* Transcript: "Harry Anderson's Wise Guy"
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Harry Anderson
WISE GUY
from the street to the screen

Mike Caveney


An Introduction : Who's This Wise Guy?

"Blood Loss in the Big Easy"

New Orleans, 1977. The close-up room at the Magic Castle was this mean little box that tended to fill up with so much smoke you'd swear someone was cremating a wet dog in there.

In walks Anderson. There isn't much that gets liquor to pause its journey from the table to my lips but I'll be the bastard lovechild of a listless octoroon if that kid wasn't the cat that swallowed the canary in a dapper little hat. It looked like he was testing the tensile strength of his suspenders to the damn near limit with a pair of cocky thumbs. I wasn't impressed.

But I was a fool.

Somehow in my motion for another beverage he'd already slipped into polite conversation at a table held down by some notoriously brusque regulars. He had them in no time flat. They were melting butter in his glass ramekins. Whatever tidy yarn he'd spun to win them over, I didn't catch a word of it. One of them laughed. I was angry. Envious? Maybe a little. Yeah, you bet I was.

[Harry and I never speak anymore.]

Anderson had one of those little wooden finger choppers that Micky Hades used to sell. The kind where the blade could be removed and clearly shown. It was a very convincing little guillotine that did not look like a novelty store toy. Harry would get a guy to examine the chopper and then cut a cigarette in half. Then he held the guy's hand up and told this silly story. The story of course was artifice, a distraction for the guy and the audience while he worked his stuff with the chopper.

Or it would become that, once his famous chopper trick was perfected, vaulting him to fame, fortune, and the crowning position in the television judiciary.

With what became his signature aplomb, Anderson was in moments a font of breast-pocket gauze, profuse apology, and redoubling determination. It's really amazing how hard it is to find a bloody sausage-sized piece of a guy on the floor of a room that dark and smoky. Impossible, I think we all proved. Just as impossible as Blind Willie Buttermilk Stubbs was going to find it to work his trumpet tomorrow night without his "twiddlin' fingers", a


"A Hole in the Ace"
(a.k.a. The A-Hole Trick)

Here is a perfect example of how Harry could ruin several decks of cards, waste everyone's valuable time, and have you love him for it. He was good at that.

One day he noisily emptied his suit jacket pocket onto the hood of his car in search of change for the meter. A clunky metal thing slid from the pile and bounced on the sidewalk. As I retrieved it for him I asked what he was doing with a hole puncher in his pocket.

His face lit up at the question like he was an elf and I asked him how he felt about climbing into the hollow of a big tree to back some cookies or something. (The two foot, six inch height differential between us causes these comparisons to enter my mind.)

A small crowd had already gathered around even before he produced the first pack of unmolested cards. How people seem to gather, and how they even know a street performance is about to take place, I'll never know. It's perhaps Anderson's greatest trick. Luring the marks like that.

I wanted to ask if he was sure about this, performing in broad daylight. He was used to working in dark rooms. It was usually the first thing out of his mouth when he would queer a trick. "I'm really more accustomed to working in a darker room than this." But Harry was excited, and had already butchered the first deck of cards with the hole puncher, and issued the first round of apologies to the crowd. These were the primer apologies, the sort that got the folks loosened up a bit before the seven course meal of ingratiation that would inevitably follow.

He asked me for a fresh deck of cards and I gave him one.

The principle behind the trick in theory, as he explained to me later, was to punch holes in what appeared to be one card, but was in fact two or more together (hence the difficulty he often had in squeezing the puncher with his little elfish hands). Then using some coy maneuvers with his thumb, temporarily concealing the hole while he slid the card beneath it with his palm, the hole would seem to disappear, or move to another part of the card.


* Sources:
* http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=002529 - John: Read book. Be the wise guy.
* http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=002530 - ==>
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