Fifteen years after his death from lung cancer at age 35, Andy Kaufman is enjoying a career year. “Andy Kaufman Revealed!” a “Tells All” memoir by Bob Zmuda, Kaufman’s writer and co-conspirator, recently was published. Chicagoan Bill Zehme’s long-awaited Kaufman biography, “Lost in the Funhouse: The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman,” will be published next month in anticipation of the release Dec. 22 of Milos Forman’s bio-pic “Man on the Moon” starring Jim Carrey.
Comedian. Actor. Sitcom star. Performance artist. Inter-gender wrestler. Song-and-dance man. From insisting on reading “The Great Gatsby” in its entirety onstage to staging mock confrontations on live television, Kaufman spent his all-too-brief career confounding audiences and critics. Some comedians speak of wanting to kill the audience. Kaufman wanted audiences to kill him.
Who was Andy Kaufman? “Andy Kaufman is me,” he stated in 1981 as host of the Friday late-night concert series, “Midnight Special.” “I’m Andy Kaufman.”
Just released on VHS and DVD by Sony Music Entertainment, Kaufman’s “Midnight Special” appearance probably raises more questions than answers. But it is a priceless artifact and an instructive and characteristically baffling Kaufman primer.
His “Midnight Special” stint was not as subversive as the infamous 1977 ABC special that the network refused to air for more than two years. Instead, “it was basically Andy’s act,” Zmuda said in a phone interview. “It was, `What do we have on the plate that Andy does, and let’s get it up there.’ “
In the course of the hour, Kaufman performs his signature pieces. Foreign Man, the template for “Taxi’s” Latka Gravas, does pathetic “eemeetations” of Ronald Reagan and Steve Martin before wowing the crowd with his patented, dead-on Elvis Presley.
One segment is devoted to Kaufman’s “other job” as a busboy at Jerry’s Famous Deli. “It keeps me in touch with people,” Kaufman explains without any hint of tongue-in-cheek.
There are also segments devoted to the two most controversial aspects of Kaufman’s career, his wrestling of women (“This is not a skit,” he thunders, “this is real.”) and abusive lounge singer Tony Clifton, who proceeds to humiliate audience members. (That’s audience plant Zmuda whom Clifton douses with water.)
But just when you think you’re in on — for want of a better word — the joke, interview segments seem to reveal the man behind the curtain. At one point, Kaufman recalls how he got the show business bug. As a child, he states, he would leave the school playground to go into the woods to perform shows for himself.
“One day,” he says, “a little kid was chasing a ball and he passed by me and heard me putting on my show. He was so fascinated, he stopped and started watching it. So the other kids started coming around. Every day I got more and more kids watching me until I had this large following. They came into my corner of the woods.”
Kidding or not (and that’s the thing; you just can’t tell with Kaufman, which is why there are those who believe he faked his own death and will attend the premiere of “Man on the Moon”), that is as good an epitaph as any for Kaufman. His legacy is that he never met audiences halfway. He always made them come into his corner of the woods.
“Andy Kaufman: The Midnight Special” retails for $13 on VHS and $20 on DVD. It is available from Movies Unlimited (800-466-8437) or from the Amazon.com and Reel.com Web sites.
