Thanky.
I’d’ve stayed. 
The most amazing thing about Kaufman was that people kept paying him to perform. After he pissed off more than a few managers and promoters with his stunts and was generally considered the most difficult co-star possibly on Taxi you’d think that word would have gotten around.
Not if your significant other wanted to go. You wouldn’t trade sex for Kaufman’s Gatsby bit, would you?
Ditto.
Wow, a difficult performer? Yeah, it’s astounding to think he continued to pick up work.
I dunno if any of you watch WWE Wrestling, but Monday night after several months of “mysterious” videos about 01/02/2012, Chris Jericho returned to the ring in a entrance almost visually identical to his last return to wrestling about 8 years ago. He ran around the ring and outside the ring patting people’s hands, encouraging them to cheer, picking up the microphone like he was going to speak, and then going back to begging for the cheers. It went on so long it was painful and some people were starting to boo while most people were just confused.
Then he walked to the back without saying anything at all.
And I thought…Andy Kaufman.
I liked Andy Kauman’s performance in Taxi, and his stand-up and funny conversations with talk chow hosts. I didn’t really understand the bizarre performance art aspect of his comedy. As I kid, I’d barely heard of the wrestling shtick.
When I saw Man On The Moon, I felt that I knew Kaufman even less than I had before. Not only did I get the Gatsby skit, the fact that he hated his role on Taxi, the whole wrestling story, but that he spoofed everyone, all the time. To the point that his brothers and sisters searched for a conspiracy in his death “Look, the Doctor’s wearing tennis shoes, this must be a joke.” The movie leads one to believe that Kaufman was never honest with anyone. That’s illogical. He couldn’t have lived his life like that.
But the movie was also a joke. That’s when I realized, I’d watched a funny autobiography – but I now knew nothing more than when I started. The plan all along.
It’s hellbinding.
Yeah. “All comedy is cruelty” is bullshit. Someone read Stranger in a Strange Land in high school. It’s a poor defense of Kaufman. And I like Kaufman.
Now this is a reaction I don’t get at all. And it’s one that makes me appreciate Kaufman. Bored? Sure. Disappointed? Yeah. Understanding what he’s going for but still finding it facile (or whatever)? Absolutely. Ready to walk out? I wouldn’t blame you. But to allow yourself to be, well, trolled so well that your “infuriated”? I’m finding that amusing. Especially if you kind of have an inkling that he might be deliberately trying to trigger that and you let him play you like that? Really, infuriating?
Yeah. I think it’s a great 3 minute gag. Would get old real quick after that. Might circle back to funny if he actually did the whole book. But then, you’d have sit through a reading of the book, one I don’t really like. Not sure it would be worth it for me. More conceptually funny than actually funny. At least for me.
Is it that you don’t know what the word “unsuspecting” means or that you were so joyously anticipating making a smug, condescending reply that you skipped over it?
Some people like to tell really long shaggy dog stories. Some people like to hear them. I suspect that if I heard Gordon Freeman or Eddie Izzard telling one I’d be entertained. But most of the time when I realize someone is in the middle of a shaggy dog story (live or posted on the Internet) I have a strong yet containable urge to hit them in the throat with a bag of nickels.
People’s preferences regarding the teller and the experience of hearing and participating in these tales differs wildly. Andy Kaufman illuminates this.
Now THAT’S comedy!
I’m another who’s too young to have been aware of Andy Kaufman when he was alive, and I admit what I do know about him is mainly through the movie. But it seems to me he was a sort of meta-comedian. “Wouldn’t it be funny if a comedian just came out and did X” Yeah, it kind of is, looking back on it, but I can see how it would mainly be annoying at the time.
P.S. Pretty sure Gordon Freeman won’t be telling any shaggy dog stories any time soon. Brilliant scientist though…
I saw some of the wrestling stuff as it happened on live TV. Didn’t care for it, or Kaufman. Memphis was pretty much the only place he could have done that crap, but then the Memphis promotion has a long history of doing really strange things. One time, they brought in Adam West as Batman to cut a promo on Jerry Lawler, who was a heel at the time…
He could be brilliant when he stuck to meta-comedy. But his schtick became “how unfunny can I be and still get away with it?” Because I got the impression, rightly or wrongly, that he was doing it out of hostility to his audience.
I can see the comic possibilities in being a heel professional wrestler, in terms of meta-comedy and playing off the audience expectations. But reading Gatsby in its entirety just to see how often you can do it and still get hired? That’s not comedy; it’s contempt.
Regards,
Shodan
It’s also not what he did. He performed it for 15-20 minutes at the end of the night, in an attemp to get everyone to go home. The manager basically wanted people to leave so he could close up.
The problem here is trying to define Kaufman as a “comedian,” “comic,” “humorist” or something similar. I don’t think he was. I think he was a performer whose real intent was to get a reaction from the audience. Laughter, hostility, contempt, confusion – I’m pretty much convinced he didn’t care what kind of response he got. A lot of the early stuff, like Foreign Man Elvis and the Mighty Mouse sing-along got laughs, so he got labeled a comedian. A more accurate label might have been “provocateur.”
“Performance artist.” Provocateur sounds like some kind of political agitator.
Pour épater le bourgeois is the phrase that springs to mind.
Some comedy is the audience laughing at the comedian. Some is the comedian getting the audience to laugh at itself. Some is the comedian laughing at the audience. The last is hard to sustain, because people don’t like to pay to be laughed at.
Regards,
Shodan
Andy was a master musician, and the audience was his instrument. I think everything he did was to get a specific reaction at a specific time.