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he fed Budd Friedman this enterprising line of canard and somehow secured stage time for their new act—Albrecht and Zmuda, Comedy from A to Z—which boasted much visual hokum, as written up with great haste by Zmuda. Among their bits was a sideshow lampoon: “I would swallow a sword onstage and bleed everywhere—people thought I was actually bleeding. It was pure gross-out kind of material.” Andy saw and liked this gag very much, as did Foreign Man, whom Zmuda enthusiastically approached after the first time he watched Foreign Man work, whereupon Foreign Man complained about haffing a bad back and asked Zmuda if he would please-tenk-you load his props back into his car for him—which was the first of hundreds of times Zmuda would do just that—and then, according to Zmuda, as the car pulled away, Andy (not Foreign Man) was heard to holler into the night, “Sucker!” Thus was begat a most significant bond of brotherly humbug.

Zmuda, for his part, was a keen student of grandiose imposterism and artful fakery. An affable native of Chicago’s Northwest Side Polish community, he had cut his teeth as part of a local guerrilla street theater troupe whose finest stunt had ensemble members positioned along a Chicago Transit Authority bus route, where they would board a bus in small clusters at each stop, then begin gagging and wheezing along the way until the bus was full of passengers complaining of toxic fumes, forcing the driver to abandon his route and call for emergency assistance. They did this repeatedly. He enthralled Andy with such tales and other ones from his brief tour of duty as assistant to the legendary renegade screenwriter Norman Wexler (Joe, Serpico), whose supposed eccentric furies and quixotic adventures had makings of further inspiration for Tony Clifton. “Andy’s eyes would just bug out when I told him this crazy stuff,” he recalled. Zmuda and Albrecht had, meanwhile, instituted a cabaret policy at the Little Hippodrome and began recruiting acts from the Improv. By mid-June, Jim Walsh had hatched a deal through them to stake Andy as the headliner of a nightly showcase to run the length of summer—with handbills hailing him thusly: FROM THE DEAN MARTIN COMEDY HOUR, NEW YORK’S MOST HILARIOUS ENTERTAINER. The late night showcase—which followed a musical revue staged earlier in the evening—also featured several complementary acts, including Walsh’s only other client, a chanteuse named Tina Kaplan, and the antic stylings of Comedy from A to Z. “Sometimes there’d be no more than twenty people in the audience,” said Walsh, “but they were wonderful people like Marlo Thomas and the playwright Herb Gardner. And they would bring their friends to see Andy over and over again.”

And then The New York Times, in the person of critic Richard F. Shepard, came to witness both ends of the bill and, on July 11, a review was published under the headline SONGS AND A NEW COMEDIAN MAKE LIVELY CABARET. Praising the entire evening of entertainment, Shepard singled out “a new and brilliantly funny comic performer named Andy Kaufman,” declaring him “the star here,” whose work “defies categorization. He is more in the Sid Caesar tradition of prepared material rather than in the stand-up mode. He gives you no quotable lines, very few describable schticks, yet he leaves you laughing, loud and hard. He enters, speaking with a peculiar accent that could be Spanish, Greek, whatever, but it’s none of them…. He imitates Elvis Presley, does a bravura performance with vocal of a ‘folk song’ from an island in the Caspian Sea; it’s hilarious…. His manner is one of complete non-self-confidence. He falters, retraces his steps, and it is in this facade of uneasiness, marked by awkward yet eloquent gestures, that his talent for the comic shines.”

And then, one night shortly thereafter, Dustin Hoffman with his friend Murray Schisgal, the writer, and their wives happened to wander down East Fifty-sixth Street and into the doors of the Hippodrome just as a fellow with a peculiar accent walked onto the stage, and Hoffman, focusing an unparalleled actor’s eagle eye