Lost in the Funhouse

by Bill Zehme

  I must say, after our talk that night when you said that from graduation I’m on my own, I was left with a scary feeling. I guess it’s normal. However, there is a certain element of excitement also. I’m on my way (“I shall be heard”) and I welcome any suggestions that you might have. Thank you for everything.

  Love, Andy

  His Holiness sat before them and wore his robes and held his flower and regarded his flock knowing these were those who would go forth with his wisdom and bring others to him and to the light. They had been in this beautiful place across the sea for just over three months, learning together, plumbing their quiet spots for sustenance, searching for truths and asking questions at the microphone which recorded all of this advanced-training congress. And so it was on May 5 that the one who wished to eventually entertain in an extremely accomplished manner stepped forward to hemhaw and inquire about what it was that he would do in life and divine the spiritual methods and the meanings of what was to be. Because the Maharishi had never before been deposed on the workings of show business, his governors decided to take the resulting exchange and archive it under the heading of Maharishi on the Value of Entertainment—although the inquisitor would not be named in the records. Among TM scholars, however, the exchange would become minor legend precisely because of who it was that asked the questions. He began:

  “Um … what is the value of entertainment? Is there a good value of entertainment—like comedy, tragedy, literature, television, and going to the movies and nightclubs? Also, if everybody was enlightened, would there be any need for entertainment?”

  The holy one, ever mystical, thus somewhat inscrutable, replied that there would always be such a need in a changing world of relativity. Entertainment, he continued, should have an energizing value. Any entertainment that does not revitalize our mind and body, he said, is not entertainment. And anything that is derogatory to energy or intelligence or vitality, he also said, is not entertainment but something opposite. Maharishi went on to suggest that Knowers of Reality—his term for TM teachers—should also avoid keeping late hours in which to be entertained, since it may tire them and inhibit the experience of Being. Good night’s rest, very important.

  The inquisitor then wondered whether people in an enlightened world could still go to movies and watch television and there is some beseeching and some desperation in his voice. The Maharishi replied that there would still be room for such, but only happy programs would exist, never sad ones.

  “There won’t be any sad programs? There won’t be any need for tragedy?”

  Sad programs are not entertaining, he was told. The purpose of entertainment was to enliven life, to create delight, to instill more vigor and energy and intelligence!

  “Any more programs where the hero dies at the end?”

  The bliss people laughed nervously and the Maharishi seemed perplexed and the inquisitor knew well that if Elvis had not died at the end of Love Me Tender he could not have sung from the clouds before the closing credits, which would have made the movie not so great. He and Michael once watched Lassie Come Home on television in Great Neck and, throughout the film, they took turns leaving the room to cry, then took turns teasing each other about it, which was a happy brotherly memory for both of them.

  “I like to watch programs that make you want to cry at the end. Will there still be programs like that?”

  Mass nervous bliss laughter again. (Such persistence, this inquisitor!) Maharishi told him that as society became more positive, there would be more comedies and fewer tragedies. Then the inquisitor mentioned the sort of comedian who does darker things, unpleasant things, yet funny things, and the Maharishi said that such a comedian has a low level of consciousness and could clearly benefit from a little elevation.

  “I wonder if a crazy man—”

  They laughed—never had an inquisitor inquisited quite like this—while Maharishi interrupted to say that crazy men tend to be unreasonable and not the best examples of positivity.

  “No no, a crazy man, a crazy man, somebody, for instance … he isn’t exactly crazy … like some of the old comedians who were looked on as odd. But they were naturally that way and that was their career…. What I’d like to know is if a comedian who is, let’s say, naturally kind of an oddball, looked upon as an oddball, and he’s a comedian because of that, because people laugh at his oddness, but he likes it and everything—”

  Maharishi responded that people don’t like oddness, that it was not the oddness that creates delight for people, but rather something in between two extreme oddnesses—a field of silence—that creates a thrill….

  [—this was what he had come for, this part, this would tell him everything that mattered and he would learn to do everything just as it was being explained—maybe he had been doing it this way all along; it seemed like he had—but now it became a little clearer to him, so he listened hard as the holy one parsed the ephemeral wisdom—]

  Oddness, according to his holiness, was simply a tool with which to create contrasts for an audience. He offered an analogy for the inquisitor—the comedian’s craft, he said, was akin to building two walls side by side and leaving a space in between. The mere presence of those two walls then creates a contrast based on an awareness of the space. And by building such contrasting walls of oddnesses, the comedian is implicitly calling attention to the length and the depth of the silent space that connects the two. And within that space, said Maharishi, lies the harmony that thrills the soul and appeals to the heart!

