-Andy Kaufman, a skinny comedian
with no athletic ability, he starts wrestling.
-I'll take on anybody who wants to come
in that ring and volunteer.
I'm going to send you back to the kitchen where you belong.
-He didn't care if the people hated him.
He wanted to get a reaction. This is soap.
You put water on it and you rub it all over your body.
Jerry Lawler, he gets the microphone and says hey,
instead of calling him an ambulance,
why don't you call him a taxi?
I'm Jim Cornette.
I was there when Jerry "The King" Lawler and Andy Kaufman
set the pro wrestling world on its ear
and started 40 years of debate.
Was it real? Or was it not?
♪♪
I first became aware of Andy Kaufman
like everybody else in the country
when he started doing television.
He wasn't a stand-up comic,
he didn't tell jokes, he created characters.
That you couldn't really tell whether it was him or not.
The first time that people saw Andy on television,
he did the foreign man. So many people were convinced
that he was really from Bulgaria, somewhere,
and that is what led him to get the role as Latka on "Taxi."
-Forget I said anything.
I don't know what I'm talking about.
-At that point, he became
one of the hottest comedians in the country,
even though he was really more of a performance artist.
Andy Kaufman was a wrestling fan
from the time he was a kid in New York.
And his favorite professional wrestler
was Nature Boy Buddy Rogers.
Buddy Rogers invented a lot of the tactics
that the bad guy heel wrestler would use to taunt the fans
and the opponents and Andy was mesmerized by this.
He saw the art in the performance.
And he starts wrestling on television.
Talk shows, Saturday Night Live, wherever he can.
But he wrestled women.
-I'm going to send you back to the kitchen where you belong.
I'm going to have you scrubbing the potato.
-He understood that pro wrestling
was about manipulating people's emotions.
But what he really wanted to do
was do this on a real professional wrestling event.
He goes to Madison Square Garden and asks the promoter of the --
at the time, the WWF, Vince McMahon Sr.
The current Vince McMahon's father.
And Vince McMahon Sr. turned Andy Kaufman down.
He was afraid that it would make wrestling look phony.
A comedian, a skinny TV star coming in
and wrestling with my talent? Just wasn't interested.
That night at Madison Square Garden,
one of the photographers at ringside was Bill Apter.
And Bill gets on the phone, it's midnight,
and he calls Jerry Lawler in Memphis.
Before the WWE went national, wrestling was a series
of geographical regional territories.
Every territory in wrestling had its own style.
And Memphis was crazy fights.
Memphis was brawling.
Memphis was over the top violence
but with a level of entertainment
and occasionally comedy.
Memphis wrestling was a cultural institution.
And Jerry Lawler was the biggest box office attraction
and the number one star in the Memphis wrestling territory.
And Lawler had just come in from one of their wrestling matches
that night when Bill called and he said,
I got Andy Kaufman here.
And Lawler goes what? He wants to wrestle!
What? And so the night of the match comes
and the first one or two or three ladies,
they were intimidated,
they've never done anything like this before.
They're dressed in their street clothes.
And then you know, Andy would pin them.
But the last lady was named Foxy.
And the people started getting behind her.
Because Andy started having a little more trouble.
At one point, she even got on top of him
and then the crowd just blew.
So the next week, the next Monday night,
the people come to see can Foxy beat Andy Kaufman?
And this time, Andy's huffing and puffing.
There was a few points where the people thought
that it looked like Foxy had him.
But finally, he prevails over Foxy.
Jerry Lawler gets in the ring
and just grabs a hand of Andy to pull him back
and Andy goes with it and flies across the ring.
And the place blows. All the people cheer.
And that's when Lawler got that little twinkle in his eye
and said hm, this can be even bigger.
Lawler gets the idea, he says I think
we could have a single match between me and Andy Kaufman.
First we got to get the heat up.
Andy starts sending in videos from California by poolside
that are played on the Memphis wrestling show.
How dare you put your hands on me, Mr. Lawler?
What some kind of hillbilly from Memphis, Tennessee?
-All you do is plow the fields and farm.
I am from Hollywood.
-I'm from Hollywood, Mr. Lawler, I'm a TV star!
You can't treat me like that!
So meanwhile, Lawler is taking the realistic tac.
He said I don't know what this guy's problem is.
I don't know why he hates the people of Tennessee,
I don't know why he acts this way.
What I'm going to promise you, Andy Kaufman,
it's going to be the last time you ever make fun of wrestling
because I'm going to fix you, son.
I'm going to prove that all these preconceived notions
you have about professional wrestling, that's all crap.
And then finally, the challenge is made for a match.
A network TV star,
one of the hottest comedians in the country
is going to fight a pro wrestler
at the Mid-South Coliseum on Monday night
and for five dollars we can get in and see it.
Boom goes the dynamite! Right?
So the night of the match was April 5th, 1982.
And I was there to shoot pictures at ringside.
Lawler comes out. And here comes Andy.
He would taunt Lawler like ah, you big ape!
And then he would run and jump out of the ring,
or he'd duck away or he'd back up.
