There is no (public) film of Tony Clifton’s visit to the “Taxi” set, although the scene was recreated in “Man on the Moon,” and it was evidently no exaggeration. “Taxi” stars Marilu Henner, Danny DeVito, and show co-creator James L. Brooks all recalled the weird, weird day when Tony came to visit the set and how bizarre everything became. Strangely, most of the cast was in on the joke and knew that Tony was actually Kaufman in disguise, making the day only that much more surreal.
Henner recalled:
“The producers tell us it’s Andy, but it isn’t Andy. Just play along. On Monday morning, this guy with very orange makeup, a wig and fake moustache shows up chain-smoking in a blue ruffled tuxedo shirt. […] We thought, ‘Okay, that’s kind of funny.’ Then he began to act. We thought this guy’s going to take down ‘Taxi.'”
The “joke,” of course, was that Tony Clifton was difficult. Again, this likely isn’t funny for anyone other than Andy Kaufman. DeVito recalled Tony Clifton viscerally, saying:
“He stank like, I can’t even defame the names of the perfumes that it smelled like. […] He said he had some rewrites. That was the roller coaster going over the edge. Then it was a ride all the way to the finish.”
It seems that Andy was engaging in an art experiment: what would it look like if a really horrible actor was fired from the set? Brooks recalled the background wrangling, saying:
“Dave [Davis] said an artist doesn’t piss on another artist and that made enormous sense to me. So, then we had that fantastic experience of Ed [Weinberger] and Andy figuring out the theater of firing him. Andy said that was one of the greatest moments of his life.”
The experiment worked.