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the career progress of this strange fellow from the Boston hotel room. By way of introduction, he cleaved carefully to the conceit that was now becoming modus operandi, that Foreign Man could not be named Andy Kaufman, that he required special explanation in order to maintain his ruse. So Allen first spoke of the Improv as a place where anyone can get stage time and—“I happened to be there recently when a fellow—not really a performer—a fellow from the kitchen—a busboy or whatever—came up onstage, and he was quite entertaining, and I thought you might like to meet him. His name is just Andy. Would you give him a warm welcome and we’ll see what happens. Here he is—from the kitchen!” And what followed was de traffic and de cooking and de little boy named Jesus and de Archie Bunker and then he lost his place and started over with de traffic and de cooking, then but right now I will like to do for you de music record and he closed with Mighty Mouse which was met with bemused good cheer but not with the frisson of discovery that had charged through Studio 8H in New York three months earlier on Saturday Night, which worried him (just a little), and yet he had now been on The Tonight Show and that was ever its own greatest reward.

Happily, he was back in New York that February, where on the last Saturday of the month he returned to Saturday Night, appearing toward the middle of the broadcast after host Jill Clayburgh had selected four unwitting audience members to climb onstage and participate in the television debut of Old MacDonald. He wore a dark coat and tie with sneakers and a straw farmer’s hat and voicelessly (again) pushed and pulled the genuinely stagestruck/giddy foils to and from the dead microphone where they gobble-gobbled and oink-oinked and viewers connected with their helpless giggling pantomimes and his bouncy letter-perfect control and it was all very pure and exciting, a manipulation that became instantly unforgettable. (He later explained the universal response to this particular feat—“There are no punchlines in it or in anything I do. It’s more like you’re laughing at Old MacDonald because it’s a concept, because these grown people are playing a game with me, and we’re having fun together, which I guess is funny. But I don’t expect anyone to laugh.”) And, again, he had left an artful imprint on the upstart comedy program—again, with a birthday party bit forged in his Great Neck den—which would now have to resonate for a while, since he would not return to Saturday Night until the following January, since Foreign Man was needed in California, where the importance and impact of Saturday Night would remain in question for some time to come.

He waited while George hatched new plans for him, which meant much work at the Improv, where comic actor Harvey Korman became enamored of Andy and of Jay Leno and brought his friend Johnny Carson in to see them and this of course was not unlike bringing the mountain to Muhammad, if not more so, because Johnny Carson was king, unimpeachably such, and could shift the course of an entertainer’s life by dispensing one wink and pressing his thumb to forefinger which meant okay-penultimate, which meant fortune and/or sitcom would follow most certainly. (It had worked that way already for New York club alums Freddie Prinze and Gabe Kaplan, who respectively starred in hit shows Chico and the Man and Welcome Back, Kotter.) Andy, of course, knew this and was oblivious to this and having Carson there was, um, fine. And Johnny watched and laughed at both men—the one with the big jaw who would years later take his desk and the one with the foreign accent who futzed and banged drums—and told Budd Friedman, “Yes, they’re funny, but they don’t have six minutes.” Friedman would remember, “Ironically, Jay did ten minutes and Andy did like fourteen”—but what Carson meant was six isolated minutes of imperviously packaged punchlines that would work on The Tonight Show. “Johnny wanted more jokes, less attitude,” said Leno, who was dejected, but Andy was less so since he had already appeared on