Andy Kaufman

• Born: January 17, 1949
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: May 16, 1984
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

Actor and entertainer

An innovative comedian, Kaufman captivated audiences with his portrayal of eccentric characters with heavy accents. He so challenged his fans to reconsider the nature of comedy with his unusual performances that they considered the announcement of his death at thirty-five a hoax.

Areas of achievement: Entertainment; theater

Early Life

Andy Kaufman (KOWF-mehn) was a shy, precocious child who began seeing a psychiatrist when he was three years old. Before he entered kindergarten he had created an imaginary television broadcast from his bedroom. Several years later he began to perform magic tricks and comedy routines at children’s parties, and he became a paid performer by age fourteen. Kaufman lived in an upper-middle-class, predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Great Neck, Long Island, where he attended public schools. He later claimed that he did not realize he was Jewish until he went to a junior college in Boston; to demonstrate his newly discovered identity, when he returned home for Passover, he read prayers with a Jackie Mason-style Jewish accent.

Early on, Kaufman developed lifelong fascinations with Elvis Presley, professional wrestling, and the fine line between performance and reality. By the early 1970’s Kaufman was confusing, and sometimes delighting, comedy club audiences with his unique brand of improvisation. One of his favorite routines when he was still largely unknown was to begin as “Foreign Man,” a meek presence with a strong accent who received little respect from the audience, then suddenly launch into a compelling, audience-pleasing Presley imitation, only to return to “Foreign Man” to shock the audience into an awareness of how the performer had manipulated their perceptions. His appearance as “Foreign Man” on the inaugural broadcast of Saturday Night Live on October 11, 1975, introduced Kaufman to a national audience that began to anticipate his unpredictable presence on fifteen more episodes of the live show.

Life’s Work

Kaufman and his opening act and alter ego, the lounge singer Tony Clifton, gathered a following of young fans who appreciated the provocations of Kaufman’s experimental style, which was showcased in a series of live concerts, in guest appearances on variety shows, and in his television special Andy’s Funhouse (1977). To extend the confusion of Clifton’s identity, Kaufman’s sidekick and partner in mischief, Bob Zmuda, and, less often, Andy’s brother Michael sometimes performed as the obnoxious, minimally talented singer Clifton, thus making it possible for Kaufman and “Clifton” to share a stage. When interviewed, “Clifton” would often insult Kaufman and extend the hoax that “Clifton” had a mind of his own.

The closest to mainstream performance and wide popularity Kaufman ever came during his lifetime was when his naïve, frightened “Foreign Man” evolved into the character of Latka Gravas, and Kaufman became a regular cast member on the highly regarded and extremely popular television situation comedy Taxi (1978-1983). Kaufman found the restraints of scripted television comedy oppressive, despite the fact that the fictional Gravas was given multiple personality disorder to allow Kaufman the chance to play various characters in Taxi episodes. Kaufman also demanded that Clifton be hired as a guest on the show, which resulted in an elaborate stunt in which Clifton became unruly and had to be removed from the set, an event that was reported in the press—to Kaufman’s great delight—as if Clifton were an actual person.

One of Kaufman’s most memorable performances was at Carnegie Hall on April 26, 1979, when comedian Robin Williams, dressed in drag as Kaufman’s grandmother, watched the central performer from the side of the stage, not revealing his identity until the end of the show. An elderly woman (a hired actor) supposedly had a heart attack and died onstage, later to be revived by Kaufman, in a fake Native American ritual. Once the stage show ended, the bizarre “performance” continued, with Kaufman inviting the entire audience to board twenty waiting buses to join him for milk and cookies. To extend the performance in both time and space, Kaufman invited the hard-core fans to join him the next morning on the Staten Island Ferry.

Throughout his short life, the enigmatic Kaufman preferred the challenges and opportunities of live performance and the even greater risks of improvisation in real settings. Attracted to the comic and dramatic possibilities of wrestling, Kaufman began a brief, ludicrous wrestling career during which he improvised wrestling matches with women from his audiences, provoked a fake long-running feud with World Wrestling Federation wrestler Jerry “The King” Lawler, and proclaimed himself World Inter-gender Wrestling Champion. In 1983 Kaufman’s girlfriend Lynne Margulies and Joe Orr began work on a documentary film about the actor’s adventures in the surreal world of professional wrestling. After Kaufman became ill, he urged Margulies and Orr to continue with the project, which includes documentary footage of wrestling matches and interviews with Taxi costars, close friends Williams and Zmuda, and Memphis wrestling legend Lawler, among others. Released in 1989, I’m from Hollywood takes its title from Kaufman’s introduction of himself to a Memphis wrestling audience.

Because Kaufman was not a smoker, followed a vegetarian diet, practiced yoga daily, and was a devoted follower of Transcendental Meditation, his contraction of a rare form of lung cancer (initially diagnosed in December, 1983, but kept secret) was unexpected. Because Kaufman was notorious for his elaborate hoaxes, some of which involved sudden death, and because Kaufman had discussed the appealing prospect of faking his own death, many fans wrongly assumed that the announcement of Kaufman’s death at age thirty-five in May, 1984, was the actor’s most outrageous stunt. Regrettably, it was not.

Although Kaufman remained close to his parents throughout his life, and they consistently supported his career, he never saw the daughter he had fathered while still a teenager. The child born to Kaufman’s high school girlfriend in 1969 was placed for adoption. In 1992, years after Kaufman’s death, Maria Colonna traced her biological parentage and discovered that Kaufman was her father.

Significance

Kaufman blurred the separation between guerrilla theater and popular entertainment. His legendary refusal to break character and his direct, often bizarre, and sometimes hostile engagements with audiences challenged definitions of performance and the relationship between performers and their audiences. In the song “Man on the Moon” from its 1992 album Automatic for the People, the band R.E.M. celebrated Kaufman’s otherworldliness, with references to his memorable Presley imitation and other noteworthy aspects of his performing life. In 1995 NBC-TV broadcast A Comedy Salute to Andy Kaufman, which contained tributes to Kaufman’s inspiration, influence, and artistic courage by many of America’s leading comedians. The innovative biopic Man on the Moon (1999), produced by Taxi cast member Danny DeVito, directed by Eastern European émigré Miloš Forman, and starring Jim Carrey in an award-winning performance introduced Kaufman to another generation of fans who can access his original performances on syndicated television.

Bibliography

Alexander, Scott, and Larry Karaszewski.“Man on the Moon”: The Shooting Script. New York: Newmarket Press, 1999. Background material on the “antibiopic” about Kaufman; full script; paired photographs from the film and documentary archives; interview with Miloš Forman conducted by the screenwriters.

Hecht, Julie. Was This Man a Genius? Talks with Andy Kaufman. New York: Random House, 2001. This book began in 1978 as a profile assignment for Harper’s magazine, and the writer spent a year tracking Kaufman. Decades later she published this account of her tape-recorded, often bizarre, interactions with Kaufman and Bob Zmuda. Ends with his mother’s poignant recollection of Kaufman’s childhood.

Zehme, Bill. Lost in the Funhouse: The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman. New York: Delta, 2001. Based on interviews with Kaufman’s family, friends, coworkers, and others, this biography offers stories about the inscrutable Kaufman from many perspectives. Includes photographs.

Zmuda, Bob, and Matthew Scott Hanson. Andy Kaufman Revealed: Best Friend Tells All. Boston: Little, Brown, 1999. This memoir written by Kaufman’s best friend and coconspirator is filled with fascinating anecdotes but is not a fully developed biography.