So waiting and seeing was what I decided to do with Andy. In this instance, it turned out to be the right decision. When he showed up on the same night I got the call from this guy on Long Island, Andy immediately tried to catch me off guard by doing “Foreign Man”—an early prototype for Latka Gravas, the character that eventually became the basis of his role as the goofball auto mechanic on the late-seventies hit sitcom Taxi.
Though I was suspicious before he even opened his mouth, I still reasoned that I should give him the benefit of the doubt. As I always did with a new act, I began the audition process by asking where he was from—at which point his voice became childlike and he replied in badly broken English, “An island in the Caspian Sea.”
I couldn’t believe what was happening, and even though I immediately realized there were no inhabited islands in the Caspian Sea, there was also something very seductive in the way he said it and I put him on anyway. As soon as I did, Andy went up and proceeded to stumble through a sophomoric series of bad celebrity impressions, all of them in the Foreign Man accent and each one worse than the other, while the audience either stared at him or giggled nervously.
Clearly, we were being had. I was becoming increasingly impatient, not to mention angry, although looking back now I consider that night to be one of the most important milestones of the Improv. I can’t imagine what we would have been without Andy. That said, I remember being concerned at the time that there might be trouble if I didn’t do something.
Then Andy proceeded to pull off what would perhaps be one of the most spectacular sleight-of-hand tricks in the history of comedy. Just as I was about to try to get him offstage without causing a riot, he announced in the same Foreign Man accent, “I would like to do the Elvis Presley,” and turned towards the brick wall.
After that, five seconds passed, maybe ten. From there, Andy turned back towards the audience and launched into a spot-on impression of Elvis singing “Treat Me Nice” as the audience went wild and I stood there in disbelief. Though it took me a minute or two to absorb what I had just witnessed, immediately after this he became a regular.
And not too long after that debut, of course, Andy became a cult favorite whose manic energy and envelope-pushing routines (eating ice cream onstage, reading The Great Gatsby, lip-syncing the Mighty Mouse cartoon show theme with a record player, etc.) would quickly make him one of the most celebrated talents ever to appear on our stage—and at the same time—elevate the Improv to a new level of acclaim.
The ripple effect also grew beyond the Improv thanks in no small part to the premiere of Saturday Night Live on NBC in 1975 where Andy was a featured performer during its first season. But even so—and despite his almost immediate audience appeal—there was likewise still something of an adjustment period.
Especially when it came to his comedic peers, he confounded them as much as he astounded them. On the other hand, if others weren’t also trying to emulate his style, at the very least they all wanted to catch a live glimpse. And of the later Improv contingent who never even met Andy, there were those, too, who would occasionally try to mimic his act onstage—usually with lackluster results.
JIMMY FALLON:
I think every comedian of a certain age wants to have their Andy Kaufman moment onstage. I tried one night at the Hollywood Improv in the early nineties when there were people from the David Letterman show in the audience. I think HBO may have even had a showcase that night, too, although I’m not sure.
I wasn’t on either showcase, but I was the first comic up afterwards, so I figured that if they hadn’t left yet, then maybe I could catch them and get cast in something. Budd had told me they were coming several days earlier, so I decided to grow a beard. The only problem was that I’d only started about three days before and so it was pretty much stubble.
But I decided it would be a moment, anyway, if I shaved it off onstage during my act. So when I got onstage, I had a razor, a can of shaving cream, and a bowl of water with me, and throughout my entire set, I shaved. By the time I was finished, I was clean shaven, but the bit had nothing to do with the jokes I was telling and it totally bombed. In fact, it was embarrassing even though I thought it was avant-garde at the time.
Of course, the more I think about it now, the more lame it was—and here’s the kicker. As I was leaving, I completely forgot about the shaving cream, the razor, and the bowl of water, so I had to go back onstage to get them.
