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Situationist
Comedy?
Andy Kaufman, The Myth, and the Man in the Moon,
It would be easy to dismiss Andy Kaufman as a genius. Being rebellious, misunderstood and dead at a young age invites that sort of thing particularly when a film biography (and Man In The Moon is a very good one) is in the offing. But the truth, if difficult to determine in Kaufman’s case, is always more interesting than automatically buying into the myth, and oddly enough in no way diminishes the mans extraordinary talent. In fact I’m more than happy to call Andy Kaufman a genius, I’m just going to go about it the long way.
Australian audiences with long memories might remember him as Latka in Taxi, but if you don’t or never saw the show, the most helpful comparison I can make is with Peter Sellers’ gentle Indian character in The Party. A little foreign man way out of his depth in a new culture. An alien.
Like Sellers, Kaufman was a superb dialectician and impersonator. As the Taxi series progressed, Latka was given a personality disorder which, conveniently, enabled Kaufman to break out of character to play other ones, each as deft and as real and as funny as Latka.
Robin Williams did much the same thing with Mork, but Williams’ manic persona is ever present no matter what the character. Kaufman in contrast completely obliterates Latka when he assumes another character. That he did so often without any real change in make-up made the transformation even more astonishing. Like Sellers in his Dr Strangelove and Lolita days.
Like all good sitcom characters Latka had been road tested over a number of years. Kaufman had introduced himself to night club audiences as Foreign Man, an appallingly bad stand-up comic and impressionist. Watching a wretched comedian drown in flop sweat is unpleasant way for an audience to spend an evening, although lines like “My wife’s cooking is so bad, it’s really terrible” would have tipped some of them off that the character was the joke rather than the jokes themselves.
Kaufman’s approach to stand-up comedy was not that of a stand up comedian, but an actor. That he was a brilliantly gifted and comic one enabled him to accomplish successfully the seemingly impossible task of getting laughs by deliberately being unfunny. Looking at his television work, there is little doubt he had the ability to do a more conventional act, in fact in the early days he did. He used to do a piece about being Jewish at Boston College and how his sense of alienation caused an automatic broadening of his Long Island accent so he sounded like Jackie Mason. It’s a dialect/impression piece certainly, but a perfectly good one, and one which would have probably got him bookings on the talk show circuit and ultimately a shot at Saturday Night Live, where his true talents as a comic actor would have shone.
Night club comedy at that time was coming out the other end of the Vietnam era, counter culture, satire phase. Television humour, always the bastion of the previous generations tastes, had on the other hand, grown so safe that singers like Sonny and Cher, and Glenn Campbell were doing their own comedy shows. Perhaps Kaufman did Foreign Man simply because nobody had ever done it before. At least not with the level of commitment and talent he gave it.
If all jokes are ultimately about misdirecting an audience then Kaufman’s act was the ultimate joke. A crowd at a comedy venue expects to see someone come on and tell funny stories. There are thousands of funny stories and countless ways of telling those stories but when the audience buys a drink and sits down it still has an expectation, and the more comedy literate the crowd the more difficult it is to misdirect them in order make them laugh. Kaufman misdirects them from the outset. It’s only when they realise the hoax that they get a punch line. That Foreign Man worked even when audiences were familiar with the character says a lot about the likeability of that character and Kaufman’s skill as a performer. It also speaks volumes for having the imprimatur of a successful prime time series .
The only other comedian at that time playing around with conventions was Steve Martin. His persona was that of a pretentious and conceited small-time entertainer. He would, in the course of his routine, don a joke store arrow-through-the-head as a demonstration of “professional comedy” and then relate a spiritual experience he had while spray painting his name on the Cathedral at Chatres. Martin’s invulnerable wild and crazy guy was the inverse of Kaufman’s vulnerable Foreign Man but it’s interesting comparing the two. They were roughly the same age and played to similar audiences. They employed devices long abandoned or never used by others; Martin performed hokey magic tricks and played (straight and very well) the banjo, Kaufman played the bongos and did Elvis Presley impressions (also straight and very well). Both comics also enjoyed outrageous post show stunts. Martin once invited his entire audience across the road to a McDonalds. He ordered several hundred hamburgers only to change the order at the last minute to one french fry. When Kaufman played Carnegie Hall he invited the 2,800 strong crowd back for milk and biscuits. Buses took them to a local school cafeteria. After the meal he invited anyone interested to meet him on the Staten Island Ferry the next day. 300 people turned up and he bought them all ice creams. The whole thing ended up costing Kaufman thousands of dollars. The two stunts point up the chief difference between the two comedians. With Steve Martin, it's all a gag (although a great one), he’s clearly messing around. With Andy Kaufman it's real, he’s clearly messing with your head.
Martin gave up stand-up when his phenomenal popularity meant audiences wouldn't let him do anything new. The more popular Andy Kaufman got, however, the more emboldened he became to re-invent not only his act but himself. If the audience was going to turn up to his concert expecting the lovable Latka he would give them the hateful Tony Clifton, another of his character studies in failed ambition, but this one dark and unsettling. A sort of Raging Bull Danny Thomas. The arrogant lounge singer is not without his laughs but they are deliberately fewer and farer between. At one point in the act Clifton brings out his daughter and performs a mawkish monologue to her as his band provides a sentimental underscore. The daughter is clearly uncomfortable and Clifton occasionally lowers his microphone to snarl at her and give her leg a slap. But there’s no removal of the mask at the end of the act as with Foreign Man. Kaufman just sings an atonal verse of Volare and bows off. He even publicly denied he played Clifton. Clifton was interviewed by Rolling Stone magazine and claimed to be real. In Kaufman’s quest to misdirect the audience he started wrong footing them at every turn. Not just on stage but in gossip columns, and on TV talk shows. Anywhere that fed audience expectation. His inter-gender wrestling, his on air fights, his part-time waiting job, his singing of Rose Marie while wearing a turban, a nappy and a false moustache and playing the conga were all part of the plot to confound the audience.
Kaufman’s act and persona went through it’s most thorough deconstruction and reassemblage on Catch A Rising Star in the early 80’s. Halfway through his Foreign Man routine a heckler attacks him for not doing anything new. The speed of the camera framing the heckler and the fact that he’s miked give away he’s a plant but Kaufman’s performance of a comedian being humiliated in front of an audience is incredibly realistic. It’s a double bluff on the audience who came along expecting Kaufman to do his failing comic bit and then get it apparently for real. When the hoax is revealed Kaufman strips away yet another level and berates the plant for showing his hand. This third bluff looks even more realistic than preceding one. As Kaufman himself said , “I like the kind of humour where nobody knows what's going on. I'm not into comedy. I think comedy is the most unfunny thing there is.”
A lot has been written about Kaufman being some sort of a situationist. The film suggests, in part, that he performed only to entertain himself, his collaborators, and perhaps an all seeing cosmic eye. Watching him on Taxi or even on a chat show as the odious Tony Clifton I don’t get either impression. Kaufman always seems to have his eye on the audience. He doesn’t hold them in contempt. He has no Dadaist pretensions. He’s there performing in front of an audience because he wants them to laugh. It’s just that he doesn’t necessarily think he should give them what they want.