“Revenge of the Attack of the Invasion of the Brains, Or Is This Only a Test?”
Andy Kaufman was from Great Neck, New York. He was born in that particular neck of the woods, in 1949. And his pencil neck was pretty great, but it was his head that was like a sequoia. The head that held the skull that cradled the brain[s]. Fast forward thirty years into the future and suddenly Kaufman was “from Hollywood,” where he would often point at his noggin and taunt, “I’ve got the brains.” And like a Z-grade, sci-fi movie classic, Andy’s brains morphed, replicated, and broke off into myriad mindsets. The brains had Andy, and they had millions of others as well. Could he, would we, survive his own pop quiz test of wills? Is he The Brain That Wouldn’t Die?
People of Andy Kaufman’s generation – the proverbial Baby Boomers – have also been described as "TV Babies.” They were the first children to come of age in front of the television. Infants suckled by the boob tube. Rug rats multiplying like rabbits in front of the rabbit ears. Latchkey Kids babysat by Bugs Bunny. Woody Woodpecker. Mickey Mouse – and that rodent’s beyond-bizarro, parallel-universe, superhero counterpart, Mighty Mouse. Etc, etc. Ad nauseam. Infinitum. Carry the Kerouac. Hold the Howdy Doody.
In the post-war fallout of the 1940s and 50s, mass reproduction spread like a virus. Physical. Mental. Technological. And in those halcyon pre-Internet days, breathless talk of said reproduction orbited the earth via word of mouth. Or, as a popular television commercial echoed some two and a half decades later, at the dawning of The Age of Kaufmania:
“…And they’ll tell two friends. And they’ll tell two friends…”
Schoolyard rumors became urban legends. And urban legends begat universal myths.
“…And so on, and so on, and so on…”
Junior High School Kid #1, circa 1980: “Hey, did ya see Andy Kaufman last night?”
Junior High School Kid #2, circa 1980: “He’s nuts!”
[Spoken as if Kaufman were Big Foot. Or the Loch Ness Monster. Or a Martian. And, at the same time, the endearing eccentric who lived up the block.]
Was Andy Kaufman really crazy? Or was he the ringmaster in a circus of his own design?
Crazy as a shithouse rat, or sane as Saran Wrap, Andy Kaufman was not only the premiere TV Baby, he was the mother to his own primetime newborn. And the primeval father of himself. And his brother and sister to boot. Andy was every last method act going in his own carnival/circus hybrid. Swami. Clown. Freak Show[s] and all. And in rearing his own tightrope-walking brood, he foretold his own legend, gleefully whispering family secrets into his offspring’s ears, as they plummeted toward certain death, only to be scooped up at the last possible second and laid gently in a net secured by – Andy Kaufman! Andy was in the spotlight. And the spotlight was in Andy. Kaufman was Ringmaster and Center Ring. Simultaneously, he was Ernie Kovacs’ major network video ghost, but brought to you by the outer limits of prenatal, cable access, late night local programming. [Andy never had his umbilical cord cut. The thing was monstrous, and plugged directly into an outlet, running, no, feeding on 220 household current.] And kids love to stay up past their bedtime, whether or not they believe there’s a TV camera in their wall. Andy Kaufman was both boogeyman beneath the bed, and tiny tot with eyes all aglow [every day was Christmas, and Hanukah!] under the covers.
The young Andy Kaufman was the nuclear family at large, silently imploding, but grinning sheepishly all the while, in the apparent peacetime Sunday afternoon gap that loomed between the post-backyard bomb shelter drill and the pre-backyard barbecue. And Andy's true womb was the big fat Zenith that America had lodged deep in the shag carpet of its “real-life” post-pre-Happy Days living room. Twenty years later, he would return to the womb and be reborn, bigger than life, right before your very eyes. And yet he was compressed enough to be birthed again and again, making you squirm with delight from the relative [dis]comfort of your La-Z-Boy. [“Hey! It’s that Mighty Mouse guy again! And this time he’s wrestling a woman!”] And then, [just like magic!], in the blink - nay, wink of an eye, he was gone. Dying [pun intended] with each new TV appearance, only to be reborn the next time he pulled the wool over your eyes on Carson, or Letterman, or when he’d pop up on Saturday Night Live, or Fridays, as if out of thin air. [And of course, he was never exactly a real “regular” on Taxi; Andy played Andy’s game by Andy’s rules.] And, late in the game, when you felt less-than-surprised at his bewildered [?] visage, you’d notice that he seemed slower, sleepwalking through the old routines, going through the motions, like a zombie boxer, but still capable of igniting that twisted glint in his eye and knocking you on your ass with one punch. Or was that part of the act, too? The Kaufman Onion, making you laugh through tears, layer by layer. But just like that old Zenith, which, before you knew it, seemed almost coffinesque, as it were, its black screen dusted in the back of the attic or garage, you just knew the damn thing still worked as good as new. It was simply stepping aside to make way for its next incarnation: a newer model with a bigger screen and even stronger reception. Andy was building a better onion.
Traveling back in time a bit, there were Kaufman contemporaries who were also tuned in and turned on, so to speak, to both Timothy Leary’s drop-out ethos, and Marshall McLuhan’s 1960’s-and-beyond “Medium-is-the-Massage” shtick. Jim Morrison [another would-be fake death fakir] riffed on the new McWorld, prefiguring the “Me Decade,” [“The media is the message, and the message is me.”] while screaming of “gazing on a city under television skies.” And Iggy Pop [nee Stooge] raged against a phantom feline and how she had a “TV eye” trained on him, as if her signal were beamed down through the crosshairs of Lou Reed’s Satellite of Love. [“I watched it for a little while. I love to watch things on TV…”] It was a post-Grassy Knoll-to-the-Schoolbook Depository world and the youth were just dying to learn how to ditch class, to say nothing of war. Morrison broke through Mick Jagger’s red door via Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception. Mr. Mojo Risin’ saw Norman Rockwell USA’s seemingly innocuous white picket fence, and he didn’t merely want to paint it black – he did it: “Between the evergreens and the garages, something was lurking.” Perhaps that something was someone. For a spell it seemed it was The Lizard King himself, “stumbling through the neon groves,” with a stealth humor too dark for most to see. And of course, Charles “Charlie Don’t Surf” Manson caught the Beach Boys’ wave to the bottom of the world, just as the 60’s wiped out forever. And by then he was the only one laughing. But a few years, a new decade, and who knows how many meditations down the road, over at the Brady Bunch house, the indoor-outdoor hedges were being occupied by a kinder, gentler maniac, the likes of Andy Kaufman/Tony Clifton/Foreign Man/Etc. And, as Andy later pointed out, tracking the specter of false laughter, the sitcom laugh track was the deathless cackling of the dead. Literally.
The late 70s/early 80s was Andy’s domain, the time of his reign. It was an era that still saw accumulations of TV snow; a period that still transmitted a sing-along sunrise sign-off, complete with national anthem, to help “conclude your broadcast day.” It was a time that also provided test patterns, and a “message of the Emergency Broadcast System.” But Andy was his own EBS: The AKEBS. And the AKEBS was taking over the airwaves! NOW! And this was an actual emergency, but there was no one there to tell you who to call or where to go in case of an actual Andy emergency! You were on your own, baby, on the Kaufman roller coaster for the first time. And it was fun! And terrifying. [Andy was TV, only better than TV!] And dizzy as you were, you couldn't wait to get back on the ride. He was the brattiness of childhood and the brilliance of adulthood all wrapped up in one alien [but somehow not alienating] human being. Andy Kaufman was more “punk rock” than most of his punk-era show biz peers. [Get an earful of his song, “I Trusted You.”] And snot or not, show or no, it was all biz. At the same time, along with another Andy – Warhol – Kaufman helped locate “geek chic” on the late twentieth century cultural radar. But unlike Warhol’s massive multimedia control tower, Kaufman’s readymade radar screen was conveniently situated right there in your goddamn dysfunctional family room.
While definitely the brightest comedian of his time, Andy’s “stand-up” journeyed far beyond the constraints of “comic.” His humor evolved, past the vanishing point, and as such, he transcended “magician,” even. They talk of actors “breaking the fourth wall.” Andy Kaufman broke 99 bottles of beer on said wall, and then Tony Clifton shattered the 100th over the head of AK partner in crime, Bob Zmuda. [Dr. Jekyll to Kaufman’s Mr. Hyde.] David Dalton called James Dean "The Mutant King." If ever there was a Mutant Jester in our midst, it was Andy Kaufman. [Not to mention his love-hate, "friend/enemy," Tony the Lounge Lizard King, as the Joker in the trick deck. Kaufman [and, variously, Kaufman and/or Clifton and/or Zmuda] was like some bizarre fusion of Kovacs, Lenny Bruce [see the infamous, censored, Letterman Jerry Lawler slap heard ‘round the world], Don Rickles, Abbie Hoffman [“Levitate the Pentagon!”], and Mr. Rogers, with all the unusual suspects [Elvis, Fred Blassie, Mighty Mouse, Howdy Doody, hookers, etc.] thrown into his ice cream stew, simmering in a pot on a stove just hot enough to touch. Andy made insanity more humane. Hell, there even seemed to be a splinter of Ed Sullivan [the all too wooden, adult Doody?] stuck in there somewhere. And maybe a deadpan dash of Warhol, too. Apparently, Kaufman was blissfully ignorant of Dada, an ocean of thought processes that flowed to his own chart, fifty years removed. But, like his supposed unfamiliarity with Marcel Duchamp and Company, Andy also played the fool when it came to his knowledge of Ernie and his own rogue’s gallery of characters. [Percy Dovetonsils: “Greetings over your orthicon tube!”] Personally, I think Andy knew better. [Kaufman was a TV babe in the woods at the height of Kovacs’ black and white wood shedding.] But then again, Andy was his own Dada. And Mama.
Andy Kaufman was the self-appointed “Intergender Wrestling Champion of the World,” and at the same time, he was also Heavyweight Antisocial Critic of the Idiot Box. Though he feigned political indifference, Andy was every bit the cultural grappler that Lenny Bruce was, utilizing Headlocks and Full Nielsens [sic], both in and out of the [center] ring; in attempting to pin down humanity’s reaction to feminism, Kaufman utilized a different type of hold: the Flying Full-Body Mindfuck.
Andy Kaufman was bold enough to ask, “What’s real? What’s not?” yet shy enough to leave the query unanswered. Beyond rhetoric, one might add to that equation, “Who’s real? Who’s not?” As Louise Norton inquired of the equally enigmatic Duchamp: “Is he serious? Or is he joking? Perhaps he is both.” [Perhaps he is.] The faker faking out the fakir within.
It was [and is] Andy’s fun house. We’re all just warped reflections in his room full of cracked mirrors. And now, Andy has been [!] resurrected, but with a twist, of course: putting one [or more] over on the one show business stunt that’s never been pulled, not even by Houdini. [How can you raise the dead if they’ve never been lowered in the first place?] Dead or alive, wax or not, hoax or no hoax, Andy Kaufman’s introduced himself to a whole new generation of TV Babies. TiVo Babies, if you will. Whatever, whoever they are, they’re fortunate to have been infected with a particular strain of Kaufmanitus, one that’s as strong, and strange, as it was back when Andy was giving their parents the old neo-surrealist song and dance disease. [And that’s deadlier than any infection lung cancer can cough up]. The last major Cough Man wave seemed to embody the end-of-the-century/new-millennium zeitgeist. Following an additional 15 minutes of fame on the silver screen, thanks to Man on the Moon, a small neon Andy Kaufman [er, Jim Carrey-as-Andy Kaufman] life-death mask now hangs in the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard. But a huge, invisible Kaufman question mark hangs in the balance. Half a decade down the line, one wonders what Andy would think of America’s Bushwhacked House of Planet Hollywood Blues. [Or what he thinks of it.] It’s an infotainment nation and we’re all wearing remote control underwear. And in an increasingly “dumb and dumber” world, you can bet that Andy’s still got the brains. But is this still only a test?