Though he won my heart from the moment he imitated Elvis Presley the first time, not everybody always felt the same way about Andy personally—even if they were still able to acknowledge his talent.
DICK CAVETT:
Kaufman came to see me once in a Broadway play I was doing called Otherwise Engaged. He came backstage afterwards with his girlfriend and we went out for a beer. He was amiable enough, but I thought he was a tremendous liar and very strange.
The way I came to this conclusion was because that night I told him a story of something that had happened to me once during an accidental meeting with actor Danny Kaye. I don’t even remember the entire context, but Kaufman in his warped way decided to put me on by telling me that he had met Danny Kaye in the exact same coincidental way, which was bullshit.
He was just doing one of his things, and I thought, “That’s not only not funny, it’s dishonest. There’s something wrong with you, boy.” And I was right, as we later saw, but he was still wonderfully talented.
Once I did a thing for TV Guide that was supposed to be on national television—and I wish I had it, but it doesn’t exist—where they took me to the set of Taxi and had me interview each member of the cast. When I got to Andy, he decided to alternate back and forth between Latka and Tony Clifton. Then he switched to being German and I did, too. After that, he switched to being French and I followed suit. I think I threw him because I knew both languages. But then he switched to something else to try to throw me and we had everybody panicked. The producers said they would get me a copy of the tape, but they never did and they never used it on the show.
ROBERT KLEIN:
It’s not that he wasn’t talented, but I also thought he was overrated. I saw him at the Improv where he did Elvis and Foreign Man and I also saw him on Taxi, although I was never a faithful watcher. It was a funny character, I’ll grant you that, but it was all a humor of impatience built upon grinding annoyance. I mean, if you read Proust to an audience who doesn’t even know who Proust is for six minutes and they’re going to start yelling, “Fuck you,” what’s the point? It just wasn’t comedy to me.
As Andy’s popularity continued to grow at the Improv—first in New York and later in Los Angeles—the stakes also grew higher, especially after his alter ego Tony Clifton began to surface more along with his growing fondness for wrestling women.
TOM DREESEN:
After a while, if you knew Andy’s act, you knew he did Tony Clifton and you kind of learned to put up with it. But if you didn’t know who Tony Clifton was, you’d hate the fucking guy. One night, I went to the Hollywood Improv to see Budd. I wanted to ask him something, and he was in the back of the room while Andy was onstage as Tony Clifton. There was also a heckler next to us at a table who was like Tony Clifton and kept saying, “This fucking guy sucks . . . this fucking guy sucks.” At first, he was apologizing to these girls that were with him. But then he turned to Budd and said, “You usually have good acts, but this fucking guy sucks.”
I just grinned and looked at Budd because we both knew it was Andy doing Tony Clifton. If you remember how he did it, a woman would start heckling him and pretending to be insulted. Then he’d start talking about, “I was with this broad.” When he’d do that, the woman who was doing it with him and being a shill would say, “Excuse me, I don’t like that term you’re using”—at which point Andy as Tony Clifton would go, “What term? You mean broad? You don’t want me calling you a broad?”
Then Andy would have her come up onstage, scold him, and then he’d give her a slap and say, “You want respect from me? I’ll give you respect when you can beat me up, lady. Go home and iron clothes and have babies ’cause that’s all you’re good for.”
After that, he’d pretend to slap her in the face using shaving cream and she’d turn around, grab his hand, throw him on the floor, and beat the shit out of him. She’d just bang his head on the floor and whip his ass while the audience was cheering.
Then when he got done with it, he’d stand up, wipe himself off, and say, “You want to try two out of three?” That was the bit. Well, on this particular night, this woman stood up and a man from another table said, “Look at this guy. Now he’s going to pick on this girl and if he lays one hand on her I’m going to break his fucking back.”
As soon as I heard that, I went over to him and said, “Sir, this is an act.”
After I informed him of this, he just looked at me and said, “It’s an act? It’s a bad fucking act.” Then he stood up and lunged towards the stage as Budd got up to grab him. The next thing I knew, we both fell on the floor. At the same time, the woman onstage was kicking the shit out of Andy and the guy was going, “Whip his ass, whip his ass!”
So we stopped the heckler from getting onstage, and the next day I told Andy what happened. But when you were talking to Tony Clifton, he wasn’t Andy Kaufman, and when you were talking to Andy Kaufman, you couldn’t reference Tony Clifton. He would just stare at you blankly like he didn’t know what you were talking about.
“Tony Clifton was in here last night,” I said.
With a look of devilish bemusement, he looked at me and said, “He was?”
“Yeah,” I said, “and he almost got his ass whipped.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, there was a guy who was going to kick the shit out of him, and Budd and I stopped the guy.”
Well, with that, Andy’s eyes got glassy. This turned him on. His whole thing was getting some kind of reaction. When he heard that guy was going to charge the stage and whip Tony Clifton’s ass, he thought that was the coolest thing in the world. That’s how weird he was.