And finally, Lawler gets out and grabs the microphone
and says ay, did you come here to wrestle
or did you come here to act like an ass?
And the people just cheer. Lawler says ay, come here.
He puts his hands behind his back,
and he sticks his head out,
and he says I'll give you a free one.
Grab me in a headlock.
And Andy starts looking around and all the people
are screaming yeah, yeah, do it, do it!
And finally he kind of tentatively,
he kind of reaches over, he grabs Lawler in a headlock
like this and he starts squeezing.
And Lawler, he's been over and his head's in Andy's grip,
and he just raises his finger behind Andy's back,
like just wait a minute.
And all the people see, oh, Andy's not hurting him.
Watch this. And he reaches down and picks
Andy up in what we call a back suplex.
And he just picks him straight up
and drops him straight back
and Andy folded up like an accordion.
And then Lawler goes I'm going to show this guy.
And Jerry Lawler's most deadly move was the pile driver.
And the pile driver is such a dangerous hold.
It was banned by the athletic commission.
So when Lawler grabs Andy and picks him up and boom!
Gives him that big pile driver, the referee rings the bell.
Andy Kaufman is the winner of the match by disqualification.
But now Andy is lying there just on the mat
and Lawler hears the response from the people,
grabs him, picks him up, and gives him another.
And laying there in the middle of the Mid-South Coliseum
in the wrestling ring
is one of the biggest network TV stars in the country.
The referee comes over and he's just checked on Andy
and he says Andy says he wants an ambulance.
Lawler gets the microphone and says hey!
Instead of calling him an ambulance,
why don't you call him a taxi?
And the people are cheering oh yes,
this is the greatest thing we've ever seen.
And the ambulance comes in and they get him on the board
and they get him on the gurney,
as they're wheeling him to the ambulance,
people are trying to -- with their feet,
trying to kick the stretcher over.
And I'm shooting pictures everywhere,
I'm trying not to step on people
while I'm trying to follow this gurney back to the ambulance.
And the ambulance pulling out of the back of the Coliseum
got another ovation from the crowd.
Nobody left until they saw Andy all the way out the back door.
He wore the neck brace for months.
Every time he was out in public, you saw him in that neck brace.
So now he comes out and he says I always thought wrestling
was all fun and games
and it wasn't to be taken seriously
but now I understand I was wrong.
Wrestling is real!
He said all those horrible things
and he got his ass handed to him for it
and now he's trying to claim he's the victim!
And so finally, they're booked on the David Letterman Show.
But the Letterman producers,
they don't know anything about wrestling.
They figure it's all fun and games.
So they wanted Jerry and Andy to get together
and put their arms around each other and sing
"What the World Needs Now is Love Sweet Love."
Jerry and Andy said, well, let's just not do that
but they didn't tell anybody.
And they got together in the back
and they start saying, well, what can we do?
This is not our normal stomping grounds.
What can we get away with?
They start doing the bit on the set.
Andy said something to the effect of
I'm not that kind of guy
that I would do this to you and Lawler looked at him
and said what kind of guy are you?
And the people in the studio were liking this,
it's entertaining, it's a little uncomfortable.
-Did you laugh after you were laying in the hospital?
Was it a joke then?
-But finally, you can tell that Letterman sees
that it's not going the direction
that they thought it was going to go.
They heard the bumper music playing.
And they knew that they were about to go to the break.
And Jerry at that point said, well,
guess if I'm going to do this this is the time to do it.
So Andy had hit him with some wise-ass remark,
and Lawler just stood up and stood in front of Andy
who's looking up at him and pow!
He just slapped the shit out of him.
We go to the commercial. Come back three minutes later,
and there's David Letterman sitting there, well,
ladies and gentlemen, and Lawler is still on the set.
Then Andy comes back from the wings
and is cussing a blue streak. He cussed this rant on Lawler,
who's sitting there just looking at him.
-I'll sue your ass! You're a motherfucking asshole!
-And then finally he grabs Letterman's coffee cup
off the desk and throws coffee on Lawler.
And Andy runs off again.
Letterman's like, well, I think some of those words are allowed
on network television, ladies and gentlemen,
but I've said it a million times, you cannot throw coffee.
At that point, Andy and Lawler
were kind of inextricably linked together.
The last time or two that Andy was down to do the shows,
he had kind of a cough.
And shortly after he passed away.
After he died, his family found the paychecks
that Jerry Jared and Jared Promotions
had written for his appearances
but Andy never cashed the checks.
He framed them.
There were always long-running rivalries
but this was something that made national news
even though it just happened in Memphis.
Because of Andy's notoriety.
And that was two years before Vince McMahon Jr.
took over from his father and went national with wrestling
and started making everybody big national stories.
And it kind of always ate Vince Jr. that his dad
had the chance to do this first and turned it down
because he thought it'd make wrestling look silly.
Andy Kaufman being a comedian,
him and Lawler did more to make people believe
wrestling was real than anything else
that had been done in the past 30 years.
Wrestling is real! And they bought it!
Because they saw the evidence in front of them!
Anyway, I guess we should do this on tape.
Was that on -- Well, there you go.