outlaw, lampooning the mediocrity of the entertainment industry? To me, his writer for ten years, he was both. Did he ever sit down and openly discuss lampooning the mediocrity around us? No. He would never intellectualize about anything he did and hated when people tried. Andy could also be quite funny if he wanted to be and could construct a comedic scenario with the best of them, but then—a moment later—purposely bore the audience to death just to see how much they could take before they walked out. When asked whether he was concerned that this sort of behavior could cost him a mass audience, his reply was, “I don’t perform for the masses. I perform for a small group who knows what I’m doing.” I would even take it a step further and say Andy was performing for himself. Blissful self-indulgence. This attitude would keep his manager George Shapiro up at night. As for me, I was sharing the rocket ship with Evel Knievel. Director Judd Apatow said it best: “Where do you go if you’re Bob Zmuda? After you write for Kaufman, how can you possibly write for somebody else?” You’re right, Judd, you can’t. So what do you do? Just keep writing for Kaufman! Dead or alive, it doesn’t matter.
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Alan Zweibel, one of the early and top writers from SNL, captured his first impression of Andy’s genius:
I heard about Andy Kaufman before I saw him. I remember they were talking about him and how he got fired from a club in Florida and they said why did he go there in the first place? Why would they understand him? And then I didn’t really get what that sentence meant. And then one night I was at the Improv and did see that Andy Kaufman was on. And I sat in the back of the room out of curiosity. So did the other comics. And I saw him do Mighty Mouse and thought I was going to go crazy. I saw him do the Foreign Man. Here was a guy that showed that you didn’t need language, you didn’t need English to elicit a response from an audience. I have never seen anybody and probably to this very day who could manipulate an audience any way he wanted to. When he would do Tony Clifton, he would get the audience to hate him. He would have the audience booing him. And then at the end he would have them cheering him. He would be able to take them any place he wanted them to go. And people started coming to the club to see this guy. At Rick Newman’s Catch a Rising Star, Carl Reiner and Rob Reiner would come to see him. One night Woody Allen was there. On another, Dustin Hoffman. It was this phenomenon. People would come in and go, “Golly, I could never do a thing like this.” I would never think that anybody could do a thing like this. I could never think that a thing like this should be done. But it is being done and look how great it is. It was so different than anyone’s background orientation. I don’t know how this happened. I was impressed. Besides his talent, there was a commitment there. He would meditate before every performance. There was a real commitment to what he did. He was unfailing. He just dug in. But I worried about him. I thought, “Where is he going to do this?” People write jokes, tell jokes, and take the check. Where was he going to go with this outside of the Improv and Catch a Rising Star? How was this guy going to make a living?
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What drove Andy to do the things he did? As in most performers, I believe there was a level of narcissism at play. In Andy’s case, throw in some sadomasochistic tendencies also. I say this because at times he truly enjoyed being rejected and hurt. Once Jeff Conaway, a cast member of Taxi, got drunk and started beating the hell out of him. He didn’t even protect himself and took the beating, à la Gandhi. Emotionally and physically he was hurting, but Jeff believed, “He pushed me to do it and enjoyed it.”
He wallowed in the pain. Another time, after being voted off SNL, he immediately went on David Letterman, making a routine out of the collapse of his career. I tell people, “Andy Kaufman died for our sins”—because I believe his psychological imperative in faking his death was martyrdom.
Yes, I believe that he faked his death. How can I think anything different? He talked to me about it endlessly for three years, and also to others. It would be his “greatest illusion,” he said, and when he was gone, “people should be ashamed for they had the greatest performer in the world in their midst and blew it.”
The consummate performer to the end, leaving them wanting MORE and sadistically punishing them by not giving it to them. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Music up: the theme from King of Kings plays. Roll credits. Is that where you are going to end it, Andy? Lifting Jesus’s routine from an MGM biblical pic? But let’s not forget the resurrection. Aren’t you at least curious what a stir you’d create if you returned? That was the plan after all, wasn’t it? Remember, you told Lynne, “Twenty or thirty years and I’ll be back.” Well, it’s been thirty years! Mom and Pop are gone. If you wanted to walk on stage dressed in leather with a boy toy on a leash, be my guest. And don’t worry about jail time. I’m sure you could easily pay back all those life insurance policies you ripped off in no time. We’d book you in the biggest venues around and charge top dollar. Who wouldn’t pay to see the man who successfully faked his death? Andy Kaufman, the greatest entertainer of all time, returns. They always said you were twenty years ahead of your time. Well, perhaps now, thirty years later, the public has caught up with you. Give them one more chance. Your fans await you!
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According to Andy, Janice Kaufman, his mother, admitted that it was her fault that Andy started to go to psychiatrists as early as age four. “I thought that children should always be happy and when Andy wasn’t, I thought something was wrong.” Andy said, “It’s not that I was crazy, it’s just that I was sad at times because the world was sad at times. When I would perform, it wasn’t sad anymore.”
I think Andy and I were kindred spirits in this regard. Both of our dads yelled a lot. I mean a lot. I remember going down into the basement of my home and performing to imaginary audiences just to get away from it. I would venture to say that many fledgling performers did the same. Performance was distraction from the harsh reality of life. When Kaufman and I met, we intrinsically knew this and from that moment on, the performances never stopped. It was 24/7. This nonstop act unleashed an overabundance of pranks, many times heaped on unwitting strangers, like it or not.
The fact that there were now two of us created a dynamic where one was constantly fueling the other. We were like the would-be murderers Hickock and Smith in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Alone, they wouldn’t have done what they did to that unfortunate Clutter family. But together, they hog-tied and slaughtered them.
Kaufman and I together formed the same duo. We couldn’t control ourselves or shut it down. We were hell-bent on “slaughtering” the status quo. I imagine we had a sense of youthful entitlement, but we weren’t fascists about it. It was just fun. Fun was the key. Fun was the drug that fueled it all. Because if we were having fun, we wouldn’t have to be sad. Fun … Funny … Humor … Comedy. You can see how the comedian label got wrongly applied. Fun. It’s a word that can easily be taken for granted. People casually throw it around, as in, “We had a fun time.” People who knew Andy will always use that word seriously in describing him, pointing out that fun really was his essence. Cindy Williams of Laverne & Shirley fame was a friend of Andy’s. She elaborates:
As an actress who loved to act, I couldn’t have met a better person than Andy, who acted every moment of his life. It was one big improv continuously. Such fun. The best fun I ever had in my life.
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Lynne
Fun was everything with Andy. Breakfast was fun. We’d play the card game Crazy Eights for hours at breakfast because it was so much fun. Andy once challenged my brother Steve, who was a professional, world-famous card player, to a game of Crazy Eights. For fun. Sometimes we’d be driving in a car and pull up to a light. If there was a car next to us, Andy would start to strangle me and I would mouth “HELP!” to the car next to us, then when the light changed we’d speed off leaving them in shock. Just for the fun of it.
Another story: When I first got to San Francisco, I was living in an apartment with a roommate, Michael. Michael made a comment to me at some point that Andy used a lot of toilet paper. So Andy made it his mission that every night he would bring home a four-pack roll of toilet paper (always the same brand, of course) and put the pack