The Self-Destructive Genius of Andy Kaufman

Kaufman lip-syncs to the “Mighty Mouse” theme on the first episode of Saturday Night Live, October 11, 1975.

“There are some who wonder,” the critic Larry Kart warned in the Chicago Tribune in 1979, “whether he who lives by the put-on will ‘die’ by it, too.” Kart was writing about stand-up comedy, a world in which laughs are life and death. To “die,” to “bomb,” is to perform your act to silence, heckles, boos, anything but laughter. It’s every comedian’s nightmare; everyone, that is, except for the subject of Kart’s review, Andy Kaufman. As much performance artist as comic, Kaufman reveled in his viewers’ revulsion. Fascinated by the unspoken rules that govern spectator and performer, he spent the 1970s blurring the boundaries between showbiz facade and reality and, at the same time, trying to discover the limits of his viewers’ patience. He eventually succeeded in the latter task, just as Kart predicted. On November 20, 1982—25 years ago today—Kaufman’s audience demanded his death (comedy-wise, anyway) on national television. That night, in a phone-in poll, the viewers of Saturday Night Live voted to ban Kaufman from the show forever.

Given Kaufman’s history with the program, and the program’s importance in American television, the vote carried more heft than the average late-night talk-show poll. Seven years earlier, Saturday Night Live had yanked the underground comedy scene before the dazzling glow of the cathode-ray tube. Incubated in tiny clubs, repertory theaters, and college magazines, a new strain of humor had begun to emerge in the late 1960s, one laced with profanity, unapologetic in its frequent references to sex and drugs, and openly dismissive of the ossified conventions of show business. A pair of early bastions, the Harvard Lampoon humor magazine and its offshoot the National Lampoon, started attracting wider attention in the early 1970s, as did the Second City sketch troupes in Toronto and Chicago.

American television, however, ignored the new trend. Laugh-In, despite its flower-power veneer, pulled what political slaps it threw; Paul Keyes, the show’s head writer, would go on to consult for Richard Nixon. In 1969 CBS cancelled the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour—which counted among its favorite topics sex, drugs, and the mistakes of the U.S. government—“because,” Tommy Smothers maintained, “of our viewpoint on Vietnam.” That robbed U.S. airwaves of any innovative humor for more than half a decade. “There were writers and producers who were growing their hair long, smoking joints, and living in trailers in Laurel Canyon,” wrote the journalists Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad in Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, “but they worked on such series as The Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch.” Bombarded by programming designed to appeal to the establishment and finding none aimed at themselves, some members of the first generation of Americans raised on television grew to hate it.

By the mid-1970s, though, network executives realized there was money to be made in appealing to the largest generation in history. NBC, dead last in the ratings, hoped to draw younger viewers by hiring Lorne Michaels, a 29-year-old Toronto native, to produce a hip new variety show. It should, according to the network’s plan, “be young and bright [and] have a distinctive look, a distinctive set and a distinctive sound.”

The show that premiered on NBC at 11:30 p.m., October 11, 1975, lived up to its mission. Saturday Night opened with an absurdist sketch in which an immigrant (played by the Second City veteran John Belushi) parroted his English teacher’s sentences—all of them about wolverines—and then copied him when he fell to the floor with a heart attack. A stage manager, played by the National Lampoon radio and theater alumnus Chevy Chase, wandered onstage to investigate. He looked at the two bodies on the floor and then turned to the camera to deliver what would become the show’s tagline: “Live, from New York, it’s Saturday Night!”

From the very first minutes of the program, the surreal premise “let you know that this was our humor, not their humor,” said Michael O’Donoghue, the writer who played Belushi’s teacher. The message only got clearer as the hour and a half ticked by. The guest host, George Carlin, delivered a monologue that suggested God was only “semi-supreme,” because “everything he has ever made died.” But the most memorable performance of the night came from a little-known Long Islander named Andy Kaufman. About a quarter of the way into the program, the stage lights came up on a nervous-looking man in white jeans and a jacket shifting nervously next to an old turntable. Eyeing the crowd but saying nothing, he dropped the needle on the record and the theme to the cartoon “Mighty Mouse” began to play. He bit his lip, stared into the distance, and waited. When Mighty Mouse sang, “Here I come to save the day,” Kaufman lip-synced the line heroically, then reverted to his anxious twitching until his refrain came on again. He never spoke. You can see a clip of the performance here.