RICK OVERTON:
I’m the guy Andy first dumped an ice-cold pitcher of water on when he was prototype-testing Tony Clifton, although he didn’t put on the getup that night because he didn’t know if it was worth it yet. He was still just trying to figure it out.
On the night he did it, everybody in the New York club was instructed to act like Andy was really Tony Clifton. He’d done it a bunch of times already, although this was his first time using the water where he said, “I’ll show you what fun is—get up here. You think that’s a funny joke? I’ll show you a funny joke.”
This was the setup—and then splash—he dumped the entire pitcher of water on me and I was drenched from head to toe, at which point I was supposed to say, “What the hell?” I forgot exactly why I decided to do this, but I wound up giving up my normal spot that night.
At the original Improv in New York, they had this side door by the stage, which was sort of this quick vaudevillian exit where I could go out, come back, and wait at the bar until it was time to do my normal set. But there was no doing a spot after an Andy thing like this—and especially not this night. While he was splashing the water on me as the audience was booing him, it was right about then that he began winning them back from the “You suck” phase. It was also the earliest terms of him really saying, “What’s the addictive boundary I can push to reel you back on the boat again?”
Honest to God, he became this two-mile fly-caster guy that night like a river ran between him and the audience. The thing people need to understand is that back then the crowd was different and their endurance was different. They’d literally stay until their hands and stomachs hurt, but they didn’t dare leave the club because they’d never seen anything like it before.
PAUL PROVENZA:
I had an amazing experience once in New York where I was onstage late one night, and I was being heckled by Andy in a very early phase of his Tony Clifton character. When I recognized who it was, I realized it was going to be funny, so I didn’t freak out going, “Oh, my God. This guy won’t shut up.”
JACK KNIGHT:
One night in LA, Andy came into the club dressed as Tony Clifton, and when I tried to say hello to him as Andy, he corrected me. He said, “My name is Tony Clifton.” Afterwards, we all went out to eat where he remained in character the entire time. He wasn’t Andy Kau
fman. He was Tony Clifton having something to eat.
GEORGE SHAPIRO, Andy Kaufman’s longtime manager:
The way the Tony Clifton character evolved was from Richard Belzer, who was Rick Newman’s longtime emcee at Catch A Rising Star. Richard had a reputation for sometimes being abusive to the audience, which Andy just loved. When it came to creating Tony Clifton, he just sort of ran with that.
BOB ZMUDA:
Tony Clifton was also based on the screenwriter Norman Wexler, who wrote the screenplay for Saturday Night Fever and Serpico and Joe, for which he received an Oscar nomination. Norman was this brilliantly talented but mentally unbalanced eccentric who would get into fights with people to the point where they literally wanted to kill him. Before I started working at the Improv as a bartender in New York, which is how I got to know Andy, I’d worked as assistant to Wexler and I used to tell these crazy stories about him at the bar.
Well, that was all it took to get Andy’s attention, because each time I told them he got closer and closer to the bar so he could hear me. This went on for several days until late one night he finally said, “Is that all true about Wexler? Norman Wexler is a god. That’s exactly what I want to do with audiences. I want to mess with their heads. I want that reality moment.”
Andy would have never hired me to be his writer had I not worked for Norman Wexler. No matter what anybody else may tell you, Tony Clifton was a composite of Wexler as much as anybody else. Anyway, Andy did Clifton more on the West Coast than the East Coast. While he was developing it, he would take this nose putty and spend an hour making the Clifton nose. Then he’d put on a terrible wig and sunglasses. However, he never really did that at the Improv on the East Coast. It wasn’t until we went to the West Coast that Tony Clifton took on a whole new life.
Nights like these when Andy transformed himself into Tony Clifton were some of our craziest and most memorable ever. However, as much as I truly loved Andy and always believed in his talent, even I couldn’t deny that dealing with him at times was almost impossible. Then there was the Improv gaggle who simply avoided him altogether—either because they just didn’t get him or they deemed it too big a risk to even try.
DANNY AIELLO:
I never knew who Andy was even after he’d been coming to the club for months. I think everybody thought he was nuts to some extent and I never had any sort of a relationship with him at all, which was perfectly fine with both of us. As a matter of fact, I think he was afraid of me. I think he was worried that I might beat the shit out of him if he came near me because I’m Italian.
BRUCE SMIRNOFF, comedian, writer, and former Hollywood Improv house emcee:
The only guys Andy evidently didn’t put on were his writing partner Bob Zmuda, his manager George Shapiro, maybe sometimes Budd, and a guy named Mel Shearer, who supposedly worked for him. I just avoided Andy because I always knew where it was going, which was nowhere.
ED BLUESTONE:
You either loved Andy or you hated him. There were two divided camps and he pissed a lot of comedians off. He weirded a lot of them out, too. They just didn’t know what to make of him. I think one of the main reasons was that he was never that approachable. He would start talking to you with one of his characters, and I guess people thought it was condescending. I didn’t really give a shit. I didn’t have any desire to talk to him. To me Andy Kaufman was much ado about nothing.
