“The question I am most often asked is how did I get started in this business. And when I’m asked that question I always tell this story, and you can believe it because it is a true story, but then I am a pathological liar. But not really.â€
So began the patter that Harry Anderson often used to introduce his signature trick, his show closer, the Monarch Monte. It was a simple trick, really. Three gigantic playing cards were shuffled and swapped places, similar to the street hustler game Three-Card Monte. What elevated the trick to a place of prominence was the story that Anderson told while he performed it—a story of a con man teaching a young Anderson not only the “religious experience†of swindling people of their money and leaving them happy, but some of the most important lessons of his life. That respect is something you give long before you get, that trust is something you save for yourself, that you never eat at a place called Mom’s or shoot dice with a guy called Pops, and that a fool and his money were lucky to get together in the first place.
Most people know Harry Anderson as Judge Harold T. Stone, the affable star of NBC’s Night Court, which ran for nine seasons from 1984 to 1992. To Anderson, however, playing Judge Stone was just a job. He never set out to be an actor, and his arrival at the center of a hit sitcom was something of an accident. Harry Anderson was no actor. He was a magician. He was a comedian. He was a storyteller and a showman. At his heart, however, Harry Anderson was a hustler.
Read more at:
https://www.theringer.com/tv/2018/4/17/17248358/harry-anderson-obituary-night-court-magic
