Andy Kaufman was a true original, and there has never been anyone else like him. While
Kaufman's life ended in tragedy, the stories he created on the way there are unforgettable.
This is the tragic real-life story of Andy Kaufman.
A dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker, Andy Kaufman grew up in a middle-class Jewish family. Despite
his shy tendencies, by the age of eight, he had already become passionate about making
people laugh. When he wasn't doing make-believe TV shows in his bedroom, he was performing
stand-up at birthday parties. According to AndyKaufman.com, it was in these early years
that Kaufman first donned his father's jacket and developed his famous "Foreign Man" character,
mostly to entertain his younger sister.
Kaufman struggled in high school, according to Bill Zehme's biography Lost in the Funhouse,
but kept going largely to please his father. After graduating in 1967, he could have been
drafted into the Vietnam War, but following a psychological evaluation, received a permanent
4-F deferment.
The reason? A letter from the doctor claimed that Kaufman had lived, quote, "in a fantasy
world since preschool days," completely disconnected from reality. The doctor also went on to write
that if Kaufman were ever put in the military, he would, quote, "lose his mind." Kaufman,
for the record, absolutely loved this letter. He proudly displayed it to all his buddies,
who knew full-well that Kaufman had purposely treated his psych evaluations as a high-stakes
joke. As friend Gil Gevins said,
"He was aware that it was all this kind of game that he played. He knew what he was doing
— not all the time, but a lot of the time. He just encouraged people to believe what
they wanted."
Once high school was in Andy Kaufman's rearview mirror, he launched toward his dreams and
began studying television at a junior college in Boston, Massachusetts. Even back then,
the precise nature of what he did, exactly, was always vague. From his earliest years
on the stage, he rejected the title of "comedian," instead always calling himself an "entertainer"
and even claiming that he had never told a single joke onstage.
While in Boston, Kaufman entertained his classmates by hosting a strange campus TV program called
Uncle Andy's Fun House. Following this stage in his life, he jetted back down to New York
City and started trying his hand at the local comedy clubs. It was in 1971 that Kaufman
caught his big break, when he was spotted by Budd Friedman, the owner of the Improvisation
Comedy Club. Friedeman liked Kaufman's act and took a chance on the young performer by
booking him for future acts.
To Kaufman's credit, he never toned down his style and continued winning new fans. Then,
in 1974, he finally made his TV debut on The Dean Martin Comedy Hour, subsequently winning
a part on Saturday Night Live.
As immortalized in the 1999 film Man on the Moon, Andy Kaufman's brand of comedy was avant-garde
from the start and only grew more unusual as time went on. In 1979, for instance, Kaufman
did Carnegie Hall — a conventional measure of success — and ended his show in the most
unconventional manner possible, by publicly inviting all 2,800 audience-goers to join
him for a midnight snack in the city.
Those who were curious proceeded to board buses from 57th street to an unknown location,
whereupon they were dropped off at the New York School of Printing, of all places. Those
who took the next step and went inside were rewarded with a massive feast of chocolate
chip cookies and milk, supplied by Kaufman himself.
Some of Kaufman's other moments, of course, were even zanier. Comedy club owners could
never predict what they'd be getting if they were brave enough to book him. On one occasion,
Kaufman brought a sleeping bag onto the stage, curled into it, and spent his entire act napping
before the audience.
He was also remembered for bringing a copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby
onstage and simply reading it aloud until every single person in the audience had left.
Why? That was just his style, and as weird as these sorts of stunts might be, they're
a huge part of why he's still remembered today.
Andy Kaufman's ride to fame was his "Foreign Man" character, which he first developed as
a little boy. Employing an imaginary accent, Kaufman carefully crafted the role so as not
to exacerbate any existing stereotypes. Depending on the platform, the background of the "Foreign
Man" could sometimes seem Slavic, Mediterranean, or just about anything else.
"Thank you very much."
The point wasn't to mock immigrants, either, but to present the character as a kindhearted,
well-meaning newcomer who wants to make people laugh with his lackluster impressions of American
stars but possesses zero talent at it.
In an average skit, the Foreign Man would perpetually bomb, growing frustrated to the
point of having tears in his eyes, or even asking for the camera to be turned off. Then
suddenly, out of nowhere, he would conclude with a stunning, spot-on Elvis impersonation,
thereby amazing crowd-goers with the realization that the entire "lackluster" show had been
a brilliant act of trickery.
Foreign Man would later evolve into Latka Gravas, the mechanic Kaufman played on the
classic sitcom Taxi. Even when Kaufman found mainstream success on network TV, though,
he continued his unorthodox methods. He didn't go to rehearsals, so coworker Carol Kane rehearsed
with a "fake Andy" wearing a sign that said "Latka."
People loved Andy Kaufman, but they hated his alter ego, Tony Clifton, a chauvinistic
nightclub performer whom Kaufman purposely portrayed as the most loathsome person imaginable.
Kaufman always maintained the illusion that Clifton was an entirely separate human being
whom he claimed to have first encountered in 1969, donning a thick wig, sunglasses,
and mustache for the role.
Clifton was played as a seedy, bigoted, homophobic, and unbearably obnoxious parody of toxic masculinity
who regularly got booed off the stage, presumably to Kaufman's delight. To keep the charade
going, Kaufman often enlisted his friend Bob Zmuda to star as Clifton in performances and
interviews, in which the nightclub performer would rail about how Kaufman was ruining his
reputation by doing fake performances as him.