JACK KNIGHT:
I saw Andy perform for the first time in New York not long after he started at the Improv. Because I’d heard about this thing he had for trying to pull a fast one on the audience to make them look like fools, I decided to take part in it just to see what would happen. The particular bit he did was where he repeated a song—something like “Monday potatoes, Tuesday potatoes, Wednesday soup.”
The part I wound up doing was “Wednesday soup,” and when my turn came, I did it in the voice of Gregory Peck. I’ll never forget the look on Andy’s face when I did it either, because he was like, “Fuck! He knows what’s going on and he’s going to do it again.” I think he may have even shortened it because he knew I was on to him.
MICHAEL RICHARDS, actor, writer, and retired comedian:
Andy resonated with me from the moment I saw him. Somebody told me about him when I was performing in San Diego. His description was, “This guy who gets onstage and plays the bongo drums.” At first my reaction was, “Yeah, and what else?” But when he said, “That’s it,” I was like, “Cool, great. I’ve got to check this scene out.”
If I remember correctly, the first time I saw Andy perform he had a washing machine onstage with him and he was reading a magazine while he did his laundry. The audience basically got up and left, but I remember thinking to myself, “That’s fantastic.” I just loved the play—that he would set something up like that and be so committed to it. He was the ultimate trickster, but I got him right off the bat.
ALAN ZWEIBEL:
I got to know Andy a little bit during Saturday Night Live’s first season on the air. I remember the first time I saw him perform, thinking to myself that I had never seen anything like it in my life. I’d heard about him before that, although when I first started hanging out at the Improv, Andy wasn’t there. He had a gig somewhere in Florida that didn’t go well for him, which a lot of the other comics were talking about.
But having never seen him before at this point, I didn’t really understand what they meant. And then that very first time I saw him perform—all in one fell swoop—he read The Great Gatsby, he played the bongos, and he lip-synced the theme from Mighty Mouse. I think the first thing I thought was, “Of course, they wouldn’t understand this in Miami.” I had never seen such control—and maybe even to this day such manipulation of an audience, going from where he could make them hate him, boo him, and curse him, and then three minutes later, they’re laughing their asses off cheering him.
JERRY STILLER:
Though we’re of different generations and we come from completely different schools of comedy, I still think Andy Kaufman was one of the funniest human beings on the face of this earth. The thing about it was that I never knew if he was real or not and I’m still not completely sure. However, the more I’ve thought about it as the years have gone by, the more I’m convinced that he wasn’t putting us on.
AMY STILLER:
Back in the mid to late seventies when Andy was first becoming famous, he came to my parents’ apartment once for Thanksgiving dinner with his then girlfriend Elayne Boosler. But instead of turkey and dressing, all Andy wanted was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a glass of milk. It was the funniest thing—and, of course, we gave it to him.
KITTY BRUCE, writer, former New York Improv hat-check girl, and daughter of comedian Lenny Bruce:
I had no idea that Andy and Elayne were ever a romantic item, but I do remember this bit she used to do about ordering a steak or a lobster in a restaurant and then getting slapped. It was incredible and so wa
s her timing.
I also remember seeing Andy perform at the Improv. At the time, I was living downtown in a loft, and I was in this new-wave punk band that was either called the Great Mistake or the Great Mustache, I forget which. Anyway, the place I was living in was a dive and the only thing that separated our rooms was literally a sheet. So one night after the club closed, I invited Andy over. I said, “Do you want to come down to where we live and rehearse?”
Well, that was all I had to say because Andy’s eyes lit up as if he had just received an invitation to the White House. But when we got back to my place and Andy sat down on the sofa, my sound guy, who was also one of my roommates, lit up a joint, and Andy literally almost came unglued. He absolutely freaked out. He goes, “There’s marijuana here. It’s a drug.” Then he ran out of there as fast as he could.
