In December of 2011, Tig Notaro performed stand-up as a guest on Conan. She came out and told a few jokes from her debut album, charming the audience with her deadpan expressions and casual likeability. When there were only few minutes left in her set, Tig directly addressed the audience. “I was performing in Seattle,” she tells them, “And when I was onstage, I moved the stool next to me just slightly and it made this weird noise. And it caused the entire audience to laugh collectively. And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s all you guys needed?’ So I just kept pushing the stool. And they kept laughing. So I just kept pushing the stool. And they stopped laughing. So I just kept pushing the stool. And they started laughing again. And it kept going like that for a while, a good ten minutes. So I was just curious what you guys would think if I pushed the stool here...” She takes the cordless microphone and puts it in her back pocket, and proceeds to slowly push the stool around Conan’s set, applying enough pressure so that it squeaks on the hardwood floors.
As in Seattle, the laughter from Conan’s audience came in waves. It is a premise so ridiculous that the audience isn’t quite sure how to respond, alternating between laughter and confusion. Tig pushes her stool for about three minutes, but it feels like ten. Just like that studio audience, when I watch this clip at home my laughter comes in waves too. It alternates with bewilderment and admiration for the gumption it must have taken for her to do this weird, surrealist bit on Conan.
Tig’s bit, which she calls Stool Movement, is a prime example of a comedian playing with the form and function of stand-up comedy. If your goal as a comedian is simply to make the audience laugh, any semblance of rules disappear. Stand-up comedy traditionally takes the form of someone standing on stage with a microphone, telling observations or personal jokes and stories. However, some of our best comedians have understood that sometimes the funniest decision is the most absurd.
It is often incorrect to classify these performances as stand-up comedy. Somewhere between performance art, clowning, and meta-comedy, these strange performances often find their laughs through the revelry of the absurd or surreal. An early practitioner of non-joke-telling comedy is the infamous performer Gallagher. While my generation might know him better as the person who stormed out in the middle of an interview with Marc Maron, Gallagher made his name by smashing watermelons for packed live audiences. Gallagher, often classified as a prop comic, would bring out a huge sledgehammer dubbed the “Sledge-O-Matic” and violently smash things on stage to the audience’s delight. The objects ranged from some fruits and foods but always culminated with the destruction of a huge watermelon. This performance was a novelty act, reminiscent of a vaudevillian, who found a specific type of humor through spectacle and juvenile antics.
Musical comedians like Tim Minchin, David O’Doherty, or Bo Burnham are often prone to daring uses of form. Burnham’s landmark album what? culminates in a piece where he is performing with different versions of himself by means of voice-over. With jokes peppered throughout, the piece is experimental in form, and follows Bo making literal music out of the daily conversations that give him so much anxiety. Much of the piece is beyond written explaining, but it culminates with these phrases spoken by three characters all performed by Burnham: “We think you’ve changed, bro.” “We know best.” “You suck.” They are repeated over and over again until it simply becomes: “We think. We know. You. We think we know you. We think we know you.”
Typically with this humor that is unconventional in form and often absurdist in tone, the audience is in on the joke. The joke is either on the comedian himself, or on a third party the comedian is discussing or conversing with. When Sasha Baron Cohen interviews people as the Borat or Ali G., sometimes the humor is in the ridiculousness of Cohen’s character. More often, however, the unsuspecting interviewee is the butt of it all. This style of comedy finds its humor primarily through the Hobbesian superiority theory, stating that laughter can result from someone feeling a “sudden glory” in themselves as they feel their own supremacy over someone else. This style can be a little harsh to more sensitive audience members, and is often the tool of demagogues and middle school bullies.
Still, some of the most influential performance-art comedians made their mark by alienating the audience itself, and not tempering their surreal or absurdist styles. The de facto home for this sense of humor currently is Adult Swim. This sense of humor is perhaps easier to describe not in what it actually is, but in its effect on its audience. This brings us back to Tig and her stool, and this comedy trades in the alternating confusion, awe, and hysterics of its fans. Adult Swim is a programming block on the channel Cartoon Network. The block runs from 8:00pm to 6:00am everyday. As its title alludes, Adult Swim is the time when the kids are kicked out of the pool, and the adults have free range to swim about as they please. Adult Swim’s unique sense of humor can often verge on anti-humor or cringe-humor, and can be uncomfortable or impenetrable to those who do not “get it.” Shows like Rick and Morty, Tim and Eric, and Childrens Hospital are all Adult Swim shows with distinct tones and massive cult followings.