MIKE PREMINGER:
Andy Kaufman wasn’t a comedian. I will fight anyone, anytime, anyplace who tells you he was. He wouldn’t have known comedy if it bit him in the ass. I know he’s considered to be one of the brilliant people of all time, but I never got it and I won’t ever get it. To me, he was just some guy who went onstage doing stuff that you would do when you were four years old. You could never have a conversation with him.
The first time I met him in New York, he’d been there for a while and I walked up to him. I said, “Hi Andy.”
“I’m not Andy,” he said. “I’m Tony Clifton.”
I don’t know what I said back, but in my head, I was like, “Fuck you!” and I walked away. I mean, don’t stand there and look me in the face when I’m trying to say hello to you. That’s my whole Andy Kaufman story.
At the same time, though, as much as Andy and Andy-as-Tony-Clifton got under the skin of many adults, he also delighted kids.
SHELLEY ACKERMAN:
I don’t remember how it all came about, but my mother paid Andy twenty-five bucks to basically come over to the community room in our apartment building one Sunday afternoon to do his act and entertain at my little sister’s fifth birthday party in 1974. I think he did Mighty Mouse and played the bongos. He may have even done Elvis. The only rule he had was that none of the parents could be in the room while he was doing it, and it turned out to be this really special thing. My sister still has a videotape somewhere.
Andy also hosted our cabaret-style children’s show on Sunday afternoons in New York beginning in late 1974, an effort that was sometimes assisted by my two daughters and child actor Danielle Brisebois, who later went on to appear as Archie Bunker’s niece Stephanie on All in the Family and Archie Bunker’s Place. For Brisebois, working with Andy was incredibly instructive.
DANIELLE BRISEBOIS, producer, singer-songwriter, and former child actor:
Andy essentially did the same act that he did for adults for kids, and I was the one who got picked from the audience to be onstage with him. This was before he became really famous and my job was to stand there and help him out with the props. It was great, and I thought he was funny, but then when he got well known, I was like, “Him?” I still didn’t quite get it even though I loved it.
ZOE LANE FRIEDMAN:
Growing up around the Improv, I have all sorts of memories, but the children’s cabaret was probably the first where what the club is became an imprint of who I am. It was stage time and I got to stand on my head while my sister Beth played the violin.
For a five- or six-year-old, there was no better comedian than Andy Kaufman. He had the most incredible imagination. He would just transform himself into all these amazing different characters. The best part was getting to choose what character he would do.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Dissing Larry David
Like Andy Kaufman, Larry David, who first came to the New York Improv about a year after Andy, was an enigma from the start. But while the curmudgeonly Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm creator would ultimately become a formidable presence both on our stage and off, his beginnings at the club, unlike Andy’s, were anything but notable at first.
As a matter of fact, on the night Larry first came in with a group of friends and asked me to go on without having ever done stand-up before—which he later recounted in the 2013 EPIX TV documentary commemorating our fiftieth anniversary that my daughter Zoe produced—I told him no.
In my defense, my initial negative reaction had nothing to do with being rude or dismissive. I simply wasn’t about to put an untested rookie on my stage during regular prime time. There were no ifs, ands, or buts about this, no matter how talented he or she was. I still wouldn’t do it to this day either if I had the chance to do it all over again.
And, in all honesty, I felt completely blindsided. From wherever I was standing, I remember hearing him say, “I’m going over to that guy.” Then, mistaking me for the emcee and not knowing I was the owner, Larry walked right up to me and said point-blank, without even introducing himself, “I want to go on.”
In those days, he had a thick, frizzy mop of sandy-brownish hair, and on this particular night he was wearing a camouflage army jacket. His devil-may-care appearance looked like a combination of G.I. Joe and Larry from The Three Stooges. I was in no mood to make idle small talk either, so I asked him matter-of-factly if he was a comedian, to which he replied, “No.”
Then I asked him if he had ever performed before. Again, he said, “No.”
So I said, “And you want to go on like that? You have to audition.”
>
After about half a second, he asked me why and then that was that. This is the way I remember it, but here’s Larry’s version.
LARRY DAVID:
Actually, I didn’t intuitively know I was even interested in comedy yet. I always liked it, and on the occasion I could make my parents laugh I liked that feeling, but it was never connected to a profession. That didn’t really happen until I was in my early twenties—at which point I was at pretty loose ends with myself after graduating from the University of Maryland, serving a stint in the National Guard, being girlfriendless and nearly homeless, and finally taking acting classes in between selling women’s brassieres and driving a limousine to support myself.
I had taken one class with the famed acting coach Bill Esper, but what they were doing didn’t really appeal to me until one day I had to deliver a speech that got a lot of laughs. It was from a book called Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. I could barely decipher what any of these people were talking about, but the assignment was to take one of the characters and put it into our words. So I did, and people laughed. And I remember saying to myself, “Yeah, that’s for me.”
At the time, I was living at the Manhattan Plaza, a federally subsidized housing project for people in the arts on West 43rd Street, which is right around the corner from where the original New York Improv was. One evening in 1974, I decided to go there with a friend of mine. We went in and as soon as we started watching the show, I turned to my friend and said, “This doesn’t seem too hard.”
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