LENNY SCHULTZ:
As crazy as Andy could be onstage, he was as straight as an arrow when he came off. During the years we were both at the Improv, Andy was still living in Great Neck with his family, and my wife and I were living in Rego Park, Queens, which is nearby. To help him cut down on the commute, we used to drive him to our place and then he’d take a cab the rest of the way. With us, he was always very quiet.
BYRON ALLEN:
By the time I first saw Andy out in LA, he was already a major television star on Taxi. I remember he would just get up onstage and do all of these sounds and characters. It was like watching a cartoon.
FRED WILLARD:
I never met Andy personally, but the first time I saw him perform was at the LA Improv. He did the most unusual thing I ever saw. He got up and started playing the bongo drums and singing some song. Then he left the stage and walked out the back door and all around the block while his musicians kept playing.
After that, he came back through the front door, got back onstage, and without missing a beat, finished the song. I was like, “Wow, that’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.” I even told my wife about it and we went back about a week later. Only this time, all Andy did was order a hamburger and a glass of chocolate milk and eat it onstage. He did this for about twenty minutes and my wife’s response was, “What the hell is going on?”
All I could do was apologize. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I saw him do the funniest thing a week ago.”
LYNNE MARGULIES, film editor, Kaufman’s last girlfriend, and co-author of Andy Kaufman: The Truth, Finally:
What drew us together was that we were so much the same as far as our tastes were concerned. The thing that a lot of people don’t realize is that Andy really wasn’t that into comedy and he didn’t go to the Improv to hang out with the other comedians. He didn’t even call himself one. The comedy we liked and both gravitated towards was actually this televangelist named Dr. Gene Scott. By the time Andy and I first got together, Gene had bought a television station that was on twenty-four hours a day. He was a wonderful madman, and watching Gene was one of the things we did that week. So Andy and I shared the same sense of humor. I think the thing that drew me most to Andy’s humor was not letting the audience in on the joke and getting them so upset. That’s what he loved the most and I was the same way. It was also the aspect of his work that I found most fascinating.
BOB ZMUDA:
My very first night at the Improv, the first thing I noticed were framed black-and-white photographs of all these guys who now had their own sitcoms. It was the last show of the evening, and I was waiting for it to start when this guy with a foreign accent walked through the front door carrying this big suitcase. He went right up to Budd, they started talking, and I heard Budd say, “No, I can’t put you on tonight. Mondays are when we have auditions.”
So the guy said to Budd, “Oh please, sir. I come from the Greyhound bus station. This would be my dream.”
Again, Budd told him no, and then he started the show and the guy disappeared. One hour passed, maybe two. Finally, at the end of the show, Budd said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t normally do this. I don’t know if you saw him a couple of hours ago. He was asking to perform. We have auditions every Monday. He seems like a nice guy. I’m going to break my rule and have him on. His name is Mr. Andy.”
But when the guy went up onstage, he was just terrible. He went, “Take my wife, please.” And then he imitated some politician, but his voice didn’t change. Well, the people laughed anyway because he was so pathetic—after which he said, “I don’t think you’re laughing with me. You’re laughing at me.” And then he started crying for real.
Things finally got so bad that one guy from the audience went up to Budd and said, “It’s cruel you put him on. He’s going to kill himself.”
Then Budd started blinking the lights. It was the worst fucking feeling I’ve ever had in my life. Then the guy said, “I like to do this one last impression for you: the Elvis Presley,” and I was thinking to myself, “Thank God, the guy is leaving the stage.”
He put on his Elvis jacket and combed his hair. He looked exactly like Elvis. He turned around. He went into an incredible medley of three Elvis songs. Now, nobody was doing Elvis impressions at the time at all because he was basically a has-been. But this guy did—and he just hit it out of the ballpark. So I was thinking, “What the fuck?”
Afterwards he said, “T’ank you veddy much!” in the foreign accent again and there was a standing ovation. I found out later that other comics wouldn’t go on after him because he killed. I was confused, and when I went outside that night, he saw me standing there while he loaded up his car. He had all of these props with him on the sidewalk—cymbals, puppets, a heavy 16 mm projector, Elvis stuff.
