Burrell began laughing maniacally as though gripped with actual terror. And Chartoff said to him, “You feel stupid?” and quivered. And he remained uncomfortably paralyzed and muttered on about feeling stupid. (Richards would recall, “He just shut down and sat there. And I could just feel that he was just gonna keep on sitting there and let everybody squirm and stink. I realized that he now wanted me to push it to the next level.”) So Richards walked off camera and returned with the cue cards and angrily plopped them in front of Andy, who said, “It’s all in fun—c’mon!” The actors stayed frozen/panicked, whereupon Andy stood and tossed a glass of water at Richards, and Chartoff rose to push a buttered dinner roll into Andy’s hair and Andy threatened to push butter in her face and Burrell kept laughing edgily and Jack Burns, apparently livid, ran onto the set and rushed at Andy, and Andy shoved him and several crew members, who were incensed and afraid of further destruction, stormed forth to intercede in the scuffle and Burns screamed for the director to go to a commercial—and it was all very much like the incident on the closed-circuit campus program Grahm Spotlight on which Burt Dubrow had tackled Andy and called for a commercial after Andy pulled a gun and tried to commit suicide on camera. But this, of course, was bigger and the network switchboards lit like Las Vegas marquees and The New York Times ran a story days later under the headline WAS “FIGHT” ON TV REAL OR STAGED? IT ALL DEPENDS, wherein Tony Schwartz wrote, “It looked like a spontaneous fistfight on live television. Whether it really happened is a matter of interpretation.” And Howard Rosenberg in the Los Angeles Times wrote, “Was it real? Yes, and the Brooklyn Bridge is in Wyoming…. Kaufman, whose schizophrenic comedy consists of reality and fantasy rolled up into one big put-on, convinced a lot of viewers that he had cracked up on the air….”

Stanley and Janice had watched in Great Neck and realized that their son would never work again; Stanley told George that he had decided at that moment not to invest any of Andy’s money in the stock market, figuring he would heretofore need it to survive. There was some relief, however, that at least he hadn’t wrestled on the show.

The next night, in New York, a new Saturday Night Live cast member named Charles Rocket uttered the word fuck in the closing moments of the show. It was just a coincidence.

Grizzled, haggard, wretched, unshaven, woebegone—it had worked well before—he tried the following Friday night to read the statement “prepared” by the producers to confirm for viewers that the fight had been a planned improvisational experiment. But then he stopped his monotonous recitation and refused to continue. “This has been a very hard week for me,” he said. His job at Taxi was on the line, he said, and no one would hire him and his friends wouldn’t speak to him and his wife had left him and he had only been trying to have fun and the laughter from the audience now was pretty tasteless, he said, because he wasn’t trying to be funny. Then came tears. Tears were always easy.

Two days later, he and Clifton posed together for photographer Herb Ritts in a session