I watched “Man on the Moon” this weekend for the first time in ages.
The one thing I wanted to discuss is Andy Kaufman. Many people think he was a comic genius, while others think he was a nut.
The movie exposed a side of Kaufman to me I never knew. And the more I watched the movie, the more I found myself disliking Kaufman. The movie did not show Kaufman as a likable person, and the more I watched, the more I wondered how he had a career at all. So, either the movie was unfair to Kaufman, or I am clearly not seeing what others saw in him.
IMO, Kaufman was a narcissist, with a personality disorder. His desire for people to dislike him was beyond bizarre, and his consistent demands to make him the center of attention played into that disorder. In the movie, he tells whoever that will listen that he’s not a comedian, and he’s not interested in entertaining audiences. He was more interested in entertaining himself. Tony Clifton? Female wrestling? Scrolling the picture on his TV special? Too few people were in on the joke. And being in on the joke as a viewer, I still didn’t enjoy it.
He *was *original, I’ll give him that. But funny? Not in my opinion. Rarely did he make me laugh, and from the movie, there was nothing that he did that I thought to myself “wow, that was great! I wish I could have seen his act”.
The movie also implied that only after his death did people start viewing him as some sort of genius. Almost as if this is the opinion one had to have about Kaufman to prove they understood his “comedy”. If he was so damn funny, why hasn’t anyone followed in Kaufman’s footsteps, or built off his act?
So what say you all? Was Kaufman a genius or just a nut?
I agree with your post. I’ll take the easy answer and say he was both. His Mighty Mouse pantomime will always be one of my favorite comedy bits, especially the planned hiccup where he almost comes in too early on the chorus - genius. Those who sing along to records know what I’m talking about.
I watched a documentary on Kaufman and felt sorry for him during the Jerry Lawler years. One clip showed him taunting the wrestling audience and he devolves into prancing around and babbling like an attention-starved three year old. Not to denigrate the man, but that’s just what he reminded me of in that clip. Like you say, at that point I believe he was mostly aiming to entertain himself (not that there’s anything wrong with that). I didn’t know if Robin Williams was pulling a “Spinal Tap” moment when he sadly said in the documentary that “we knew he was slipping when we found out he was wearing wrestling tights under his street clothes.” Looking back, I don’t think Williams was acting and was instead seriously worried about his ill friend.
The Tony Clifton character is still around, and I believe Sacha Baron Cohen has built off Kaufman’s work in some respects by playing on an audience reaction to provocation, although in Borat, we’re more in on the joke. Saying “I support your war of terror!” to a Texas rodeo audience? Kaufman would be proud.
I never found any of his stuff funny and after seeing the movie - I only managed about 30 minutes of it I just thought ‘How does he get away with acting like that’. To me he was a NUT… and NO genius
I didn’t know much about Andy Kaufman before seeing the movie, but I had the same feelings as you. In fact, Googling what other people had to say about him, I found an essay that I think expresses it very well. It links to a Straightdope mailbag column but the link is broken and I couldn’t find the right one. Anyway, the writer of the essay says:
I think that Kaufman is one of the most brilliant comedians ever.
All comedy is cruelty. Much like the great Michael O’Donoghue, Kaufman understood that and carried it out to its logical confusion. So much of his comedy was inspired by that. The audience was the brunt of his humor, but that’s no different from Henny Youngman insulting his wife. In much of his comedy, it’s the audience that’s the brunt of the humor instead of, say, a politician or the comedian’s girlfriend. Understandably, the audience would be upset, yet how is it any different from insulting them than it is for John Stewart insulting Rick Perry?
One of my favorite bits of his was “The Great Gatsby.” It’s sheer comic genius. He starts by reading the book. People wait for the joke, but there is no joke. They get restless. They ask themselves, “Is he serious?”* They begin to boo. He stops reading and goes to the victrola. “Do you want me to play this?” he asks, and the audience, expecting Mighty Mouse, cheers. Now he’s going to be funny, they think. So he turns on the Victrola and you hear “The Great Gatsby” – from exactly the point he stopped reading aloud.
I can’t even think about it without smiling, and if I had been in the audience, I would have been helpless with laughter.
Kaufman was doing practical jokes. That’s common one-on-one, but rare for an audience. Kaufman worked on doing that sort of joke on the audience. If you object to it, then you don’t understand comedy, and prefer to comedians to be safe instead of challenging you.
*The question that Kaufman always wanted the audience to ask.
He did things that no other performer would ever dare, and I respect that. Does that make him a genius? Not really. Some of what he did was absolutely brilliant; some, not so much. As for being a “nut,” who’s to say? We all have our… quirks. Some peoples’ are more pronounced than others. I don’t know where the “nut” line is, do you?
Maybe you didn’t get the joke. Maybe you got the joke and didn’t think it was a good one. Maybe you got the joke and thought it was great. All of the above are equally valid responses to Kaufman. Which category you’re in, though, says more about you than about him.
He reminded me of the typical “class clown” at the middle school level: an obnoxious attention whore who is so irritating 99+% of the time that you want to kick him in the nuts 'til he dies…but once in a great while says or does something that genuinely cracks you up. Whether those sporadic laffs are enough to allow you to enjoy his company the rest of time depends on you. In my case, I disliked him and mostly tended to turn the channel when he turned up on TV. I’d absolutely never have remotely considered paying to see him live.