Kaufman’s routine was an instant hit with the TV audience, but he had been doing it in coffee houses and comedy clubs for years. The 26-year-old self-proclaimed “song and dance man” only rarely appeared as himself on stage and never delivered a punchline. Instead, he submerged into opaque personas, and viewers couldn’t tell what was serious and what was an act. "The thing with Andy is that there was never a wink-wink to the audience," said Marilu Henner, his costar on the sitcom Taxi, which ran from 1978 to 1983. On that show, Kaufman played the immigrant Latka Gravas, a character he had honed many years earlier in New York nightclubs.

He would set up a set of conga drums and nervously approach the microphone. In an undifferentiated Eastern European accent, he botched one worn-out one-liner after another (“Take my wife, please take her”), and the audience, most of whom had never seen him before and had no reason to doubt his exotic talentlessness, drifted from patience to embarrassment and then outright booing. Kaufman would break down in tears on stage; then his honking sobs took on a rhythm. He started beating on the congas in time, and then the sobs and drumbeats morphed into a feverish, virtuosic samba. (A variation saw him follow several inept impressions with an astonishingly accurate Elvis impersonation.) “I’d never been in a comedy club before where I’d seen the audience go that crazy,” remembered Dick Ebersol, an NBC executive, speaking of a 1974 performance Kaufman gave at the New York comedy club Catch a Rising Star. “They’d all been sucked in.”

“I just want real reactions,” Kaufman explained. “I want people to laugh from the gut, be sad from the gut—or get angry from the gut.” As Saturday Night Live became a sensation, Michaels invited Kaufman back time after time. Kaufman delighted in the chance to play with a national audience on live television. “When you’re watching a movie, for instance, while you might get upset at the villain, you also know it’s just a movie. But the thing that tells you you’re seeing something that isn’t real is already weak on live TV, much weaker than it is in the movies or on a taped TV show,” he said. “. . . I knew I could tear down the fourth wall there.” Over the next seven years, he appeared on SNL 14 more times. On one memorable show in March 1978 he read for several minutes from The Great Gatsby until the audience erupted in boos and heckles.

Meanwhile, SNL’s popularity was sending temblors through the underground comedy world. During the heyday of the hippie counterculture, rock music had acted as a generation’s mouthpiece. Now the music scene was splintering into a snarl of competing subgenres, and the comedians who had spent the first half of the decade sweating it out on the stages of dingy clubs and student unions became the new objects of mass adulation. By the end of the decade, audiences regularly packed 30,000-seat theaters to see Steve Martin perform. Which would have been great, had they laughed at his jokes. But Martin’s routine was old news; the fans had already memorized it from his records and TV appearances. They came to scream Beatlemaniac-style, to yell out his catchphrases. It made for a bewildering, if lucrative, experience.

Kaufman reacted to his own soaring popularity by defying approval. His put-ons grew more elaborate and combative, and any viewer who tried to identify with him was stymied by a series of hostile new personas. “His audience’s need to be hip at all costs turns out to be one of Kaufman’s major comedic weapons,” Kart wrote in 1981. “You say there’s nothing that can embarrass or offend you, he seems to be telling us. Well, try this on for size.” He developed an obsession with wrestling: He would challenge any woman in the audience to try to pin him on stage. When he overwhelmed his volunteer—which he always did—he announced that all women were “weak” and should devote themselves to housework. The diehards called it satire; others, including some feminist groups, began to condemn him in the press.

His television appearances now also devolved into violence. The professional wrestler Jerry Lawler slapped Kaufman in the face on-air during a taping of Late Night with David Letterman, and Kaufman replied with a long string of obscenities. In 1981 Kaufman stopped dead in the middle of a sketch on ABC’s live comedy Fridays, complaining that he felt “stupid.” The scene ground to an awkward halt. The actor Michael Richards (who went on to play Kramer on Seinfeld) then dropped a stack of cue cards in front of Kaufman, who responded by throwing a glass of water in Richards’s face. A free-for-all fight broke out among the cast and crew on live television. Kaufman had decided earlier in the week to derail the sketch, but only the producers and Richards—and none of the other actors and stagehands—were in on the secret. Just as in the fight on Letterman, which he had also planned in advance, Kaufman never gave any indication that he was kidding.

“After the first Fridays show, I felt better than I’ve ever felt after a performance,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1981, “because I had, in a sense, created a reality. The whole thing was not real, but in the minds of all these people across the country it was real. So the question is: ‘What actually is reality?’” His experiment earned ABC a flood of angry letters. One viewer complained that Kaufman was a “danger to himself and others.” Meanwhile, Fridays’ ratings surged.

