If you don’t find it hilarious I do not understand your mind. Which is not a criticism. I’m just saying, if you don’t get it, I don’t get you.
I am curious to know what comedians (or other performers) could count as precursors or influences on Kaufman’s style as exhibited in this clip. Comedy (and performance in general) always plays with audience expectations. But what precursors are there to this fairly explicitly adversarial play? I don’t know much Brecht but from what I’ve heard about him I wonder if his plays ever do this kind of thing?
I think I saw that routine on a summer variety show Andy Williams had in 1975 or 1976. It was obviously memorable to me and also very funny. How is it not comedy? I thought comedy was any entertainment whose purpose is laughter. Wasn’t that his purpose? Whether it was his purpose or not, that was the result.
Then I don’t know how to describe it. Maybe closer to John Cage’s 4’33"? I generally dislike conceptual performance art pieces, but both Kaufman and Cage work for me, for whatever reason.
4’33 gave the audiences something that was somewhat novel - the sound of a “silent” auditorium. It was art that the audience was able to enjoy, even if they didn’t realize at the time that they were supposed to be enjoying it.
Gatsby is funny when you read about it, but if you had to sit through 20 minutes of it, at some point you’re doing to stop laughing. You can’t laugh for 20 minutes straight at one joke. So what happens then? You either sit there smugly for 20 minutes, smelling the rosiness of your own farts, or you stand up and leave, and walk out on a creative genius. Or you do what I do when Family Guy busts out the old “I hurt my knee and I’m going to sit here going ‘ahh’ for 3 minutes” gag: get frustrated and annoyed.
This. When I saw it as part of the movie, I thought it was pretty clever and original… until you realize that he did that one bit for an entire show.
If you paid money to see that performance, my guess is you’d want your money back pronto. Either that or you’d want to punch his lights out.
The vast majority of people go to see people perform on stage to be entertained. The only one entertained by the Gatsby bit was Kaufman, and he did it to be a prick, pure and simple. He didn’t break out the Gatsby act until the audience pissed him off by begging for Latka, or something other than what he was doing on stage.
Gatsby was the audience’s “punishment”. The concept is original.. and maybe 5 minutes of it would be funny as part of a larger act. But to do it because you are irritated? That’s being an abrasive asshole, and nothing more.
Hmm… Like I said, I’m not that intimate with his oeuvre. I thought the Gatsby bit went on for 5 minutes or so. The whole act, though? I have to admit, that would probably cross the line into “annoying” and “pretentious” to me.
Yeah, I see what you mean. I get some chuckles out of reading the summaries in this thread, but to be stuck watching the bits played out for seven or eight minutes… that would get boring and/or annoying.
When did he do it for twenty minutes? Is that performance recorded?
In the clip I linked to, the performance is about seven minutes long, and it is punctuated by asides which (perhaps counterintuitively given the nature of the joke) keep things moving.
The movie gives the impression that he continues to read until the theater is nearly empty. Ignore the Russian dub and see for yourself:
The movie starts out with a full theater and around 1:50 you see it nearly empty, with the remaining brave souls struggling to stay awake. If that happens in 8 minutes, that’s the worst audience ever.
I don’t know how many of his performances actually went that way, but that’s the impression the movie gives. I’m too young to have seen Andy Kaufman live.
I’ll admit that the version you linked to appears to actually be set up as a TV friendly comedy piece, so apparently he was able to play nice when the situation called for it.
eta: Actually, according to the movie, he reads the entire book on stage. That’s gotta take several hours, I’d think.
For some people, humor consists only of jokes, told as jokes, with a standard punchline. For others humor can be very nuanced and ironic. Everybody has their own tastes, and Andy definitely wasn’t targeting common tastes in humor. I found most of his stuff hilarious. Some things just didn’t go over for me. But the lengths he would travel to dig humor out of unlikely sources provided his greatest acclamation, when he died a tragic death (assuming dying young is always tragic), many did not believe he was actually dead, that it was another bizarre gag. He may have one upped Twain there. The reports of his death were not exaggerated.
A major case of “The emperor has no clothes”. I never understood his cult. He was essentially a circus geek with a bigger paycheck; if he were alive today he’d probably be going on the talk show circuit advocating that women be banned from professions or ugly people be sterilized or something equally incendiary just to get attention. If making people uncomfortable is talent then Andy Dick is long overdue for a MacArthur Grant.
I suspect the movie depiction of the events is heavily exaggerated, given the description here, but what’s evident is that the bit was born as a way to annoy the audience for upwards of 15 minutes, and only later became the SNL-friendly comedy routine that you linked to.