Garden of Earthly Delights: Andy Kaufman, the Abrasive Genius (part two of two)

The time has definitely arrived for me to offer up the second part of this blog post, given that Kaufman was “in the news” again last week, thanks to another bizarre and pointless “Andy is still among us!” scenario taking place on the Internet.

In the first half of this post I discussed the recent gallery show that contained Andy's personal papers and professional paraphernalia. Among the events that were held to coincide with that show were a number of Kaufman-related video screenings and panels in a series called “Andy Kaufman’s 99 cent tour,” held at the Participant Inc gallery. I was only able to attend two of these events, but I feel that one of them was so special that it needs to be recounted in detail – and then on to more rare clips that are “hiding in plain sight” online....

The difference between this event, which took place on February 19, and the others was that it was hosted and arranged by Hal Willner. I've discussed the incredibly memorable summer shows that Willner has staged here in NYC before (and rhapsodized about his benefit for Tuli Kupferberg here) and his involvement in this particular panel made for quite a memorable evening.

The panel was initially announced to be MTV VP and journalist Bill Flanagan, the talented musician (and vinyl-holic) Lenny Kaye, and Richard Belzer – the last-mentioned dropped out and was replaced by Kembra Pfahlera (and who would *you* rather see?). Also added to the panel were another music critic and Janine Nichols, a former colleague of Willner's from Saturday Night Live.

Willner moderated the panel in a friendly, informal style, playing LPs on a small record player he brought with him – an obvious nod to Andy's original standup act. At the outset Willner showed us albums he assumed Andy would've loved, a hodgepodge of vinyl oddities that he exhibited and then sort of tossed aside. (The one and only jarring thing about Willner as host was that he literally did leave those albums sitting on the floor throughout the show – I had to step over them to use the restroom at the end.)

The first half of the discussion was all about Andy’s personal record collection, samples of which were in the Kaufman show at the Maccarone gallery. It's an odd assortment of singles and LPs, favoring middle-of-the-road singers, of the Fabian-Connie Francis variety – nothing to indicate that Andy lived through the later Sixties (no Beatles, Beach Boys, folkies, acid rock, any of that). One of the two music critics on the panel noted that it “seemed like a record collection with all the good records taken out”; the fact that some family member or friend might’ve lightened the load was put forth at one point. [NOTE: I’ve done several searches but couldn’t turn up the name of the other music journalist; if anyone has it, please put it in the comments field, and I’ll update this entry.]

Lenny Kaye, who wielded a printout of the titles in the collection as he spoke, disagreed, and noted there were a lot of interesting, progressive things in the collection. For instance, a large amount of albums by the African drummer Babatunde Olatunji, who was one of Andy's (non-Elvis) heroes.

Also, a number of Brenda Lee singles, a Soupy Sales (a later one, “Still Soupy After All These Years," signed by Soup to Andy), and this wonderful item, “Peppermint Stick” by Little Isidore and the Inquisitors, which was a famous “dirty record” of its time.

The two critics and Kaye emphasized how Andy's records were like the pop culture references in his act — firmly rooted in the Fifties and seemingly filled with longing for his childhood (they guessed that a number of the LPs were acquired years after they had initially been released).

The discussion then turned to Andy’s act, his links to the Fifties/early Sixties and his constant absorption of TV when young. Pfahler was asked to speak about Andy as a “performance artist,” and she answered quite eloquently that his sincerity was the key. She pointed to the times he sang during his standup act, and noted that he was truly feeling the songs, even though he was “supposed” to be performing them to make people laugh. Willner followed this by playing a snippet of the Slim Whitman tune “Rose Marie,” which Andy famously performed with utter sincerity on the NBC Letterman show — while wearing a turban and a loincloth.

Kaye and the two critics discussed Andy’s integration of music into his act — from the Mighty Mouse theme to his conga numbers to the full-on bizarre moments, like the performance of “Rose Marie.” At this point the two panelists who contributed the most interesting insights were Willner and his predecessor as music coordinator at Saturday Night Live, Janine Nichols (aka Janine Dreyer). 

Nichols offered her recollections of Andy, among them his entrusting her with his beloved portable record player and the records he played on it onstage. She noted that back in the pre-Internet/YouTube days, she would often receive viewer requests for tapes of the Mighty Mouse theme; she would supply tapes if the correspondent was polite enough in their request.

