Andy Kaufman

by Bob Zmuda

  He supposedly died at 6:20 p.m. on May 16, 1984. I was not bedside when he died. I had gone home for a few hours to sleep when I got the call from his secretary, Linda Mitchell. She simply said, “It’s over.” I hung up the phone and said to myself, “Over? … We’ve only just begun.” I flew to the funeral in Great Neck a couple of days later. At the funeral, I had to try my best not to laugh out loud. Luckily, a stifled laugh with a little cough thrown in can appear as a sob. So now the long wait would start, year after year after year would pass. Surely he’d try somehow to get in contact with me. I certainly would receive some sign, something that only I would understand and could never be linked back to him. But nothing. Cold silence. Eventually, over time, I too believed he had died. He had to. Yes, he told me he was going to fake his death, but ten, twenty, twenty-five years later? It just had to be the most unimaginable coincidence ever. Had to be. Who plans to fake his death one day and then the next day really dies? It just doesn’t happen, but it did. And it happened to the strangest individual who ever lived. And I believed his death like a fool. Against all odds believed it. Believed it because Andy wanted me to believe it. It’s just like I told him, “You’re going to have to convince me you died,” and he did. But no more. So why did I change my mind? Facts, pure and simple. If you look at all the facts, you can only draw one conclusion: Andy Kaufman faked his own death.

  ***

  It seems that so many critics and fans are driven almost to the point of distraction trying to break through the Kaufman enigma. You can only imagine the questions Lynne and I fielded for years, with people wondering what he was really like. Of course, one could never answer that. Can one answer that for anyone? Do we really know what made Abe Lincoln tick? Can Daniel Day Lewis tell us? Can anybody really explain you to anyone else? I’d venture to say you couldn’t even explain yourself to yourself if you tried. Yet over the years, so many people (bright people) are still trying to figure Kaufman out. Intellectual thought falls short. But if there is one thing family and friends can agree on, it’s the fact that he was strange, very strange. Perhaps the closest we can get to understand Kaufman is through his adherence to transcendental meditation, sex, fun, and metaphysics in no particular order. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that an understanding of Andy is going to be easy. After all, his is the trigonometry of psyches. Things will not be black or white even though I will attempt at times to paint them as such, more for my own sanity than the reader’s. Writing about madness hopefully needn’t make the writer mad.

  And also throw out all that comedy bullshit. I’m telling you, he was not a comedian and really shouldn’t be judged through the prism of comedy, or you’ll never come close to understanding him. Andy was funny (sometimes) because he was an absurdist, but being funny truly wasn’t a goal. Remember, Andy wasn’t waiting for the laughs. If they came, OK. He’d take them. But if they didn’t—and many times they didn’t—it really made no difference to him. It might have mattered to the TV executives, his managers, club owners, and the public, but to Andy, never. Laughter? How trite.

  If he wasn’t a comedian, then what was he? To me, Andy was a behavioral scientist. He was constantly measuring people’s reaction to stimuli. Andy instinctively knew back in ’72 what neuroscientists have recently discovered: that laughter is one way the brain deals with the discomfort of an embarrassing situation (Foreign Man), inappropriate jokes (Tony Clifton), or the surprise of an unexpected punch line (“Take my wife … please take her.”). He was always looking at the human condition and poking his nose around in areas where no one else did. Who interviews a girl with a tape recorder right after he has sex with her for the first time, asking why she doesn’t like to have her legs up high while she’s having intercourse with him? Who would ask such a thing? The sex researcher Alfred Kinsey perhaps, but even Kinsey would be more demure about it and have the young lady fill out a questionnaire. Not Andy, because Andy doesn’t care what she answers. That’s irrelevant. What fascinates him is her shock at his asking. That’s the behavior he’s interested in exploring—the “uncomfortableness” of a situation. This is the behavior he would explore time and time again.

  When he first started doing the Foreign Man act, which he lifted from seeing a Pakistani man telling bad jokes at Café Wha? in Greenwich Village when he was fourteen, he could see how painful it was for the man not getting laughs (even though Andy and a friend were dying inside). So Andy used that same uncomfortableness to his advantage. You were uncomfortable watching his Foreign Man character’s ineptitude. The uncomfortableness led to nervous and embarrassed laughter from the audience. Andy milked that embarrassed laughter and accused the audience of “laughing at me, not with me.” And then he would start to cry. This would only cause the audience to laugh louder. Occasionally there’d be a few sensitive people in the audience (usually women) who would get very offended at the audience for laughing at this poor soul (not knowing the whole thing was a put-on).

  Andy would also utilize real situations from his own life, no matter how painful, and present them onstage. Sometimes they got people to laugh. Sometimes they got people angry. Sometimes they got an audience to walk out. To Andy, it was all the same. He just wanted real emotions. He wanted his audience to be in the present. When he ran into me in ’74, I was fresh out of guerrilla street theater and radical Abbie Hoffman-style politics—fused with an almost unrelenting devotion to psychologist Abraham Maslow’s theory of “self-actualization” and a living-in-the-present philosophy—and Andy and I immediately clicked. It was uncanny how we thought exactly alike. In interviews he would state, “Once I met Bob, I just knew he had to be my writer. We just looked at the world the same way.”