He said to me, “Excuse me, I have bad back. Can you help?” And so I did, and it took about fifteen minutes. Well, no sooner did I get the stuff in the trunk that he got in the car and said, “Thank you very much.” Again, he said it in the foreign accent, but then his parting word was, “Sucker!” which he said in an American voice. So now I was blown away and he drove off. That was the first time Bob Zmuda met Andy Kaufman and Budd Friedman.
BOB SAGET:
I was also in the audience once when he did his laundry onstage. He had a washing machine and everything. Another time, I saw him at The Comedy Store in Westwood, where he had these toy soldiers and he pretended like they were fighting. It was like watching a nine-year-old kid who should be on Ritalin, although when Andy was on, he was the leader of the pack.
Of course, precisely where that pack might lead was anybody’s guess.
PAUL PROVENZA:
By the time I had moved up the ranks to be one of the comics who always got on, Andy was already pretty well known. Not surprisingly, every comic who happened to be there whenever Andy popped in would jam into that little doorway between the service bar and the show room so they could see him. I was one of them, but I also remember not getting Andy the first few times I saw him.
And then one night—I don’t remember how or when—I was watching Andy with a bunch of other comics and it was like somebody flipped on a light switch. All of the sudden, I went, “Now, I get it. This is genius. You can never stop learning about comedy. It just keeps changing and growing, and now it’s a real art form.”
HOWARD KLEIN, TV producer best known for The Office, talent manager, and former assistant manager of the New York Improv:
I just have these vivid memories of Andy coming in and wanting everyone to be pissed off at him—performance art meets comedy. He would get up and do stuff like sing “99 Bottles of Beer” backwards and people would start booing even though he was so unique. He would get to like seventy-five bottles and people would be like, “All right, we get it.”
GILBERT GOTTFRIED, comedian, actor, writer, and voice-over artist:
I was there on one of the nights he did this. At first, the audience laughed, thinking it was the gag, but then he really did it. He sang from ninety-nine to zero. A lot of people just got up and walked out, but I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard.
KEVIN NEALON,
actor, comedian, and former Hollywood Improv bartender:
I didn’t know Andy in New York, but I got to know him at the Hollywood Improv around 1980 because I was trying to do stand-up while I was working there as a bartender. If another comic didn’t show up, Budd would put me on and I was lousy at both. I’d go from being a bad bartender to a bad comic and then back to being a bad bartender—where Budd would often be furious with me because there was usually a crowd waiting to be served drinks.
It was great because I got to talk to the other comics, and one of my most memorable conversations was with Andy. I remember it like it was yesterday. He was out front and I knew that he was into transcendental meditation, so we discussed that for about thirty minutes. I wasn’t really paying that much attention, though. All I could do was stare at the mole on his face and think to myself, “I’m talking to Andy Kaufman.”
PAUL PROVENZA:
Andy wasn’t really a sociable cat. When he was socializing with people, it was usually with people he knew, and I really didn’t know him that well. However, one night in particular when he was in from LA, there weren’t many of his cronies at the club for whatever reason and so Andy just came up and started talking to the younger comics.
Afterwards, out of the blue, he asked us to walk him back to his hotel. The Improv in New York was at West 44th and Ninth, and his hotel was at 59th and Sixth. So me and about two or three other comics went back to Andy’s hotel, where we continued shooting the shit with him in the lobby for the next several hours.
The other thing I distinctly remember is that as we were walking him back to his hotel—and it took me a few blocks to realize this—what Andy did every time he stepped off the curb was to change accents. He would suddenly be from a different country and he wouldn’t acknowledge you unless you spoke to him in the same accent. You had to walk the whole way trying to figure out which accent he was doing and take it on—at which point he would talk to you like everything was fine. The entire time he was doing this, I just remember thinking to myself how hilariously odd the whole experience was.
The Improv Page 24