She noted that Andy gave her his records as if they were his children and felt comfortable enough with her to ask if he could do his required pre-show mediation in her office. She agreed, and said that each time that he did SNL, he did indeed disappear inside her office for close to two hours (she also noted that she never barged in on him, so she never saw what he was actually doing). Her (pretty valid) take on Andy’s record collection was that he seemed to have chosen his favorite singers based on how big a pompadour the singer had.

Willner told of working with Andy on musical numbers that never wound up appearing on SNL: an “opera/sword swallowing act” he later did on Letterman (which became the “Rose Marie” bit above) and three obscure Elvis tunes he was supposed to do to go along with the Albert Goldman-bio-inspired sketch in which he played Presley. Returning to the topic of record collections, Willner also spoke at length about the occasions in which Andy “hid out” in his office (he was not the most popular guest by a certain point) and was mesmerized by certain items in Hal's record collection.

There were two items that Willner says Andy made him play over and over again. The first was one of Jerry Lewis' prank phone calls – the one where a man calls the theater asking for Jerry to mention his friend from the stage and gets Jerry, who proceeds to fuck with him for a few minutes. The item below isn't that phone call, but a similar one from the Jer-sanctioned CD “Phoney Phone Calls”:

What was interesting about hearing this in a gallery on Houston St. was that barely anyone in the audience even tittered – Jerry is a hard sell in the art community downtown. The second thing Andy doted on was the famous live recording of Elvis losing his shit while singing “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”

Willner closed the evening by performing himself, doing a bit he saw Andy rehearse in his office, but which Andy never performed on a TV show. Andy loved Wilner’s “CO-STAR” album of Cesar Romero so much that he worked out a ventriloquist act to go with one of the tracks, in which Cesar plays a lothario hitting on a manicurist in a hotel.

Andy acted out the manicurist part (which is unheard on the record – thus the “costar” aspect; the listener was supposed to “act” with the record), while he had a dummy “lip-synch” to the Romero dialogue. Willner used a Knucklehead Smiff dummy (!) with an NYU hoodie on as Romero, while he took Andy's part and played the manicurist.

As with all public events Willner takes part in (usually as a producer-organizer, never to my knowledge as a performer), the panel was indeed a one-of-a-kind event. Ensconced in the front row of the audience were Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed. Laurie watched with rapt attention, smiling broadly – I had forgotten that she has her own trove of Kaufman stories (which were recounted in this interview). Lou was asleep throughout most of the evening, but I guess his recent health troubles explain his condition.

Following the show, one video clip was shown: Andy's audition tape for SNL, in which he recited the lyrics of “MacArthur Park” very quickly, two times. Then he did the intro to the Superman TV show in a country bumpkin voice. That latter part is up on YouTube:

As for the newest “Andy isn't dead” hoax, here is the most in-depth article about it. All I can note is that it was verified that Andy did father a child as a teen, and the child in question was female (check it in his Wikipedia entry). And now onto a few of the many rarities that have turned up online....

Among the many super-rare items (read: so rare they must've come from family or close friends) are his first TV appearance and an 8mm horror film made with no budget that includes Andy in a “cameo.” Also there is a pilot called “Stick Around” that he appeared in in 1977, in which he plays a robot version of his Latka character (a few years before he played another robot in the film Heartbeeps).

Perhaps the most interesting clip of a Kaufman bit in “gestation” is this early version of the Tony Clifton character, when Andy simply wore a mustache and wig to play the character.

And yet another 8mm film, this time with Andy in his dressing room acting as his obnoxious alter-ego (in this case without any makeup or wig):

Andy did a LOT of cheesy Seventies TV. Here he is with Cher doing a really awful Garden of Eden sketch where he's Adam and she's the serpent. He was also on the Johnny Cash Xmas special doing his impression of Elvis and singing a nonsense song.  

Here he is doing a weird supermarket prank on a Lisa Hartman special (check out the Borat outtakes, and see if you don't think Sasha Baron is doing a major Andy bit when he asks one clerk “what is this? What is this? What is this?” at the cheese display).

