When appearing on Saturday Night Live (1975) in 1982, he
performed a "geek trick" by sticking a long needle through the skin of
his forearm. He said to some squeamish audience members "It's just a
trick!" Then to show that it wasn't "real," he moved the needle back and forth and blood began to pour out of the "wound".
In the summer of 2005, he opened a nightclub in the French Quarter of New Orleans called "Oswald's Speakeasy," where he was often featured as a performer.
The son of Harry Anderson and Suzanne Johnson, magician-turned-actor Harry Anderson was reportedly once a Three-card Monte dealer in New York City. He graduated in 1970 as the valedictorian of North Hollywood High School. Before he became an actor, he taught a course on how to detect fraudsters and confidence ("con") artists.
His first wife, Leslie Pollack, is reportedly a certified witch. The couple had two children before divorcing: Eva Fay Anderson (Eva Anderson) (born 1981) and Dashiell William Anderson (Dashiell Anderson) (born 1985).
Anderson and wife, Elizabeth Morgan, survived Hurricane Katrina by remaining in New Orleans, where they owned a store called "Sideshow" and a nightclub named "Oswald's Speakeasy", although later relocated to Asheville, North Carolina, in 2006.
Before television and movies, he was a live performer for the Green Show at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon.