What Cervaise said. He’s not funny because wrestling women is instrinsically comedic, it’s funny because his motivations in doing so were so tongue in cheek. He did it to annoy people. That amuses me. And he NEVER broke character. That impresses me.
My mother and sister, both of which are intelligent women with great senses of humor hate him. They think he was a mysogonist who got press for being a professional asshole. We’ve agreed to disagree about Kaufman.
As for what ruined his career, Andy’d probably say that Taxi ruined it. He never wanted to do the show, did so only after they threw boatloads of cash at him, and he continued to be a jerk to everyone involved with the show until the end. This jerky, prima donna version of Andy is in direct conflict to most other reports of him being a quiet, strange, kind man who bussed tables at Jerry’s for kicks. Which leads me to believe that he was miserable at Taxi, and was acting out.
I’d say that his career peaked out at his TV special, which is truely odd. I’ve seen it, the video store I used to work at has a copy. It’s DEFINATELY not mainstream, at times completely boring, at times terribly funny, and if nothing else, a conversation piece. Like Kaufman himself.
That’s the way I understand it. Andy was out there making himself laugh. If anyone else found it all as funny as he did that was cool, but also beside the point. If this is true then Andy never did ruin his career, as his career was all about his perception of what he was doing, not ours.
We should all be so lucky as to make a career out of keeping ourselves entertained.
Also, say what you will about Andy Kaufman, at least he never stooped to the depths Tom Green has taken a similar approach to comedy.
Of course it’s all a matter of taste. I find a lot of what Andy Kaufman did funny, just as I’m lead to believe there are people who consider Tom Green’s antics hilarious.
*What about SNL voting him off? I think that didn’t help matters much? Although I did like his “Mighty Mouse” routine.
*By the way, what’s the whole story on that? Didn’t he set it up thinking that people would vote for him, but instead they voted for some lobster instead? All I recall was that he felt lousy about it, pissed that his joke backfired.
I honestly think Andy would have been perfectly happy to live out his life performing in cheesy bars and low-rent comedy clubs, getting booed while maybe one or two people in the audience (or maybe none) had an idea of what he was really doing.
The fact that he actually achieved a measure of fame in his lifetime is sort of the ultimate punchline to everything he was doing. Of course, due to the very nature of his act, the level of fame he could ever be expected to reach is somewhat limited.
Although I disagree with those who feel he faked his death, I can sort of see the logic. He’d reached the highest level of fame he could ever be expected to alive, the only way to take it any further was for him to die. To then reveal he’d faked his death would destroy everything. He’d be more famous/infamous than ever for a brief time, but then people would forget about him again and really, how do you top faking your own death? By remaining mysterious and dropping the occasional clue - or letting others do it for him without even realizing they’re doing it - he keeps his legend alive.
Of course, if he really were still alive I don’t think he could maintain the hoax for so long. For one thing I can only imagine he’d want to still be out performing, and even in disguise people would eventually catch on.
The man’s dead, but some people believe he’s still alive and if there’s a heaven, he’s up there right now with a big smile on his face finding the whole thing utterly hilarious.
I just watched some WWF program with a friend at some bar. I never liked wrestling, but I actually found it quite entertaining. Anyway, I KNEW the “bad guys” were “acting” to get a response from the audience. I think Kaufman dedicated his life to being perceived as an asshole. He was such an OBVIOUS ass that people didn’t get offended nearly as much as they got pissed. Wresteling was an obvious choice for the guy.
I saw Jerry Lawler on “Insomniac, With Dave Attell”, he’s a greasy dirt bag. Coaching woman on woman mud wrestling.
I adored him when he was alive simply because you could never take bets on what was going to happen. It was thrilling to watch while it happened. He always gave me a real “here-we-go” type of stomach butterflies whenever he was on anything with the lone exception of “Taxi”. Quite frankly, I thought he sucked in “Taxi” as forced character, but whenever he was on Carson, Letterman, SNL or Fridays he was entertaining to say the least. He reinvented himself EVERY time he was on television.