"We fooled the American public for years that Andy was Tony Clifton when in fact it was
me at times."
Kaufman truly tested the limits of Clifton's repulsiveness when, as a condition for doing
Taxi, he mandated that the producers also hire Clifton, on a separate contract. Once
this was done, Kaufman intentionally sabotaged Clifton's career by appearing on-set drunk,
late, and with two women alleged to be prostitutes. Clifton insulted everyone on the set, spewed
vulgarities, and caused one actor to walk off furious. The next day, Kaufman arranged
for Clifton to be thrown off the set, publicly, by studio security.
In the early 1980s, Fridays was a sketch comedy TV series in the vein of Saturday Night Live,
but far less successful. And when Kaufman starred in one 1981 skit — which featured
two couples, both high as a kite, doing a double date at a restaurant — things suddenly
went haywire on live TV. Mid-dialogue, Kaufman broke character, and said,
"I feel so stupid."
As the other cast members tried to keep the skit going, Kaufman began railing about how
dumb and unfunny it was, to the point where fellow performer Michael Richards, who would
later become a cultural icon for playing Kramer on Seinfeld, went backstage and threw all
the cue cards at Kaufman. The sketch was thoroughly ruined. The scandal was instantaneous. Headlines
ran furiously about how Kaufman had gone nuts, and, sure enough, Kaufman was delighted.
As with so many "controversial" times in Kaufman's career, the whole thing was planned by Kaufman
behind-the-scenes, and producers probably only agreed to it due to Fridays' poor ratings.
After the buzz went negative, ABC acknowledged that the stunt was planned. Kaufman rebelled
by doing a teary apology on TV, claiming that due to his outburst, his career was now veering
off the rails, and he'd lost his wife. He had no wife, by the way, and his career was
doing just fine.
One of the most notorious sections of Kaufman's career was his role as a wrestler. However,
Kaufman only wrestled women, offering $500 to any woman who could pin him. His arguments
for only wrestling females were blatantly sexist, and he even went so far as to declare
himself the "Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion of the World." Throughout the fights, as the
audience booed, Kaufman would scream out,
"This is not a comedy routine! This is not a skit! This is real!"
But in actuality, it was a comedy routine, and Kaufman was not only intentionally playing
into the professional wrestling trope of the "heel," or villain, but also mocking the sexist
attitudes of society at large.
Kaufman didn't make a point to clear up the confusion. That wasn't his style. If he'd
done his skits in the post-WWE era, wherein wrestling tropes are better-known, audiences
might've understood his intent, but back then, they simply assumed he was a sexist jerk.
Saturday Night Live received mountains of hate mail, so in 1982 Kaufman proposed a live
poll wherein people could vote to ban him from SNL, which they did.
Andy Kaufman's heel turn as the "Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion of the World" angered a
lot of people, but perhaps none more so than a real professional wrestler, Jerry "the King"
Lawler. Lawler was - apparently - so angry about Kaufman wrestling women that he made
it his mission to take Kaufman down. In the early 1980s, they became fierce wrestling
competitors, with showdowns that took place in the ring, on talk shows, and across the
entertainment landscape.
At one point, Lawler's pile driver put Kaufman in a neck brace. The apex of the whole thing
was probably when both of them appeared on The David Letterman Show, leading to a confrontation
wherein Lawler slapped Kaufman on live TV. One thing was for sure: These two men despised
each other. Or so the story goes.
In reality, it was just another storyline — the sort that professional wrestling is
now known for. Behind the scenes, Lawler and Kaufman were buddies, though it wasn't until
years after Kaufman's death that Lawler revealed the truth. In 2013, Lawler said that if Kaufman
were ever somehow found alive, he'd be happy to continue their fictitious battle.
Andy Kaufman wasn't a smoker, except when playing Tony Clifton. Biography states that
he was generally a health fanatic, if anything. That's why family members were so disturbed
when he started coughing during Thanksgiving of 1983. They pleaded for him to visit a doctor,
and when he did, the news was dire: Kaufman, 35 years old, had somehow contracted terminal
lung cancer.
With only three months to live, the doctor's only recommendations were the care-and-comfort
variety. Nonetheless, Kaufman combined conventional treatments like chemo and radiation with unorthodox
solutions like a macrobiotic diet and "psychic surgery." Sadly, nothing worked. He died shortly
afterward.
Just like Tupac and Elvis, there are a whole bunch of people who think that Andy Kaufman
faked his death, has been staying quiet for decades, and is just waiting for the right
moment to someday reemerge and say "Gotcha!" on live TV. To be fair, if there was ever
a dead celebrity who would do this, it's definitely Kaufman. When he first died, even some friends
and family were convinced that the whole thing was a hoax, and these rumors have only grown
more rampant since then.
Bob Zmuda has often claimed that Kaufman told him aloud that he wanted to one day fake his
death for a few decades, as the best practical joke of all time, presumably to return sometime
in the 21st century. So far, that hasn't happened.
On the other hand, according to Yahoo News, various people who stood beside Kaufman on
his deathbed, such as his manager George Shapiro, have said that the great comedian is actually
dead. And the coroner agreed. Then again, maybe they're all in on the joke? Either way,
this much is true: When it comes to Andy Kaufman, someone will always be raising questions.
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