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quiz show The Dating Game, not necessarily to meet girls (although he enjoyed that possibility) but to insert Foreign Man into a very different cultural reality. “He wanted to do the show as Foreign Man,” Mitchell recalled, “and they just didn’t want Foreign Man.” Day after day, however, he stormed the production office unwilling to accept defeat and was finally auditioned on camera and was amusing enough to secure an okay-we’ll-think-about-it, which he took less lightly than the producers may have. (He called them every day for the remainder of his visit, just to see if a decision had been reached, which it had not.) Uncle Sammy, meanwhile, knew the veteran comic Sammy Shore and his wife Mitzi Shore, who owned the Comedy Store, where every nascent American purveyor of stand-up entertainment had begun to make pilgrimage in hopes of being discovered. Sam Denoff would remember: “I called Mitzi and said, ‘Listen, I have this guy, I’m not sure what he does.’ She told us to come over and we hung around backstage and then he went out and started to do one of his crazy foreign things with the audience. And, Jesus Christ, the people went whaaaa? And I couldn’t even look over at Mitzi, because I didn’t know what the hell she would think. He was unpolished, but he had this idea that he was gonna send the world up.” Mitzi Shore wasn’t sure what she thought either, but she noted that he held some unusual sway over the crowd, which was not the easiest thing to do in West Hollywood, where the rather jaded clientele generally resisted such silliness as chanting gibberish along with a boy beating a drum.

Back in Great Neck that February, the mission escalated. Fortified by chutzpah tested in Los Angeles, he would now audition in places that had previously only intimidated him. On his behalf, Eppie Epstein put in a call to Budd Friedman, the powerful starmaking owner of the Improvisation. Friedman’s memory: “Eppie said, ‘You’ve got to see this guy!’ And that’s all he said. And for some reason I believed him.” Friedman told Epstein to send him in for open-mike night the following Monday, the twelfth. Meanwhile, Andy knew that regular Thursday afternoon auditions were held at a brand-new Upper East Side showcase club called Catch a Rising Star. So he loaded his various prop cases into his father’s car on February 8 and drove to the club, where he schlepped everything through the door, mystifying the talent coordinator Conan Berkeley and the house pianist Eddie Rabin. Then Rabin encountered him primping alone in the men’s room—“This strange guy asked me, ‘Are you de piano player? I will be singing de Elveece? You know de Elveece?’ And I thought, well, I guess he’s the real thing. I mean, there was no reason to put on a foreign accent for me alone in the men’s room. Then he went out and did the act and I realized I’d been had.” At which point, Berkeley, who was greatly impressed by the audition, would remember saying to him, “Can you come back and perform tonight?” And he went back into the Foreign Man and said, “Oh! Yesss, I will be back yesss!” Berkeley told Catch owner Rick Newman to specifically watch for this immigrant person that night, so Newman and his friend, the prominent young comic David Brenner, stood in the back of the room and witnessed Bombing as they had never understood bombing before. “He started speaking in a language that I’d never heard, that David had never heard,” said Newman. “Then he began crying.” And the conga-crying—“He never said a word of English for his first eight minutes!” said Newman—moved toward eemetations toward Elveece—“and then we lost it, just fell off our chairs!” The audience, meanwhile, was either ecstatic (per memories of Newman and Berkeley) or enraged (per Brenner); afterward he tottered to the rear, where Newman professed glee and gave insightful praise, inviting him back all weekend and whenever he wished to be seen, and where Brenner counseled him after such a dismal showing—“I said, ‘You know, you can’t go by what that audience did to you tonight. Don’t listen to them. Not only are you funny,