Couldn’t stand the guy. I never saw the film, because I couldn’t see the point. I know what he was doing, but derived absolutely no joy from it, and after a while whenever he came on, I’d switch the channel. Heis bits of conceptual comedy sound great in abstract ot told in recollection, but actually sitting through the performance was an exercise in tediousness with no payoff.
“All comedy is cruelty?” A grossly inadequate and misleading summary, on a par with saying “Magic is lying to the audience”. If you based a magic act on that bare premise you’d get thrown off the stage, and rightly so, no matter now purely you stayed to the philosophy. The same with comedy. If Don Rickles insults you, it’s funny. When Michael Richards insulted people onstage, it wasn’t. It’s got nothing to do with “safe” or “challenging”.
He didn’t infuriate me…he intrigued me, so I don’t necessarily say he failed. I first saw him either on SNL with his Elvis impersonation, or on the Tonight Show doing Foreign Man.
Watching him on the Tonight Show, doing jokes like, “My wife is such a bad cook…she terrible.” made me say “what the hell is this?” but when he sat on the couch and told Carson how the island he was born on sank, and Carson nearly busted a gut laughing, I knew it was a gag, and I started to follow along. I didn’t always get it, and didn’t always think he was hilarious, but I began to watch everything I could.
For what he intended to do, I think he succeeded. He walked that fine line between genius and nut, between clever and stupid.
From everything I know of him, he’s better described as a troll than a comedian. This is not to say that he couldn’t be funny. Trolls are often funny. 4chan is filled with funny, albeit obnoxious stuff.
If Kaufman were alive today, he would LOVE the internet.
I don’t classify Andy Kaufman as a comedian but a performance artist and to discuss him as a comic would be similar to discussing Marina Abramovic as a nude model.
Were some of his routines funny - yes but take his groundbreaking routine as an example. In it, “Foreign Man” impersonates Elvis Presley. It is hysterically funny but why? He gives us Foreign Man to laugh at (not with) and his impersonation are cringingly bad. He is a figure to mock and I’m sure when developing his character, some heckler shouted, “You suck!” to which FM bowed and replied, “Thank you veery much.”. Then he goes into Elvis as a big “Fuck You!” to the audience (reportedly it was Elvis’ favorite impersonation) but then comes back as completely UNself-aware Foreign Man to finish up. It’s not comedy but it is a funny-as-hell routine and at the end, no one is sure if the joke is on Kaufman or the audience.
I think Kaufman was a genius and to answer a question in the OP, there have been others who have done (to an extent) what Kaufman did. Take Sacha Baron Cohen for instance. I agree that not bringing your coworkers in on the joke is a shitty thing to do but oftentimes some of them were in on it. Besides, it got to a point in Kaufman’s career when you hired him expecting him to do something crazy and just sat back to watch what you got.
But I don’t think we can take Man on the Moon as any sort of indication as to what Kaufman was really like. Frankly, I found the movie to be badly written. I just looked up the credits and the two writers were Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander the creative geniuses behind the abomination that was the Problem Child franchise and Agent Cody Banks.
It was lazy writing and lazy research. Basically they took a Comedy Central bio-piece and extended it from 22 minutes to an hour and a half. If Wikipedia was around in 1999, they’d have cribbed the entire screenplay from what they saw on Kaufman’s page. Basically, they made a superficial overview of Kaufman’s life without ever once delving into the question of “why.” Why was Kaufman the way he was? What were his motivations? What did he get out of it? What was he really like when not “on”? The movie really never touched on it. It was afraid to even try. It just went from scene to scene to scene highlighting his life but never delving further than what actually happened into the area of why it was occurring.
So love Kaufman or hate him, but don’t use that movie as the sole basis for your opinion.
See, to me that routine is NOT funny at all. If I somehow managed to see it without knowing all about Andy Kaufman I would have been relieved that he actually could perform once he broke into full Elvis, but would have felt used and confused by the stupid “Foreign Man” bookends.
If I want performance art I’ll go see Blue Men or something worthwhile that doesn’t make me cringe with embarrassment.
Wait til we find out which of the Republican candidates are just “doing a Kaufman”. I think it was Cain, but it’s hard to tell. Perry and his Brokeback moment was surreal as well.
I would say he was to comedy what Iggy and the Stooges were to pop music. A large part of Iggy’s act was to piss off the audience as much as he could. He got the idea when he went to a Doors concert… they were playing for a frat audience and Morrison, whacked out of his gourd as usual, decided to blow the gig off. He sang everything in a Betty Boop voice, until the frat boys were frothing with anger. It was a revelation for Iggy… he had never before considered the idea that you could get up on stage and actually try to irritate the audience and have that be part of the art.
There are other examples of that in pop music, like Dylan telling his band, “Play fucking LOUD” when people booed him for going electric. Exchanging negative energy with the audience became more common with punk bands… I guess GG Allin took that to the extreme.
Part of what I really like about him. I’m not exactly intimate with Kaufman’s oeuvre. But every famous clip I’ve seen of his (like the Gatsby one, or the Elvis one) just hit me in all the right places. I love that type of subversion. But I do find it genuinely funny, not just “conceptually funny.”