Laughter from the Toy Chest

By Tony Clifton

Andy Kaufman, comedy's stand-up Pirandello

Awkwardness. Embarrassment. Gradual. . . shame. The eyes start to bulge. The body tries to move, but the feet stay still. He runs in place from the waist up. Perspiration starts to form on the upper lips. There is just the suggestion . . . yes . . . a smile. But it is camouflage, a thin subterfuge hiding disorientation, incipient humiliation, blind panic.

He tries to speak, manages a halting, coverall "Thank you very much" delivered in some unheard-of accent that sounds like south-of-the-border Maltese. Then he dives ahead, attempting another impersonation. Same accent. Same tone. Same delivery. Now the fear hits again, so bad this time that he forgets everything . . . and has to go back to the start of the act. He takes it all from the top. Already accomplice in his fate, the audience becomes part of his misery, both the reason and redemption for it. The man will not stop, either. Finally he bails himself out with a saving, dazzlingly accurate impersonation of Elvis Presley.

Andy Kaufman sheds characters like a cold-sufferer discarding Kleenex. He is not only this indomitable overreacher called simply "Foreign Man." He can be, as easily, a lowlife Vegas saloon singer named Tony Clifton; a heartsick yearner after a lost love from the seventh grade; a ringmaster for a kind of rainy-afternoon kiddie show, full of cartoons and silly songs. In all those guises, Andy Kaufman is a little like a stand-up Pirandello. But what adds particular piquancy to his lavish charades is Kaufman's adamant refusal ever to drop his own mask.

Kaufman's most familiar incarnation is also his most comforting, a benign extension of Foreign Man tailored for situation comedy and appearing weekly, under the name Latka Gravas, on ABC's smash sitcom Taxi. But Latka fans who sought out Kaufman at his frequent unscheduled appearances at comedy clubs or who checked out his recent concert at Manhattan's Carnegie Hall got something of a shock. Lovable Latka is there all right, but reduced to supporting status; his cute malapropisms ("America is a tough town") are cut entirely; only his accent, and the loony-tune vocabulary, remain to reassure. The concert was like a childhood Saturday spent with the strange little boy down the block. Kaufman takes skits out for random amusement like a kid pulling old toys from a chest.

"When I perform, it's very personal," Kaufman says. "I'm sharing things I like, inviting the audience into my room." He means this literally. The Mighty Mouse record he sings along to is his own, from childhood; the cartoons he shows--including a couple of kindergarten antiprejudice tracts--were long-ago gifts from his grandfather. "The audience," says his collaborator Bob Zmuda, 29, "is asked to become babies again." This is a sort of low-level exercise in primal manipulation that might turn precious, like a Steve Martin extravaganza of silliness. But Kaufman, whether he chooses to acknowledge it or not, is up to something a good deal more ambitious. He is continually questioning, then undermining the idea of what is funny. "Andy takes a lot of risks," Zmuda says. "What performer in his right mind would go onstage and deliberately bomb?"

This is not everyone's idea of a barrel of laughs. Which is part of the point. Like a more controlled and benign version of a happening, Kaufman's show engineers a guerrilla takeover of comic consciousness. "I try to please people, to give them a good time," Kaufman says. "But I refuse to make my act conform to traditional show-biz standards of entertainment." Presumably unaware of this, ABC gave Kaufman $100,000 for a 90-minute special of his own. The result began with Foreign Man urging viewers to turn off their sets, went on to include an interview with Howdy Doody and a variety spoof called "The Has-Been Corner." The show is altogether some of the best and most dazzling comedy done for television--but it remains unaired, deemed too avant-garde by network executives. "They said it was brilliant, like Ernie Kovacs," Andy recalls. "I never saw Ernie Kovacs, but I understand that's a compliment."

Indeed, like the TV special, much of Kaufman's work seems like an open rebuke to show-biz standards. The Carnegie Hall show featured a bunch of performing moppets called the Love Family, who bounded onstage, delivered glutinous renditions of execrable standards like The Impossible Dream and soon had the audience applauding in mockery, booing and calling for mercy. "When I bring out my performers, people think it's a put-on," Kaufman complained to TIME'S Elaine Dutka after the show. "The critics try to intellectualize my material. There's no satire involved. Satire is a concept that can only be understood by adults. My stuff is straight, for people of all ages." So straight that backstage, the Love Family burst into tears at their reception, and Kaufman was criticized in reviews for "cruelty," a charge that particularly rankles. "The Love Family is great," he insists, surely sincere. What makes Andy Kaufman great is his unassumed childishness, and cruelty, acknowledged or not, is as much a function of childhood as innocence.

At 29, living alone in Los Angeles' Laurel Canyon, drinking carrot juice and gobbling ice cream, Kaufman is still very much the kid who locked himself in his room and never came out. In conversation he retains the wary vulnerability of the shy boy who shook with fright every day at camp before his name was called at roll. "My mother sent me to psychiatrists since the age of four because she didn't think little boys should be sad," Kaufman reports. "When I was two, and my brother was born, I stared out the window for days. Can you imagine that?"

Raised in an upper-middle-class family in Great Neck, just outside New York City, Kaufman put on playground shows for schoolmates, appeared at neighborhood birthday parties with a pint-size extravaganza--comedy, cartoons, magic --that could have been an early rehearsal for Carnegie Hall. During his days at Grahm Junior College in Boston, a course in transcendental meditation eased him into performing at amateur nights and clubs like the Improvisation in Manhattan. There he would appear, often as the Foreign Man, and embarrass everyone with his desperate comedy and maladroit impressions, then let them in on the joke by launching into his superlative Elvis.

Kaufman is at his best and most challenging when he does not let anyone in on the joke, doesn't even admit there's a joke at all. The playroom innocence of Kaufman's live show is a touch indulgent, almost always inspired. Sometimes at the beginning, a pretty girl comes out with an invitation to milk and cookies, a promise made good at show's end, when the entire audience is conveyed by bus to a snack with the star. But it is in Tony Clifton, with his crass, abusive desperation, that Kaufman may have found his strongest comic voice. A distant cousin to Lenny Bruce's abrasive small-timer bombing at the London Palladium, Tony is the dark side of every comic. He is also, to Andy Kaufman, very real. Tony Clifton has a separate agent, gets separate billing, demands--and receives--separate dressing-room facilities when he works with Andy. The producers of Taxi wrote Clifton into the show, had to negotiate a separate contract, then, when he was late for rehearsal three days running, had to fire him. "Don't tell me," said Andy Kaufman. "Tell Tony." Tony showed up, got canned, threw such a fit that studio guards had to carry him off the lot.

Now the Tony doppelgaenger appears beside Andy to take bows at the end of the show. Kaufman insists Clifton is a real person he once mimicked, who is now appearing in person. "Everyone thinks he's me," Kaufman says. "It's really destroying Tony's career." It is clear that Kaufman's comedy in every incarnation is like a full-dress masque that sets new rules, tests new limits. "I never told a joke in my life," he says, with pride. The essence of his gift, the full range of his promise, is just this simple. Andy Kaufman is not kidding.

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