  [—um—]

  The comedian, said Maharishi with beatific patience, must first say one thing and then say another thing and these two things will usually contrast—but what makes the contrast so evident is the journey in between, which is the journey through a field of silence. And it is the experience of this journey—from, perhaps, the gross to the subtle—that creates delight. The silence, then, is the very impulse of life!

  [—actually, he was confused about the walls and needed that part repeated and crystallized—which was that if a comedian does one unexpected thing and waits before he does another unexpected thing then he will receive a better sort of laughter, which was not unlike what Uncle Sammy had always said about things called Set-Ups and Punchlines, but Uncle Sammy had never dwelled on the part about Silences and certainly Silences were something that he (Andy) personally had great ability to produce, having heard his share of them during a life of creating Oddnesses, so this was all most inspiring—]

  So then the Maharishi went on about this phenomenon and then the inquisitor inquired about whether the comedian makes this all happen consciously and he was told that the comedian must be conscious of building the walls but the silences are for the audiences to locate. Still, there was one dire and personal consideration/worry to finally clarify here—

  “So if a crazy man who everybody laughed at because he was crazy started meditating, then he’d be a better entertainer?”

  If he likes to be an entertainer, Maharishi replied, then he will be better.

  “He won’t become more serious and not be crazy anymore, will he?”

  [—because that would not be very good at this point—]

  Maharishi replied that if seriousness will entertain the environment, then he will be necessarily serious. If lack of seriousness is required, he will embody this lack as well. Whatever way he wishes to work, he will remain an entertainer, in the largest sense, to his environment. He will feed others with life, create thrills of joyfulness in their hearts. Through Transcendental Meditation, his holiness said, the entertainer is able to radiate more of life and this—he emphasized—is the purpose of an entertainer.

  [—so then he would be, um, fine—]

  He arrived for national consumption three years later and the how of his arrival—on something called Dean Martin’s Comedyworld (happy-happy-program!)—was certainly predicated on the teachings in Spain. It was also the product of blithe tedium, penniless persistence, and iron will. But, upon arrival, his sile
nces would be majestic and deafening, thus thrilling. (It was unheard of to be as unheard as he permitted himself to be—the brazen manipulative awkwardness of it!) And his walls would be impossibly fortified with constructs of quicksilver—shuffled personae, sly juxtapositions, imbalances never imagined by other mortals. He would still be considered a crazy man, no less crazy for having found enlightenment. He was crazy and also more wise about his craziness. He worked onstage as no one ever had before; he never told the truth; his material asked no one to relate (and inadvertently made fun of those peers whose material did); he most often heard the appraisal original, sometimes in a bad way, then more and more in a very extremely good way. This Dean Martin program on which he would debut—and on which Dean Martin never appeared—was a temporary summertime replacement for the very popular NBC-TV Dean Martin program on which Dean Martin actually did appear. Both shows, however, were produced by Greg Garrison, who conceived Comedyworld to be an ambitious cavalcade of comic enterprise, old and new, featuring classic film clips, bits of some recent British nonsense called Monty Python’s Flying Circus, interview montages with very famous comedians and, more saliently, a wellspring of fresh material from young stand-up performers—“the kids of today who will be the stars of tomorrow!”—who were videotaped at various nightclubs around the United States. (The show would pluck from the vine such smartass punks as Jay Leno, Jimmie Walker, Freddie Prinze, et al.) Garrison had smelled a boom coming —suddenly kids wanted to be comics instead of rock singers!—so he went to New York in April 1974 to audition talent and it was at the Improvisation on West Forty-fourth Street that he first saw the foreign kid do the Mighty Mouse—“He just knocked me out. I said, ‘Put him on the show.’ They said, ‘Well, he’s never done television.’ I said, ‘He’s done enough. Put him on!’” He went on, in fact, twice—on the first and third installments of the program, broadcast June 6 and 20—and he appeared each time immediately after snippets from Charlie Chaplin films, Modern Times and The Great Dictator, respectively. (His was deemed the only performance material feathery and innocent enough to complement the golden swoons of Chaplin.) For the first shot, taped at the Improv on April 26, he was introduced to viewers—almost with a disclaimer—by “Roving Comedy Correspondent” Nipsey Russell—“Our most recent immigrant to Comedyworld has just passed through customs at the Improvisation…. He’s just here from a little island in the Caribbean, and possibly you won’t understand him too well. But let’s give a listen to Andy Kaufman!”