To salvage their own audience, the producers of SNL decided Kaufman was still worth the gamble. In 1980, after the end of the fifth season, Michaels and the last of the original cast retired from the show. The new incarnation, run first by the producer Jean Doumanian and then by Ebersol, struggled to live up to its predecessor. Sex and drug jokes that once seemed daring now felt lazy; SNL, the vanguard just a few years earlier, came off as tepid and bland. If anyone could inject some vigor into a stale formula, though, it was Kaufman.

He was scheduled to appear on SNL on October 23, 1982, but his prepared material apparently failed to match the caliber of the rest of the lineup (which included a sketch called “Naked Corpse Funeral” and a parody of Good Morning America in which the actors Joe Piscopo and Gary Kroeger said “Good morning” to each other for several minutes). Kaufman did not take the news well. “I was standing there backstage where [Kaufman and Ebersol] screamed at each other,” remembered Andrew Kurtzman, one of the show’s writers. “There was a certain amount of ‘fuck you’ and screaming down the little entranceway leading into the studio.” Once his temper cooled, Ebersol invited Kaufman to appear on the following week’s show. But Kaufman’s act had only deteriorated since their argument. “He handed me three handwritten pages he planned to do that was not only unfunny but also belligerent,” Ebersol explained to the press. “I made my mind up he was not going on.”

Over the next two weeks, the papers caught wind of the feud. On the November 13 show, just before the musical guest Kenny Loggins’s second number, Ebersol took the stage. “In recent weeks we have received inquiries from many of you, including even the editors of TV Guide, as to why, prior to our last two telecasts, we heavily promoted Andy Kaufman and then failed to present him as advertised,” he said. “So tonight, let me set the record straight by saying, in my opinion, that in both cases Andy misled us into thinking, right up until airtime, that his material would be up to the show’s standards. It was not. It was not even funny, and in my opinion Andy Kaufman is not funny anymore.” The audience burst into applause.

A week later, Ebersol appeared again, this time early in the program. In a fit of democratic publicity-mongering, he invited SNL’s viewers to phone in (at 50 cents a call) to vote on whether or not Kaufman should be allowed back on the show. By the end of the episode, 364,730 people had offered their opinions—169,186 for his return, 195,544 against.

Kaufman, by all accounts, was devastated—despite the fact that he had orchestrated the entire charade, including the dustup with Ebersol. The audience’s verdict was real, however. The viewers had actually phoned in to ban him, as Kaufman had suspected they might. He had spent the previous week holed up in a hotel room, fretting about the outcome. When the referendum came, he regretfully abided by it. Unfortunately, so did most other TV producers. Other than David Letterman, few wanted to hire him for guest spots anymore; the controversy, increasingly, didn’t seem worth it. In a way, his years of needling his audience—drawing out queasy pauses, unleashing on-stage tantrums and on-air fistfights—had led inevitably to this end. “What we have here is not just a comedian who ‘dies’ again and again because his jokes fail to produce laughter,” wrote the media scholar Florian Keller, “but here is a performer who repeatedly puts at stake his social position within the symbolic network of show business.”

Kaufman’s act had always flirted with failure. But then he would break into his perfect Elvis impersonation, or the network would cut to commercial. Now he was naked to the full force of his audience’s rejection—of him, not of one of his characters. And according to his friend Bob Zmuda, it stung. “He loved his appearances on SNL, not only for the freedom and exposure, but for the feeling of security—almost of family—they gave him,” Zmuda wrote. “Though the cast had changed over the years, walking into that studio fit him like an old pair of slippers, and the loss of it hurt him profoundly.”

But, true to form, he never again appeared on the show that made him famous. Michaels took over again as SNL’s executive producer in 1985, which might have offered an excuse for Kaufman to return as well. Unfortunately, by then it was impossible. Kaufman had died of lung cancer more than a year earlier, on May 16, 1984, only 35 years old. (Some of his fans, conditioned by his pranks, wonder to this day if he faked his own death, although his signed death certificate certainly offers evidence to the contrary.)

His comedy has survived, diluted, in David Letterman’s unpredictable stunts and Stephen Colbert’s obvious glee over what he can get his audience to do (such as vote online to name a Hungarian bridge after him and sign a petition to get his name on the ballot in South Carolina’s presidential primary). But Kaufman’s unblinking commitment to genuine, heartfelt chaos—and his willingness to bomb in search of it—has largely disappeared from television. Viewers bade it a merry farewell the night Saturday Night Live’s announcer closed the broadcast with “This is Don Pardo saying, ‘I voted for Andy Kaufman.’”

—Christine Gibson is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.