I loved him for being sooooo out there and unusual. He didn’t pander to the mainstream standards of comedy…simple as that. I always felt he was the Frank Zappa of comedy. You either dug it or you didn’t. Andy and Frank could not have cared less what the masses thought. They were in it for something else.
As for him ruining his career? Who says he ruined anything? He died.
Here’s what I recall of the Saturday Night Live phone-in thing:
Viewers were supposed to phone in to decide whether Andy Kaufman would ever appear on the show again. The vote did not go well for him. At some point, Eddie Murphy refers to a previous episode in which the audience was allowed to call in to vote on whether Larry the Lobster was to be cooked. He said something like, “You voted to save Larry the Lobster. Are we gonna have to hold Andy over some boiling water?” The audience cracked up. Eddie said, “Y’all are sick.”
It was a truly awful movie that killed any chance of Kaufman having a film career. Trio recently ran the episode of Late Night when he offered to personally refund the ticket price for anyone who saw Heartbeeps, and Letterman said he’d need change for a twenty.
I liked Andy, until I saw him on an episode of Fridays, where he awkwardly rambled on about something thus delaying the introduction of a musical act (who was that?) so long that they had to cut to commercial. The bit was so lame-ass that I just started hating him after that.
I also agree that Man In The Moon was too sappy. Andy took gambles on comedy, some panned out, many didn’t. It doesn’t make him a genius at all, just a gambler.
I always found Kaufman painful to watch. So I didn’t watch him. You can talk all you want about his determination to go ahead whether it got laughs or not, or whether or not he broke character. But it just didn’t work. I was amazed that they kept bringing this loser on over and over. And why people kept saying he was a “comedian’s comedian”. I found Cervaise’s explanation helpful in that regard. It makes sense. But it doesn’t make it worthwhile to watch Kaufman.
So essentially what we had here was a “Performance Artist”, whose medium was comedy/acting. (Like other PAs use music, or visual installations, or public disturbances, or media hoaxing). Still a large part of the population – and some TV/film casting directors and critics – actually bought into that he was supposed to be a regular comedian/comic actor. Which may have worked against him at times.
If the public doesn’t “get you” is that good or bad? It depends on what your purpose is and who the public are: some publics deserve to be “whooshed”. But does not caring if the public “gets you”, even making every deliberate effort to “whoosh” the audience, make you a superior artist? Not in and of itself. So I don’t see him quite as “genius”, but he was extremely good when he had his game on; the “huh?” times are a chance a performer takes, only his were too visible.
The sin is not “not being “gotten””. The sin – the only real sin in performance – is being boring. People will watch the damnedest things if they’re fascinated by them, or think they’re getting some new insight, regardless of whether they could classify their experience or not. Andy Kaufman was boring.
Actually, most of the time, I “got” Andy Kaufman just fine. I think MOST people “got” him. It’s just that most people eventually wearied of him.
VERY few people were gullible enough to believe he was REALLY a macho, sexist pig who wrestled women to prove they belong in the kitchen. VERY few people believed that he and Jerry Lawler had a real feud going on. Almost everyone knew that virtually EVERYTHING Andy Kaufman did was thoroughly planned and calculated.
The problem is, even people who “got” that eventually got bored with the whole schtick. Wrestling women was a cute bit for a little while, but he kept doing it LONG after it had stopped being funny.
If Kaufman himself enjoyed the whole thing, swell. I’m glad HE had fun. But there’s absolutely no reason anyone else should have felt compelled to tune in and watch him, or pay good money to watch him amuse himself.
The problem was NEVER that people didn’t “get” the wrestling joke. Rather, people said, “Okay, we GET it, we GET it! You’re making fun of rednecks, and you’re pretending to be one. We get it. We’ve gotten it for over three years. Think you might want to try something NEW, perhaps? Something FUNNY?”
agreed.
The special tribute they did on him a few years ago-I would not turn the channel til the next program came on. I was SO sure he was going to come on and say “Hi!I’m alive after all>”
I guess you could say he was adept at the “put-on”.