He also appeared as “Dr. Vinnie Boombatz” on a Rodney Dangerfield cable special. Of particular interest, though, is his appearance with the one and only Marty Feldman on The Merv Griffin Show to promote Marty's film “In God We Trust” (which is a major disappointment, considering it stars Marty, Richard Pryor, and Andy!).

On more familiar turf, here he is with co-conspirator Bob Zmuda, fooling around on a kids show called Bananaz in 1979. Zmuda comes on a professor discussing the theory of “psycho- genesis” (in which you're encouraged to stay in the place that you were conceived by your parents). It's a very interesting example of a case where the folks on the show expected Andy to do something weird, as did the studio audience, so it seems like no one was truly deceived here, but it is fun:

Some of the clips that appeared in their entirety at the Participant Inc shows are up online in fragmented form, including this bit of The Slycraft Hour, a 1981 Manhattan access show, in which Andy does a weird Slavic accent, but keeps up his “I’m From Hollywood” bit, and does finally wrestle a woman in the studio:

And onto two clips that show Andy when his health was becoming an issue. First, doing an interview with Tom Cottle (a man with amazing hair). Kaufman stays out of character for the whole time, discussing his childhood, the “TV shows” he did in his bedroom, and the fact that his parents “were worried that I was crazy.”

It's a quite touching piece, where he's really serious; he even offers a fully serious discussion of his love of pro-wrestling, including his attempt to resurrect “the Buddy Rogers atmosphere.”

 It's one of three times I've seen what you might call “the real Andy” on film or tape (the other two being the backstage interview at the end of the “real Andy Kaufman” film by Seth Schultz, and a Tonight Show segment on which he's interviewed by a seemingly snarky Steve Martin, who's guest-hosting for Carson and asks Andy if his main goal is to make the audience feel embarrassed).

Andy coughs a little during that interview, as he does in his last TV appearance, where he's dressed in the Foreign Man outfit, but serves primarily as a host for music-videos and in-studio live appearances. The show was a pilot for a series called “The Top,” and if you need a time-reference, I'll simply note that Andy touts Cyndi Lauper as an up-and-coming talent:

Those last two clips would be very sad notes to go out on, so I will leave you with this delightful song from a Midnight Special appearance. Introduced by K.C. (of the “Sunshine Band”). This kinda sums up Andy's weirdness in one little package (except the audience is digging it).

Garden of Earthly Delights: Andy Kaufman, the Abrasive Genius (part one of two)

Andy Kaufman was a “child of television,” and — although those who saw him live rave about the experience — it was on television that he made his greatest impact. He enjoyed provoking and irritating his audience, but also betrayed a serious love for the inanities of television, from its variety-show excesses to its emphasis on childlike, simple emotions. Perhaps the most striking thing about his work is how it was insanely childish and incredibly sophisticated at the same time.

I write this a few weeks after a major celebration of Kaufman's comedy took place here in NYC. A gallery show of his costumes, notebooks, correspondence, and many personal possessions was supplemented by more than a week's worth of video presentations, hosted by fans and Andy's co-conspirators, at another gallery. The cumulative effect was fascinating, since the work of a resolutely and often intentionally abrasive comedian was discussed in earnest detail and put in a much larger context.

It would be hard to think of another comedian who could be celebrated in such a way – many movie and TV comics are honored with film festivals at rep houses or month-long showings of their old programs at the Paley Center, but to have a display of costumes and notebooks, as well as moderated discussions among “downtown artist” folk, points up how really unusual and genre-bending Kaufman's work was.

Those of us who were watching it at the time knew something really weird was going on. I remember first seeing Andy on Van Dyke and Company doing his “foreign man” bits (with jokes that just laid there, a character who seemed brain-damaged and juvenile, and this unknown comedian coming in at various points to “interrupt” the proceedings). As even a cursory look at the Kaufman “archives” on YouTube shows, he did a *lot* of talk show appearances, and although he did repeat certain bits, he concocted special bits that were done only once for certain appearances, like this "homeless" bit on the Letterman morning show.

As a young fan of his work, I often wondered what the fuck he was doing, but the laughs far outweighed the head scratching. Sometimes it was definitely something recognizable as “comedy,” but when he embarked on the “Intergender Wrestling Champion” and Tony Clifton bits, they seemed interminable and had no payoff.

