andy kaufman

There are many brief internet biographies on Andy Kaufman. Most all of them make mention of his death hoax. If you're very new to Andy Kaufman, a good, short overview is at findagrave.com.. A biting, yet amusing encapsulation of his life is here.

Andy Kaufman is hard to write about. Andy was a living, breathing, walking contradiction. He was loving, aloof; endearing, annoying; naive, calculating; simple, complex; genius and dolt. There are many factors in his childhood that went into his makeup, but basically he was a gifted child, very shy and very imaginative. He had a love of music and television and wrestling. Andy was an observer from day one. He grew up with early TV, watching many cartoons, kids shows, silent comedies and horror movies. A favorite was the 'Howdy Doody Show', which he was part of, in the peanut gallery, at the age of five. Seeing the behind-the-camera viewpoints must have had a huge impact on him. He saw the strings then.

Andy had excellent, loving grandparents. Much is made of the one grandfather, Papu Cy, who died when Andy was a toddler. It was his father's father, grandpa Paul,however, who most likely influenced Andy the most. Paul Kaufman was described in Bill Zehme's book as a "barely repressed showman" and it was the flamboyant grandpa Paul who had all the fun stuff: the phonograph, the movie projector and all of the films, the records and noises and pranks. All of this he left to Andy. Andy developed his career unconsciously, by doing the things he loved, in his pre-teen years. It was a wild jump of imagination to bring the same kiddie entertainment show to the comedy circuit of the early seventies.

His work on 'Saturday Night Live' provides an acceptable microcosm of his career. Imagine a performer who first poked popular culture in its collective eye by lip-syncing. The audience of the new (1975) 'Saturday Night Live' saw Andy Kaufman's personality progressively revealed on each appearance. Lip-syncing "Here I come to save the day!" from Mighty Mouse's theme on the inaugrual episode was followed by lip-syncing "Pop Goes the Weasle" on a later show. Later, Farmer Andy took us through several verses of "Old MacDonald" by way of the lip-sync, and he put audience members in that position too. Somewhere in there we got to hear his voice, a foreigner it seemed. He fooled us by crying and then showed us that it was all a joke by playing the bongos in time to his sobbing. The Foreign Man returned to do some imitations, but fooled us again by doing a good one of Elvis! Who was this guy? Later he let us in on a secret. Now he appeared as he was in real life. He was actually British, you see, and he enjoyed Great American Novels, like The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which he began to read at length. On a later appearance he showed us his true self. In his own voice (finally) he announced that he would wrestle a woman onstage. He wrestled many women many times.

Unfortunately, there was no appearance by Tony Clifton on SNL. Andy said that he saw Tony Clifton perform in Las Vegas in 1969 and went on to impersonate him and later to hire the acerbic lounge singer as an opening act. Clifton was destined for other venues.

Oh! and 'Taxi'. 'Taxi' is the situation comedy that most people know Andy Kaufman from. His Foreign Man character morphed into Latka Gravas and worked as a mechanic at the Sunshine Cab Company. With any other performer, their important role on a hit TV show wouldn't be a mere footnote. But Andy was different. He was nominated for two Golden Globe awards for his work on this program. He also managed to get Tony Clifton a separate contract, and he managed to get him fired and thrown off the studio lot too. In this regard, Andy was working as a culture-jammer at the same time as he was getting paid thousands of dollars to hi-jack a network show.

Reacting to the poor attempts to label him ,he made clear that he was not a comedian. He enjoyed the double-meaning of "song and dance man" and preferred that title. "Performing artist" and "entertainer" are vague and not entirely accurate. In truth, Andy Kaufman was an illusionist. He was like a magician, but instead of prestidigitation, he practiced sleight-of-mind. His tools were societal conventions and your expectations and he knew just how to contort them to astound and amaze you. His calling cards were question marks. "Which is the real Andy?" was the calling card that was traded in for the "Is this guy crazy?" calling card. In the end it was anybody's guess. Some say he died from a large cell carcinoma on May 16th, 1984 at the age of thirty-five, but you can read about that here.

Two biographies about Andy Kaufman have been published around the time the feature film was made about him.

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