When stand-up comedians play with performance art or absurdist humor, it is typically one part of their larger comedy arsenal. Eric Andre, Reggie Watts, Zach Galifianakis, Steve Martin, and others use touches in their material. One comedian, however, committed to his absurdism with every inch of himself for his entire career. He was more performance artist than comic. His name was Andy Kaufman, and although he performed in comedy clubs, he never told a single joke.
Andy Kaufman never claimed to be a comedian, and in fact, he hated being referred to as such. “Kaufman took the anti-comedy of Albert Brooks and Steve Martin and turned it into something more like anti-entertainment.” Writes Richard Zoglin. In purest terms, he was an entertainer. Kaufman’s shows resembled one-man shows, variety shows, and performance art more than stand-up. Whether he was playing the bongos, performing as one of his many alter-egos, or reading the entire Great Gatsby to a miserable audience, Andy Kaufman did whatever he found funny, and he did it for as long as he found it funny. “He was the only comic I had ever seen who didn’t care if the audience laughed,” says friend and colleague James Burrows. Kaufman wasn’t only on his own wavelength, he was on his own planet. But in following his own peculiar sense of humor down any path it lead, Kaufman may have inadvertently pioneered one of our strangest and most affecting art forms to date.
Andrew Geoffrey Kaufman was born in 1949 in Great Neck, Long Island. His father, Stanley Kaufman, was a jeweler and his mother, Janice Kaufman, was a homemaker and former model. Andy was the eldest of three kids, and according to his father, he showed a love for music at a very young age. Like many future performers, he put on entire TV shows for his stuffed animals. He loved professional wrestling, talk-shows, and children's’ television. Richard Zoglin writes, “While other stand-ups of his generation were inspired by Lenny Bruce or Robert Klein, Kaufman’s heroes were the kids’ show hosts and professional wrestlers.”
By the age of 8 years old, Andy begins working as an entertainer for children’s birthday parties. He leads sing-alongs of songs like “Old McDonald” and “100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” as well as telling stories and making the children laugh. By 14, he’s getting paid to perform and working parties regularly. “He had this childlike quality,” writes Andy’s manager George Shapiro. “He liked relating to children, I think he felt safe relating to children.” Kaufman wasn’t the class clown in school, however, and was actually a terribly shy child. He exhibited signs of depression and anxiety from a young age. When his younger brother was born, Andy largely isolated himself from the family. “I would stare out the window, just stare,” Kaufman later remarked. “And I would be very sad, and they felt that a child shouldn’t be sad, so they thought something was wrong.” Because of this behavior, Andy’s mother had him seeing a psychologist regularly by fourth grade.
As a young man, Kaufman was a prolific writer and poet. He wrote incessantly, writing a play by age 14 and a full (still unpublished) novel at 16, entitled The Hollering Mangoo. Andy had little regard for the rigors of academia, graduating high school with a 1.7 GPA, ranking 419th in a class of only 461. Upon graduation, Kaufman spent all of his free time in the clubs and venues of Greenwich Village. He was drafted for Vietnam, but was deemed unfit after receiving a 4-F deferment after failing the psychiatric test. Kaufman experimented with psychedelics and alcohol in the hip West Village scene, but became sober by the time he was 20. Kaufman discovered Transcendental Meditation and fell in love with its message and its effect, which greatly helps with his intense shyness. He became active in the community, frequently attending meditation retreats and meditating twice a day religiously for the rest of his life. After realizing his desire to study film and television, Kaufman moved to Boston and enrolls in Grahm Junior College. He created and hosted Uncle Andy’s Funhouse, a children’s show for his school’s television station. The show was an outlet for many of the performances and routines Andy had been cultivating while working children’s parties, as well as a chance to further explore his passion.
In addition to his television show, Andy began performing in comedy venues and music venues in Boston and New York. His act was more of a variety show than a comedy or music show, and many audience member simply didn’t understand or enjoy his performances. “I like the kind of humor where nobody knows what’s going on.” Kaufman later stated. “I’m not into comedy. I think comedy is the most unfunny thing there is.” Kaufman “challenges and confuses audiences,” often leaving a trail of bewilderment behind him. He did a few characters, sang children’s songs, played the bongos, and lip-synced to popular music. “He sounded like a boy who was singing just for fun,” writes Hecht.
One of Kaufman’s more successful acts in the early days featured him playing the audience like a hustler or pool shark. In the character of his benign and confused foreign man, Andy would do a series of terrible impressions. When the audience was convinced he was talentless, he proposed that his next impression would be of Elvis Presley. He then turned his back to the audience, ripped away a layer of clothing to reveal a full sequined jumpsuit, combed his hair back, and gave one the audience a fully-committed, brilliant rendition of “Jailhouse Rock.”