One of the joys of watching his work on video and online these days is discovering the “punchlines” for some of his long-stemmed pieces of shtick. The intergender business had its payoffs revealed in the Carnegie Hall tape (in which he finally did something with the bit that was conventionally funny – downing spinach to get Popeye-like strength) and the I'm From Hollywood documentary (in which you see the well-executed finale of his wrestling career). The Tony Clifton provocation had its own payoff, in that Andy wasn't always in the makeup, a fact that was finally sprung on the public in a memorial special hosted by his siblings and Taxi costars.

The Kaufman gallery tributes showed that he really did a create a world of his own, through his standup, his talk-show appearances, and especially his concept specials. The threads that run through all the material are a spoofing of conventional show-business and a confounding of audience expectation. His unexpected death at 35 seemed to make no sense at all, but fit into a larger scheme of insanely talented performers who kick off before their time — most because of self-destructive tendencies and addiction, and others because they’re just too special to stick around for long.

In this part of my tribute to the “abrasive genius,” I want to pay tribute to his “bigger” creations (that are not Tony Clifton or intergender wrestling). I can best do this by describing the joys to be found at the show that recently closed at the Maccarone gallery. The show was held in a large room with the pieces exhibited in vitrines. The first things one saw were his personal papers – letters, passport, diaries, etc – then went on to his costumes, his record collection (more on that in the second part), and other objects (tape boxes, notes with phone nos. for contacts at Saturday Night Live, items reflecting his interest in transcendental meditation).

The highlight of the papers was surely his fan letter to Elvis, handwritten when he was college age. Steve Allen once wrote that when he first met Andy he wasn't sure if he was a big fan of his work or mocking him – the letter to Elvis runs along similar lines, since it is an *overwhelming* fan note in which Andy used quotation marks for emphasis. When he mentions being a “big Elvis fan,” the quotes do lend a weird note of irony. I'm sure he meant it, but setting something in quotes means you're being ironic or sarcastic.

The other weird aspect of the letter (one true to Andy's style as an anti-comedian) is his telling Elvis that he would love to replace him someday. One can only imagine the King's response, had he read this feverish fan letter from a young man who swears he writes papers in school on Elvis's movies. Andy cites two or three of Presley's worst films as some of his faves, so one gets the impression that Andy's taste in pop culture found him deeply loving some really cornball stuff (thus the delicate “balance” in a lot of his standup between mocking something and paying tribute to it).

Andy clearly didn't like to type, as only his stories are typed (there was even a handwritten resume on display). I haven't read his fiction and poetry – which was indeed published long after his death and now is out of print and fetching inflated prices on eBay – but he clearly was inspired by the Beat writers, as the items that were featured in the Maccarone show were redolent of Kerouac at his wordiest.

Andy's note to the Maharishi also is a curious item. He wrote to say that he loved TM, but it wasn't changing his life entirely, he was still descending into sadness. (It must've worked better for him in subsequent years, as he continued to practice it until his death.) The strangest notes in the collection weren't from Andy, however. They were housed alongside a group of jokey/angry/self-promoting notes from women who wanted to wrestle him (which were published in a book edited by his girlfriend, Lynne Marguiles).

The women challenged him to matches, writing in the same style he used when he put down women in his “intergender wrestling” bits. The weirder letters were from men who picked up on Andy tapping into a familiar wrestling trope, a “hair match” in which the loser has to have his/her head shaved bald. This excited some of the viewing audience who wanted Andy to beat a woman in the ring and then have her shaved bald (a pic of the fetchingly chrome-domed Persis Khambatta in the first Star Trek film were included with one note). One can only imagine the laughs that Kaufman got from the fact that he had fired up the libidos of some gents who were even kinkier than he (for an exploration of his sex life, see his friend Bob Zmuda's bio, Andy Kaufman Revealed!).

The gallery show also included a homespun feature in which visitors could sit down at a round table in the center of the room and talk to people who knew Andy at some point in his life. I would've loved to have chatted with Carol Kane or the most surprising name on the list, Prudence Farrow – whom I have to assume had some connection to Kaufman through his TM fascination. The day I went the guests were Andy's brother Michael and the “Bunny Ranch” owner Dennis Hof (a gallery employee informed us Andy was a regular customer at the Bunny Ranch....).

