Goofin' on Andy Kaufman (and paying tribute, too)

It's wonderful to see Hollywood and the entertainment establishment embrace Andy Kaufman now that he has been safely dead for 15 years. Perhaps even the American public - portions of which voted him off "Saturday Night Live" for good in a telephone poll in 1982 - will find a warm place in their hearts for him, or at least for Jim Carrey's version of him opening in theaters nationwide Wednesday. With the release of "Man on the Moon," the feature film based on Kaufman's life, his legacy as a singular comic phenomenon seems complete. All those things for which he was reviled toward the end of his life have been rediscovered as timeless treasures. The reviewer for Entertainment Weekly - who gives "Man on the Moon" an "A" - describes Kaufman's obsession with wrestling women as "thrilling," although audiences at the time found it revolting, and Kaufman couldn't get booked anywhere because of it. The same reviewer describes the lounge act of Tony Clifton, the foul-mouthed "entertainer" who was variously performed by Kaufman and others in disguise, as "fantastically abrasive" and "mesmerizing. " That would be news to the crowds that threw debris at Tony and demanded their money back. The fact that Kaufman by the time of his death (of lung cancer at 35) had made himself unwelcome on every TV show but one (David Letterman's) and had been written off by many critics as stale and predictable are forgotten now. Today, the kind of artistic purity Kaufman fearlessly sought in everything he did is admired and valued, as evidenced by reports that during the filming of "Man on the Moon," Carrey would continue to "be Andy" off-camera. Carrey knew Kaufman was inscrutable even to his closest friends and was obviously trying to pay tribute to the master. But tribute is something Carrey, who commands $ 20 million paychecks, can afford. It is Carrey, after all, who has parlayed his shtick on a sketch-comedy show into Hollywood megabucks, while Kaufman was cast as a robot in "Heartbeeps ' (alongside Bernadette Peters), effectively short-circuiting his movie career. Camera crazy It was television where Kaufman shaped his comic consciousness, which made it all the more heartbreaking when TV shows stopped returning his manager's phone calls late in Kaufman's career. These are among the details we learn from writer Bill Zehme from his fascinating and frequently hilarious new biography, Lost in the Funhouse: The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman. From Zehme, we learn that young Andy spent hours each day in the bedroom of his upper-middle-class Jewish home on Long Island, strutting before imaginary TV cameras hidden in the walls. Soon a whole cast of TV characters was crowded into his head: monsters, bad guys, cops, wrestlers (especially wrestlers), etc. Some of the creations for which he later became notable, such as the foreign man ("tenk you veddy much") and Elvis Presley, can be traced back to Kaufman's junior high days, when he performed for schoolmates and at birthday parties. By the time NBC executives discovered Kaufman in 1975, he was playing clubs like Catch a Rising Star, alongside Robin Williams, Richard Belzer, Jay Leno and other ascendants. No one was sure what made him so side-splittingly funny; in fact, he had a kind of anti-routine. NBC knew "Saturday Night Live" was going to mark a generational divide in TV comedy, if it was going to do anything, and Kaufman was clearly beyond that divide. He was beyond, period. Kaufman was the very first player signed by "SNL" in 1975, and his brilliant routine with a phonograph playing the theme to "Mighty Mouse" was the highlight of the show's premiere telecast. (In it, Kaufman stood next to the record player, looking around nervously, until suddenly he would burst into a spirited lip-sync with the record as it sang, "Here I come to save the day! ") His popularity peaked with his role as Latka Gravas on the sitcom "Taxi. " It was a version of his "foreign man" character. But as Zehme writes, Kaufman always thought "his best work as Latka (happened) five years before there ever was a Latka." Instead, Kaufman felt the urge to drop his old characters and introduce new ones, a tendency that would mark his career. He started wrestling in public. All his life Kaufman had loved the extreme emotions of pro wrestling, and now he experienced them firsthand. Crowds turned on him instinctively, booing lustily and cheering his injuries. Then there was Kaufman's Tony Clifton character, who also began to show up more often, especially as Kaufman passed the persona on to his friend and co-conspirator Bob Zmuda. After Clifton created a melee during a taping of the Dinah Shore show - he was dragged off the set screaming, "What do you think you're doin'? Do you know who I am? I'm a big star! " - Clifton and Kaufman vanished from the airwaves. Part of the problem is that Kaufman was manipulating his audience for his own benefit. He refused to explain what he was doing, or why, which only confused and angered his fans, who couldn't tell if he was putting them on or what. Zehme says, "It was all part of his mad agenda to thumb his nose at television and show business generally, and the constraints therein. I think that's why he's being celebrated now." But back then, the supposedly sophisticated audience of "SNL," 366,000 of them, dialed a 900 number during a broadcast and voted yes or no on whether to ban Andy from the show. Kaufman was given the heave-ho by more than 25,000 votes. The studio audience applauded the result. So then it was down to Letterman. In "Late Night" Kaufman finally found someone with seemingly infinite patience for his experiments. He cursed out wrestling legend Jerry Lawler and threw coffee at him - another one for the pop-culture books. Another time, Kaufman brought three surly-looking toughs onto the show and announced he was adopting them. In late 1983, Kaufman told his manager that he wanted Letterman to have him on the show and ask him what he got for Christmas so that he could say, "Cancer." The only label that really works for Kaufman is "performance artist," like Joey Skaggs, the media prankster who worms his way onto talk shows and news programs under fake personas (he once appeared on "Good Morning America" as Joe Bones, sergeant of the Fat Squad, a quasi-military outfit that bullied its members into losing weight). They thrilled to the perfect execution of their meticulously made plans - and after the jig was up, if only a few patrons appreciated their work, so what? Looking back, one can't help but wonder what would have become of Andy Kaufman had he lived to see the rise of cable TV. Then again, Skaggs rarely appears on television - so perhaps Kaufman would be performing mostly for imaginary TV cameras, playing to small assemblages of true believers, which may or may not have included Jim Carrey and some of the other comic superstars now clutching his memory. To reach Aaron Barnhart, phone (816) 234-4790 or visit TV Barn at www.tvbarn.com >>>