In 1969, an estimated 35 million Americans watched a 37-year-old man in pasty white makeup marry a 17-year-old bride live on late-night television. This episode looks past the caricature of Tiny Tim to reveal Herbert Khaury, a brilliant musical archivist and uncompromising outsider artist.

We trace his New York childhood, his obsession with early acoustic recordings, and how he reverse-engineered the sound of a gramophone with his falsetto. From flea-circus stages and Greenwich Village to his breakthrough on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, we follow his fame, his controlling and chaotic marriages, his professional freefall, and his refusal to stop performing despite congestive heart failure, right up to his death on stage.

• How a 1915 Henry Burr record ignited his lifelong obsession
• The stage names like Larry Love and the flea-circus gigs before fame
• Why the mainstream saw novelty while the counterculture saw subversion
• The darker reality behind the televised fairy-tale marriage to Miss Vicki
• His refusal of heart surgery and his collapse mid-performance in 1996