The piece de resistance of the show a notebook of performance ideas that Andy jotted down in '73-'74. Among them were these (all paraphrased here):

— Bring out bald men who look like “Great Neck executives” (then a list of names of famous bald men who looked the way he wanted – “Mel Cooley,” Milt Kamen). Have them play congas in a men's room in separate stalls.

— Go on Carson and get married, sincerely, but do an “Alice Toklas” (Andy referring here to the Peter Sellers movie, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas) and make sure the commercial breaks interfere with the ceremony. Wind up never getting married.

— Come onstage with Bobby Fischer and play chess with him for the whole show.

— (the single best item and one I'm sure he could've carried off with much deadpan certainty) Come out on stage, say "Let Us Pray," and then just lead the audience in prayer the whole time.

The video and panel discussion presentations at Participant Inc will be discussed in my next blog entry, but here is a list of the “essential” Kaufman complete shows, as preserved on tape and now available (for the moment) on YT for free.

First is the show called “Uncle Andy's Funhouse” that aired as “The Andy Kaufman Special” late night on ABC in a 90-minute timeslot (the YT poster has put up the full version with the original commercials and sporadically sizzling audio). The show was shot in '77 but didn't air until '79; it includes some of his most famous bits, including the Foreign Man/Elvis transformation and his wonderful, truly manic conga drum version of “It's a Small World After All.”

The items specific to this show are his oddly touching chat with Howdy Doody, the introduction of the “angry Andy” (which basically became the Clifton character), “Has-been Corner,” and an odd framing device which finds the Foreign Man watching the show as it is being aired (he thinks it's pretty awful).

One of the oddest artifacts to show up in the era of VHS was a documentary called The Real Andy Kaufman, which chronicles Andy doing his full act at Kutchers Hotel in the Catskills and not going down all that well with the audience. This is an interesting opportunity to see his live act and also to see him literally knowing that the audience ONLY wants to see him doing “Latka” and Elvis. And so he brings up his entire family (with both grandmothers!) onstage to provoke them ever further:

The documentarian Seth Schultz conducts an interview with him after the show, in which Andy seems truly offended that the audience didn't enjoy the show (they were “downright rude!”). One assumes that he was used by this time (1979) to appearing before nightclub and college audiences who got what he was doing. How he thought the intergender-wrestling bit would go over with a resort-hotel audience is anyone's guess, but this one of possibly only a handful of times that he was seen with his guard down, for at least a minute or two:

His Carnegie Hall show is uniformly agreed to be possibly THE high water mark of his career. It's a full-fledged stage show that he financed himself and, as noted above, he provided contexts for all of the bits, including the intergender thing and Tony Clifton:

In 1981, he hosted an episode of the Midnight Special that included all of his “greatest hits,” but also included video of his very odd stint working as a busboy at a deli-restaurant while he was starring on Taxi, as well as two special guests he clearly chose for the occasion: Freddie Cannon and Slim Whitman:

Possibly my single favorite thing that Andy participated is the video My Breakfast with Blassie, in which he has breakfast at a Sambo's restaurant with the one and only “fashion plate of wrestling,” the classy one, Fred Blassie. The film contains my fave moment featuring his partner in crime Bob Zmuda (it is gross and stupid, but never fails to make me laugh) and many, many bits of wisdom from Fred to Andy:

While Breakfast is definitely in my Pantheon of favorite Kaufman creations, his last TV special, which aired on Soundstage in 1983, is perhaps his most extreme subversion of the TV medium (making him only one of a handful of comedians who picked up where Ernie Kovacs left off). The show begins suddenly, showing the end of the program and then restarting – instead of Latka watching the program, this time it's an old couple in a tacky living room (“he's playing with the medium... leave it on”).

His nod to Winky Dink and You (playing with a “magic screen” three years before Pee-Wee did it) and onscreen argument with his real-life ex Elayne Boosler are both mind-bogglingly weird sequences, but nothing is as good as the end, where he tells us all off and then “angry Andy” gets counseling from Latka (who is also a sarcastic son of a bitch).

I'll outline a number of extremely wonderful rarities in the second part of his blog entry, but this special is perhaps the best example of Andy toying with his audience's minds while he screwed with the cliches of television talk-shows.

Images in this entry came from the "Fuck Yeah Andy Kaufman" Tumblr, "Tropical Nut Borer Control," and "Kvetchbook."