him ever so gently and whispered, “Andy, wake up. It’s Bob.” He didn’t stir. I shook him harder. He slowly started to wake. “I want to talk to you. Lynne’s going to be back any minute.” He began to come around, his eyes flickered and then opened. I said, “Andy, you with this dying routine … It’s fantastic. Totally believable.” He smiled softly and then said in a raspy, low-energy voice, “I’m really dying, Bob.” I heard the key jiggle in the lock. Lynne had returned. I quickly ran back to the couch and picked up the paper as if I was reading it. Lynne entered the room. “How’s he doing?” “Still sleeping, I guess.”
He supposedly died at 6:20 p.m. on May 16, 1984. I was not bedside when he died. I had gone home for a few hours to sleep when I got the call from his secretary, Linda Mitchell. She simply said, “It’s over.” I hung up the phone and said to myself, “Over? … We’ve only just begun.” I flew to the funeral in Great Neck a couple of days later. At the funeral, I had to try my best not to laugh out loud. Luckily, a stifled laugh with a little cough thrown in can appear as a sob. So now the long wait would start, year after year after year would pass. Surely he’d try somehow to get in contact with me. I certainly would receive some sign, something that only I would understand and could never be linked back to him. But nothing. Cold silence. Eventually, over time, I too believed he had died. He had to. Yes, he told me he was going to fake his death, but ten, twenty, twenty-five years later? It just had to be the most unimaginable coincidence ever. Had to be. Who plans to fake his death one day and then the next day really dies? It just doesn’t happen, but it did. And it happened to the strangest individual who ever lived. And I believed his death like a fool. Against all odds believed it. Believed it because Andy wanted me to believe it. It’s just like I told him, “You’re going to have to convince me you died,” and he did. But no more. So why did I change my mind? Facts, pure and simple. If you look at all the facts, you can only draw one conclusion: Andy Kaufman faked his own death.
* * *
It seems that so many critics and fans are driven almost to the point of distraction trying to break through the Kaufman enigma. You can only imagine the questions Lynne and I fielded for years, with people wondering what he was really like. Of course, one could never answer that. Can one answer that for anyone? Do we really know what made Abe Lincoln tick? Can Daniel Day Lewis tell us? Can anybody really explain you to anyone else? I’d venture to say you couldn’t even explain yourself to yourself if you tried. Yet over the years, so many people (bright people) are still trying to figure Kaufman out. Intellectual thought falls short. But if there is one thing family and friends can agree on, it’s the fact that he was strange, very strange. Perhaps the closest we can get to understand Kaufman is through his adherence to transcendental meditation, sex, fun, and metaphysics in no particular order. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that an understanding of Andy is going to be easy. After all, his is the trigonometry of psyches. Things will not be black or white even though I will attempt at times to paint them as such, more for my own sanity than the reader’s. Writing about madness hopefully needn’t make the writer mad.
And also throw out all that comedy bullshit. I’m telling you, he was not a comedian and really shouldn’t be judged through the prism of comedy, or you’ll never come close to understanding him. Andy was funny (sometimes) because he was an absurdist, but being funny truly wasn’t a goal. Remember, Andy wasn’t waiting for the laughs. If they came, OK. He’d take them. But if they didn’t—and many times they didn’t—it really made no difference to him. It might have mattered to the TV executives, his managers, club owners, and the public, but to Andy, never. Laughter? How trite.
If he wasn’t a comedian, then what was he? To me, Andy was a behavioral scientist. He was constantly measuring people’s reaction to stimuli. Andy instinctively knew back in ’72 what neuroscientists have recently discovered: that laughter is one way the brain deals with the discomfort of an embarrassing situation (Foreign Man), inappropriate jokes (Tony Clifton), or the surprise of an unexpected punch line (“Take my wife … please take her.”). He was always looking at the human condition and poking his nose around in areas where no one else did. Who interviews a girl with a tape recorder right after he has sex with her for the first time, asking why she doesn’t like to have her legs up high while she’s having intercourse with him? Who would ask such a thing? The sex researcher Alfred Kinsey perhaps, but even Kinsey would be more demure about it and have the young lady fill out a questionnaire. Not Andy, because Andy doesn’t care what she answers. That’s irrelevant. What fascinates him is her shock at his asking. That’s the behavior he’s interested in exploring—the “uncomfortableness” of a situation. This is the behavior he would explore time and time again.
When he first started doing the Foreign Man act, which he lifted from seeing a Pakistani man telling bad jokes at Café Wha? in Greenwich Village when he was fourteen, he could see how painful it was for the man not getting laughs (even though Andy and a friend were dying inside). So Andy used that same uncomfortableness to his advantage. You were uncomfortable watching his Foreign Man character’s ineptitude. The uncomfortableness led to nervous and embarrassed laughter from the audience. Andy milked that embarrassed laughter and accused the audience of “laughing at me, not with me.” And then he would start to cry. This would only cause the audience to laugh louder. Occasionally there’d be a few sensitive people in the audience (usually women) who would get very offended at the audience for laughing at this poor soul (not knowing the whole thing was a put-on).
Andy would also utilize real situations from his own life, no matter how painful, and present them onstage. Sometimes they got people to laugh. Sometimes they got people angry. Sometimes they got an audience to walk out. To Andy, it was all the same. He just wanted real emotions. He wanted his audience to be in the present. When he ran into me in ’74, I was fresh out of guerrilla street theater and radical Abbie Hoffman-style politics—fused with an almost unrelenting devotion to psychologist Abraham Maslow’s theory of “self-actualization” and a living-in-the-present philosophy—and Andy and I immediately clicked. It was uncanny how we thought exactly alike. In interviews he would state, “Once I met Bob, I just knew he had to be my writer. We just looked at the world the same way.”
Never forget that Kaufman’s psychological imperative onstage was to search for the “uncomfortableness” in every situation. This bloodletting, like the Stations of the Cross, led him on the road to spiritual enlightenment. Performance would therefore become a sacred ritual, performance as High Mass. Fame and fortune would bring him comfort and security. Andy, on the other hand, would rather be uncomfortable and insecure and not a prisoner to the karma of the material world. As you will see, give him the opportunity to sabotage his career and he’d leap at it. When Dick Ebersol, producer of Saturday Night Live, designed a vote to banish him from SNL, it was just too tantalizing for Andy not to go along with it. His deep-rooted martyr complex couldn’t be happier! Jesus had his Judas. Kaufman had his Ebersol. Judas and Ebersol have their roles to play in order for both narcissists to reach transcendence.
Andy was in heaven (not that the vote didn’t hurt him—it did—deeply, which he also enjoyed). But at the same time it gave him fodder for his next scenario to act out. Andy is kicked out of show business. How uncomfortable is that! How embarrassing. Christ, it’s another Everest to climb.
In this context, the ultimate scenario, Kaufman faking his death, is par for the course. Andy endures the crucifixion and martyrdom and all the benefits that go along with it. “They’ll see how much they miss me when I’m gone.” But like they said in the film Man on the Moon, it’s a showbiz death in a showbiz town in a showbiz hospital. No one really dies. Not really! What fun!
The petty squabbles that people would get into would also fascinate him. He’d love to get people all riled up, taking the bait, and watch them go to pieces. And then he’d laugh, much as we would viewing a box full of puppies romping, biting, or tumbling over one another.
Andy was above the fray, not in an arrogant way, but more in an innocent way. He was probably one of the most innocent people