  Never forget that Kaufman’s psychological imperative onstage was to search for the “uncomfortableness” in every situation. This bloodletting, like the Stations of the Cross, led him on the road to spiritual enlightenment. Performance would therefore become a sacred ritual, performance as High Mass. Fame and fortune would bring him comfort and security. Andy, on the other hand, would rather be uncomfortable and insecure and not a prisoner to the karma of the material world. As you will see, give him the opportunity to sabotage his career and he’d leap at it. When Dick Ebersol, producer of Saturday Night Live, designed a vote to banish him from SNL, it was just too tantalizing for Andy not to go along with it. His deep-rooted martyr complex couldn’t be happier! Jesus had his Judas. Kaufman had his Ebersol. Judas and Ebersol have their roles to play in order for both narcissists to reach transcendence.

  Andy was in heaven (not that the vote didn’t hurt him—it did—deeply, which he also enjoyed). But at the same time it gave him fodder for his next scenario to act out. Andy is kicked out of show business. How uncomfortable is that! How embarrassing. Christ, it’s another Everest to climb.

  In this context, the ultimate scenario, Kaufman faking his death, is par for the course. Andy endures the crucifixion and martyrdom and all the benefits that go along with it. “They’ll see how much they miss me when I’m gone.” But like they said in the film Man on the Moon, it’s a showbiz death in a showbiz town in a showbiz hospital. No one really dies. Not really! What fun!

  The petty squabbles that people would get into would also fascinate him. He’d love to get people all riled up, taking the bait, and watch them go to pieces. And then he’d laugh, much as we would viewing a box full of puppies romping, biting, or tumbling over one another.

  Andy was above the fray, not in an arrogant way, but more in an innocent way. He was probably one of the most innocent people I’ve ever known, at least in the beginning. But remember, we’re talking forty to forty-five years ago. He existed smack in the middle of the ’60s. Remember the flower children? Andy surrounded himself with them. It’s been pointed out, most recently by writer Vernon Chatman, who just spent three years editing Andy’s micro-cassette tapes of over eighty hours for Drag City’s Andy and His Grandmother album, that Andy lacked cynicism. Vernon could not “detect one ounce of cynicis
m in Kaufman—none.” Correctly so. And yet cynicism, like pain, can protect us from hurt. Put your hand in a fire, you quickly withdraw it. The pain protects you from more injury. So too cynicism protects us from the pain of society. Yes, it makes us jaded, but it constantly reminds us that there is a real cruel world out there.

  Because Andy didn’t have that cynicism, that safeguard, when a series of mishaps happened to him, such as being voted off SNL, or being kicked out of the Transcendental Meditation movement, he had no defenses. He couldn’t cynically shrug it off. He’d feel the sting of rejection and couldn’t release it. Did that sting internalize itself in the form of cancer cells, as Lynne suggests? Did they rebel and grow? Obviously a positive mental state has a lot to do with good health. Did this extremely healthy individual’s own gene pool simply fail to cope with the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” even if he brought that “outrageous fortune” on himself? Did something in him just say, “It’s time for Elvis to leave the building”? Or, did those rejections, mixed with his obsession about faking his death, reach such a crescendo that he finally acted upon it?

  ***

  “I AM NOT A COMEDIAN!” He would yell it from the rooftops. Andy couldn’t tell a joke to save his life. Wouldn’t want to. He was however a bullshit artist, a master in the art of the humbug or “put-on,” a prankster. Now most of the time, laughter accompanies a good prank. Maybe that’s where the confusion came in. Usually at first people who are pranked are annoyed and don’t laugh. But soon, if they have a sense of humor, they lighten up and go ahead and laugh with everyone else. Some don’t. We’ve all experienced people in our lives like that. They’re better to stay away from. Many of them don’t have a sense of humor and after being pranked will say indignantly, “That wasn’t funny.” But Andy, on the other hand, always found life funny, if not downright hilarious. He had no use for people who didn’t. In fact, if he stumbled upon one of these individuals, he took it upon himself to teach them a lesson by becoming even more obnoxious, sometimes even sadistically so. Eventually he would take on the entire entertainment industry, and he would either win or lose, depending on whether you had a sense of humor or not.

  To some, Andy was a man-child. Michael Stipe of R.E.M., the band that wrote the homage to Kaufman in Man on the Moon, thought Andy was “a seven-year-old his entire life. I really feel like he was trying to lift us out of some morass of banality, of accepting everything for what it is rather than questioning it.” Was Andy a wide-eyed innocent? Or was he a fearless and subversive 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.

  ***

  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?

  ***

  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!

  ***

  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.