Andy surrounded himself with them. It’s been pointed out, most recently by writer Vernon Chatman, who just spent three years editing Andy’s micro-cassette tapes of over eighty hours for Drag City’s Andy and His Grandmother album, that Andy lacked cynicism. Vernon could not “detect one ounce of cynicism in Kaufman—none.” Correctly so. And yet cynicism, like pain, can protect us from hurt. Put your hand in a fire, you quickly withdraw it. The pain protects you from more injury. So too cynicism protects us from the pain of society. Yes, it makes us jaded, but it constantly reminds us that there is a real cruel world out there.
Because Andy didn’t have that cynicism, that safeguard, when a series of mishaps happened to him, such as being voted off SNL, or being kicked out of the Transcendental Meditation movement, he had no defenses. He couldn’t cynically shrug it off. He’d feel the sting of rejection and couldn’t release it. Did that sting internalize itself in the form of cancer cells, as Lynne suggests? Did they rebel and grow? Obviously a positive mental state has a lot to do with good health. Did this extremely healthy individual’s own gene pool simply fail to cope with the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” even if he brought that “outrageous fortune” on himself? Did something in him just say, “It’s time for Elvis to leave the building”? Or, did those rejections, mixed with his obsession about faking his death, reach such a crescendo that he finally acted upon it?
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“I AM NOT A COMEDIAN!” He would yell it from the rooftops. Andy couldn’t tell a joke to save his life. Wouldn’t want to. He was however a bullshit artist, a master in the art of the humbug or “put-on,” a prankster. Now most of the time, laughter accompanies a good prank. Maybe that’s where the confusion came in. Usually at first people who are pranked are annoyed and don’t laugh. But soon, if they have a sense of humor, they lighten up and go ahead and laugh with everyone else. Some don’t. We’ve all experienced people in our lives like that. They’re better to stay away from. Many of them don’t have a sense of humor and after being pranked will say indignantly, “That wasn’t funny.” But Andy, on the other hand, always found life funny, if not downright hilarious. He had no use for people who didn’t. In fact, if he stumbled upon one of these individuals, he took it upon himself to teach them a lesson by becoming even more obnoxious, sometimes even sadistically so. Eventually he would take on the entire entertainment industry, and he would either win or lose, depending on whether you had a sense of humor or not.
To some, Andy was a man-child. Michael Stipe of R.E.M., the band that wrote the homage to Kaufman in Man on the Moon, thought Andy was “a seven-year-old his entire life. I really feel like he was trying to lift us out of some morass of banality, of accepting everything for what it is rather than questioning it.” Was Andy a wide-eyed innocent? Or was he a fearless and subversive outlaw, lampooning the mediocrity of the entertainment industry? To me, his writer for ten years, he was both. Did he ever sit down and openly discuss lampooning the mediocrity around us? No. He would never intellectualize about anything he did and hated when people tried. Andy could also be quite funny if he wanted to be and could construct a comedic scenario with the best of them, but then—a moment later—purposely bore the audience to death just to see how much they could take before they walked out. When asked whether he was concerned that this sort of behavior could cost him a mass audience, his reply was, “I don’t perform for the masses. I perform for a small group who knows what I’m doing.” I would even take it a step further and say Andy was performing for himself. Blissful self-indulgence. This attitude would keep his manager George Shapiro up at night. As for me, I was sharing the rocket ship with Evel Knievel. Director Judd Apatow said it best: “Where do you go if you’re Bob Zmuda? After you write for Kaufman, how can you possibly write for somebody else?” You’re right, Judd, you can’t. So what do you do? Just keep writing for Kaufman! Dead or alive, it doesn’t matter.
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Alan Zweibel, one of the early and top writers from SNL, captured his first impression of Andy’s genius:
I heard about Andy Kaufman before I saw him. I remember they were talking about him and how he got fired from a club in Florida and they said why did he go there in the first place? Why would they understand him? And then I didn’t really get what that sentence meant. And then one night I was at the Improv and did see that Andy Kaufman was on. And I sat in the back of the room out of curiosity. So did the other comics. And I saw him do Mighty Mouse and thought I was going to go crazy. I saw him do the Foreign Man. Here was a guy that showed that you didn’t need language, you didn’t need English to elicit a response from an audience. I have never seen anybody and probably to this very day who could manipulate an audience any way he wanted to. When he would do Tony Clifton, he would get the audience to hate him. He would have the audience booing him. And then at the end he would have them cheering him. He would be able to take them any place he wanted them to go. And people started coming to the club to see this guy. At Rick Newman’s Catch a Rising Star, Carl Reiner and Rob Reiner would come to see him. One night Woody Allen was there. On another, Dustin Hoffman. It was this phenomenon. People would come in and go, “Golly, I could never do a thing like this.” I would never think that anybody could do a thing like this. I could never think that a thing like this should be done. But it is being done and look how great it is. It was so different than anyone’s background orientation. I don’t know how this happened. I was impressed. Besides his talent, there was a commitment there. He would meditate before every performance. There was a real commitment to what he did. He was unfailing. He just dug in. But I worried about him. I thought, “Where is he going to do this?” People write jokes, tell jokes, and take the check. Where was he going to go with this outside of the Improv and Catch a Rising Star? How was this guy going to make a living?
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What drove Andy to do the things he did? As in most performers, I believe there was a level of narcissism at play. In Andy’s case, throw in some sadomasochistic tendencies also. I say this because at times he truly enjoyed being rejected and hurt. Once Jeff Conaway, a cast member of Taxi, got drunk and started beating the hell out of him. He didn’t even protect himself and took the beating, à la Gandhi. Emotionally and physically he was hurting, but Jeff believed, “He pushed me to do it and enjoyed it.”
He wallowed in the pain. Another time, after being voted off SNL, he immediately went on David Letterman, making a routine out of the collapse of his career. I tell people, “Andy Kaufman died for our sins”—because I believe his psychological imperative in faking his death was martyrdom.
Yes, I believe that he faked his death. How can I think anything different? He talked to me about it endlessly for three years, and also to others. It would be his “greatest illusion,” he said, and when he was gone, “people should be ashamed for they had the greatest performer in the world in their midst and blew it.”
The consummate performer to the end, leaving them wanting MORE and sadistically punishing them by not giving it to them. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Music up: the theme from King of Kings plays. Roll credits. Is that where you are going to end it, Andy? Lifting Jesus’s routine from an MGM biblical pic? But let’s not forget the resurrection. Aren’t you at least curious what a stir you’d create if you returned? That was the plan after all, wasn’t it? Remember, you told Lynne, “Twenty or thirty years and I’ll be back.” Well, it’s been thirty years! Mom and Pop are gone. If you wanted to walk on stage dressed in leather with a boy toy on a leash, be my guest. And don’t worry about jail time. I’m sure you could easily pay back all those life insurance policies you ripped off in no time. We’d book you in the biggest venues around and charge top dollar. Who wouldn’t pay to see the man who successfully faked his death? Andy Kaufman, the greatest entertainer of all time, returns. They always said you were twenty years ahead of your time. Well, perhaps now, thirty years later, the public has caught up with you. Give them one more chance. Your fans await you!
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