  As was by now obligatory—and as it would be for at least the next four years—he entered as Foreign Man (never mind that his actual name gave whiff of Long Island; somehow he was an immigrant of varying nonspecific origin). Thus he shambled out in front of the legendary brick wall wearing one of the two Foreign Man uniforms that would never be replaced—tatty ill-fitting blue-olive-tan checked sport coat (formerly Stanley’s, as was the pale pink jacket he sometimes opted to wear) over blue oxford shirt over black turtleneck with gray flood pants and white socks and brown loafers. Hair was slicked into an oily wave. Arms were rigid at sides, danglefingers ever tapping at air as though he were vertically typing invisible words. (With the finger movements, he innately counted his rhythms—his memory banks were wired to his digits, a small secret he rarely shared and barely understood himself.) Fear screamed in cerulean blue eyes. Pinched uncertain adenoidal voice quavered and—right there on very same network air which Howdy Doody breathed, sort of —“I … I am very nervous because ees my first time on TV. So, you know, last night ees very hard to go to sleep….” Point here was to engender empathy by being, well, deeply pathetic—so very bad and so very sweet; so desperate to be in show business, thus so desperate for love. There ensued what he privately called Bombing, and Foreign Man had always Bombed with a pure and pristine magnificence that built the first wall of oddness that led to the next wall of proficiency (odder still) and all that occurred betwixt was plain tragic fumphering. So he launched into the already long-employed misbegotten tale of the two boys and the one girl who hauled a cannon over the mountains of Spain and discovered that no one had a cannonball to fire at the castle (“Don’t look at meeee.”) and the requisite audience discomfiture came as ever. Then he attempted just one eemetation, that of de President Neexon, droopfaced and rigid, shooting both fists skyward into victory Vs—receiving laughs before opening his mouth—“vait-vait until I give you de punch!” Then, with voice unchanged—“Let me make one thing perfectly clear … um, I am de President of de United States, make no mistake about that! Tenk you veddy much!” Wordlessly, he next walked over to his phonograph, dropped the needle on the turntable, and Mighty Mouse played and he precisely lip-synched only to the rodent tenor’s infrequent seven-word braggadocio —Here I come to save the day!—absorbing all intervening moments of chorus by standing and fidgeting, eyes darting, pouring himself a glass of water, sipping the water, waiting through silences most cavernous and impressive, clearly incapable of saving any sort of day but then again … maybe. And then the record ended and cheers came like they always had and he bowed repeatedly.

  The next day, he drove to the Playboy Club Resort in Great Gorge, New Jersey, where he performed poolside under spring sunshine for the Comedyworld cameras again as Foreign Man. (He had to place his guitar case and prop valise and tape recorder—the act always required serious lugging—on a chaise lounge behind him. Congas, as ever, stood to his left.) This time Comedy Correspondent Barbara Feldon read the cue-carded introduction—“… I can’t think of a single performer I’d rather be watching than this absolutely adorable young man from the Caribbean Islands….” Then more gentle Bombing ensued—“Tenk you veddy much I am veddy happy to be here tonight, er, today, but you know there is vun thing I don’t like about thees place ees too much traffic. You know today I had to come on de highway there was so much traffic eet took me an hour and a half to get here. But talk about de terrible things, my wife, take my wife please take her. No, no, I am only fooling I love my wife but she don’t know how to cook…. Her cooking ees so bad ees terrible….” He began his eemetations—Nixon again and Ed Sullivan (“Tonight we have de r-r-r-r-r-r-really beeg show!”) and then he segued into that which was by this time the signature opposite wall of the Foreign Man repertoire except only now a larger population would begin to know it and once it was known it would become expected and once it was expected it would become a burden that defeated the elements of surprise and incongruity that he cherished. But that would come later because now he was brand new, a bright oddity possessed of rehearsed naïveté and true charm making a small but significant step forward from the swirl of obscurity, and so he said, “And now last but not to be de least I would like to eemetate de Elveece Presley!”