Many of Kaufman’s bits are funnier in theory than practice. A lot of the appeal and fascination with Andy Kaufman centers around the fact that he did what he did, and not the fun of experiencing what he did. Andy had little regard for the audience, and simply did whatever he found interesting or worthwhile. For example, on multiple occasions Andy sang the entire “100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” to a miserable audience. Would I want to watch that? Fuck no. Do I love that he did that? Fuck yes. If Andy was annoyed at an audience or frustrated with their behavior, he would stop his routine, pull out a paperback book from his bag, and proceed to read The Great Gatsby in its entirety to the audience. On a few occasions, he did this until not a soul was left in the audience. Is this petty and unprofessional? Yes. Do I find it badass and hysterical? Also, yes.
In 1972, The owner of the Improv discovered Andy Kaufman during a performance at My Father’s Place, a small venue on Long Island. While he didn’t exactly understand Kaufman or his style, he took a liking to him, and Kaufman began performing at both the Improv’s New York and the Los Angeles locations. Kaufman found moderate success in the larger venues, but it wasn’t until 1975 that he had his first big break. “For the right kind of audience (which could be few and far between) Kaufman was comic nirvana,” writes Michael Kantor. Kantor was right, and Kaufman soon learned that there was an audience out there for him. He just needed to find them.
Dick Ebersol, an NBC executive, saw Andy performing and invited him to audition for a new show he was creating, which at the time was called, “Saturday Night.” On October 11th, 1975, Andy Kaufman appeared on the inaugural episode of SNL. He stood on stage with his arms at his sides, and playing a recording of the theme song to the cartoon, Mighty Mouse. Kaufman’s act consisted of standing still while the song played, excepting for the choruses, where he would enthusiastically lip-sync, before returning to his awkward stance until the next chorus. While Kaufman was a bit of an acquired taste, the simplicity and innocence of his act was endearing enough to win over the audience. This began a fruitful relationship between SNL and Andy Kaufman, and Kaufman would go on to make over a dozen appearances over the next decade. George Carlin, who was hosting Saturday Night Live that first night, was confused but amused by Kaufman. Carlin later wrote, “I just thought, ‘Oh. Well, of course.’ It was just another sign that free spirits and oddballs can be rewarded.”
In 1978, Andy was hired by ABC to play a small role in their upcoming sitcom, Taxi. They essentially hired him to play his foreign man which was one of a few of Kaufman’s signature characters. The character is an innocent, bumbling man from an unspecified European country. Onstage, Andy Andy proclaimed him to be from a small island in the Caspian Sea (they aren’t any) called Caspiar. Taxi made Andy’s character into Latka Gravas, who was the blue-collar auto-mechanic. Taxi premiered in 1978, and featured an ensemble including Judd Hirsch, Tony Danza, Danny DeVito, Marilu Henner, and Christopher Lloyd. The show took place at a fictional Taxi company called Sunshine Taxi in Manhattan, and followed the stories of a few cabbies and their dispatcher, as well as Kaufman character, who as the foreign man was the show’s comic relief.
Given Andy’s unique style and comic voice, he was very hesitant about taking a role on a primetime sitcom. He signed his contract with the hopes that Taxi would give him the exposure and the resources to be able to tour and perform at a higher level. Before signing his contract, however, Andy convinced the executives to sign Tony Clifton for at least two episodes of work. Tony Clifton, similar, to the foreign man was another of Andy’s character. Clifton was a inconsiderate low-life who was a former Las Vegas crooner. Kaufman fiercely denied that he was Tony Clifton, and he would wear a wig, face prosthetics, and huge dark sunglasses whenever he performed as Tony. Tony sometimes opened for Andy, singing old standards and antagonizing the audience. The executives agreed to the two-episode deal with “Tony”, and they played dumb about his identity to appease Andy.
When it was time to shoot Tony’s episodes, He showed up late, drunk, and with a hooker on either arm. He was extremely unprofessional towards the rest of the cast and the crew. Tony even provoked the show’s star, Judd Hirsch, and the two go into a fist-fight on the set. In the end, the producers were able to fire Tony for bad behavior, and get out of their contract for his two episode. Still denying any connection, Andy Kaufman actually supported the decision to fire Tony Clifton. As Tony Danza tells the story, the cast was watching the footage of Tony on set one afternoon, when Andy Kaufman walked into the room. The cast when silent, and when the footage ended Andy sighed and muttered, “What an asshole.”
