Andy Kaufman - Bob Zmuda

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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 cynicism 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

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