  For Elvis, he wore hidden layers, like he used to wear to school not to be funny. He turned his back to the audience, as dictated by professional impressionist law (must-make-metamorphosis-mysterious!), and bent over the chaise to switch on the tape that played the momentous recorded opening strains of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” which would swell into the raucous chords of “See See Rider” (all lifted directly from an actual Elvis Las Vegas concert album), during which he shed his checked coat and his oxford shirt to reveal a yellow silk blouse which he then covered with a teal tuxedo jacket and, still facing aft, he combed back his hair in pompadourian fashion, strapped on his guitar, swiveled to the music, then peeked out over his shoulder to display the perfectly cocky sneersmile that belonged only to Elvis Presley. He spun forward and was Elvis, prowling the pool patio with mock lascivious intent, slack babyface cheeks jiggling, sinewy legs jangling, and then the recorded intro music stopped as he stood fully transformed at the microphone and the audience applauded—and just before he would now speak in the voice of Elvis Presley, no longer Foreign Man at all, and say “Thank you thankyouverrrmuch!” and continue his Elvisian patter and launch into sublime replication of some familiar Elvis hit and radiate crackling ions throughout, after which he would throw articles
of his costume into the audience and heave winded breaths while trying to regain composure and then finally speak in the voice of Foreign Man, no longer Elvis Presley at all, and say “Tenk you veddy much!” and meekly ask for his clothes back, one of Greg Garrison’s videotape editors abruptly cut elsewhere because of broadcast time constraints. He would not know this until he watched the program in June, thus realizing that he had been left at the microphone hanging—stranded mid-feat in the silence that preceded the true tricks that were his unique currency. And he was heartily disappointed, which was fine no really, because at least it happened on network television, on his second appearance on network television in two weeks no less, and he would have another chance soon enough because things were really only starting now and it had taken him so long to get this far.

  And so, back in 1971, Maharishi had regarded the boy in Spain as a puzzlement what with all of the crazyman talk and thereby discouraged bliss hierarchy from indoctrinating him just yet as a teacher. “People there thought Andy was very unstable, found his behavior kind of peculiar, asking the Maharishi about humor,” said Don Snow, a training cohort who had been made a teacher on the Majorca trip. “It’s considered very disruptive to have somebody who’s emotionally unstable on these advanced-training courses.” Andy, however, disagreed with this assessment and sought out His Holiness two months later in Massachusetts and pleaded his case and was then given status as a teacher. He had not returned to Great Neck after Majorca and would only make periodic visits home until autumn of 1972, when he would reclaim the den as headquarters and borrow family cars to hawk his act in the city and elsewhere. Until that time, he hired on at the Student International Meditation Society (SIMS) in Cambridge, where he did clerical work and dispensed mantra and initiated newcomers to enlightenment and also performed at TM parties as well as at Al’s Place and was allowed to return to Grahm to make a sample tape of Uncle Andy’s Fun House to send off to television stations but the taping was disastrous—he was disorganized and then he accidentally smeared chocolate cake on the white cyclorama studio partition, which incensed student director Marc Summers, who would later host game shows and who then threw his headset at Andy in disgust. “I told him how unprofessional he was and then I was out the door!” said Summers. “I thought this guy should probably be in a mental institution somewhere.” Jimmy Krieger of Great Neck was now Jim Krieger of Boston University, where he studied film and made student films for which he recruited his childhood friend as star and they were artful little sixteen-millimeter films smartly shot in grainy black-and-white. Among roles he essayed in the Krieger cinematic oeuvre were a flower thief loosed upon Copley Square, a hapless fellow evicted with his young wife from a tenement and forced to wander Cambridge in bathrobes, Elvis Presley musically lamenting a leak in the roof of an apartment, and a fully frocked priest engaged in passionate necking with a nun on various public park lawns as Bostonians gawked in horror. Of the young woman who wore the nun’s habit, Krieger recalled: “Andy really loved this girl, was crazy about her. But she was serious about becoming an actress and wanted nothing to do with him. And he would constantly say, ‘She’s gonna regret it. I’m gonna be very famous one day and she’s gonna regret not knowing me!’” By all accounts, he would say this about many women. He once led Parinello and a group of guys down to a bus terminal where he promised to make irresistible moves on each girl that alighted. They watched from a distance as he moved toward girl after girl, issuing strange noises from the corner of his mouth —schkk-schkk, as one might urge a horse to giddyup—then asking, “Hey, baby, you doing anything today?” Schkk-schkk. “One by one, these girls would tell him, ‘Get away from me! Get away from me!’” said Parinello. “Then he started getting hit with pocketbooks and handbags. He just looked at us and vowed, ‘Okay, I’ll get the next one!’” Later he said that these women, too, would all be sorry one day.