Taxi was a large success with the public, and was awarded a few Golden Globes, including Best Comedy. In 1979, Andy himself was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, but lost to Norman Fell of Three’s Company. While the steady job and the salary was a nice change for Andy, he began to hate working on Taxi. He used his fame to continue performing, and when the show ended in 1983 after five season, he was able to return fully to his stage act. His best friend Bob Zmuda later remarked that Andy’s biggest fear was that he would only be remembered for his role on Taxi.
Andy Kaufman differs from character comedians like Paul Reubens, Andrew Clay Silverstein, and Bobcat Goldthwait because of his variety of characters and his method level of portrayal. Other character comedians in the 1970s and 1980s typically had one character who was a larger, more dramatic version of themselves that they played for comedic value. Kaufman, however, disappeared into his characters, treating his work more like a method actor than a comic. “With Andy, it was a case of art imitating life,” says fellow comic Richard Lewis. “Before he’d get up on stage, or after he had finished performing, he kept in character. He wouldn’t become himself, whoever that was.” There are stories from Andy’s friends about how some days he would show up as Latka or as Tony, and he would be them all day. The leads us to believe, interestingly enough, that the real Andy is exactly the person (or people) that the audience is seeing. “Andy Kaufman sheds characters like a cold sufferer discarding Kleenexes.” wrote Time magazine in 1978. According to Steve Allen, Kaufman used to walk through New York City and change characters with every block.
Some of Kaufman’s most strange and inaccessible exploits were during his stint as a professional wrestler. In 1977, he began wrestling women on television and live at wrestling events. In the Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon, the story goes that Andy wanted to be a wrestler and he chose to wrestle civilian women because it was the only way he wouldn’t get destroyed in the ring. Being a big time wrestler was a childhood dream of his, and this was an interesting and conceivable way to go about it. Kaufman’s wrestler character was a clear villain. “If I’m going to be a villainous wrestler,” he said, “I believe in going all the way.”
Kaufman was true to his word, and was excellent at riling up his audience with crude and masochistic rants. He yelled things such as “Stay in the kitchen where you belong!” in order to establish his character and work up the women in the audience. He offered $1,000 and his hand in marriage to any women who could pin him. Wrestling whoever would come down into the ring with him, Kaufman was never pinned. Kaufman wrestled women in the ring in the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis, as well as on Letterman and Saturday Night Live. His wrestling career culminated in his fake feud with Jerry “The King” Lawler. Lawler sent Kaufman to the hospital for a few days after particularly rough blow in the ring. The appeared together on Letterman and began fighting on air, with the audience unsure of what was planned and what wasn’t.
In 1982, seven years after Kaufman’s first appearance on Saturday Night Live, producer Dick Ebersol when on-air denouncing Kaufman, saying that he was no longer funny. He announced that there was going to be a vote, and home viewers could call in and decide whether Andy should be invited back to SNL. While this segment was a planned joke between Ebersol and Kaufman, things didn’t exactly go according to plan. Two 900 numbers were set up, one to “dump” Andy and one to “keep” Andy. The numbers were repeated throughout the show, with various cast members arguing to having Andy stay or go. At the end of the night, 195,544 people voted against Andy, while only 169,186 voted for him to stay. Andy never appeared live on Saturday Night Live again. “He never came back from that fully,” says Andy’s father, “He was really, really hurt.”
After the SNL fiasco and the cancellation of Taxi, Kaufman began working on a Broadway play. He was playing opposite Deborah Harry of Blondie in a show about a female wrestler, entitled Teaneck Tanzi. The show opened 1983, but unfortunately it was short-lived. The show closed after only two performances after receiving terrible reviews.
Kaufman faced another huge blow a few months later when he was disinvited from a Transcendental Meditation retreat. Kaufman had been devout in his meditation since he was a college student, and he had attended numerous retreats since then. Some of his stunts, particularly his exploits as the Intergender Wrestling Champion, were deemed too offensive to the TM committee.
At this point, Kaufman couldn’t get booked anywhere except for Letterman and his career was on a downswing. In November of 1983, Kaufman went to the hospital for a persistent cough. Andy was diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer. Kaufman pursued alternative medicine, and even visited a so-called “psychic surgeon” in The Philippines, but unfortunately the whole affair was a scam. Kaufman died at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles in the following May.
Due to Andy’s particular sense of humor and affinity for practical jokes, there are many who believe Andy Kaufman to still be alive. I think there were a few of us still holding out hope that Donald Trump was actually the ultimate Tony Clifton. “I wouldn’t put it past Andy to show up one day,” remarked Jeff Conaway, his Taxi co-star.