Talks With Andy Kaufman

Was This Man a Genius?
Talks With Andy Kaufman
By JULIE HECHT
Random House

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Not Funny



"I just want the audience to have a wonderful, happy feeling inside them and leave with big smiles on their faces," Andy told me with a blank stare the first time I met him. "I can't help it if people laugh, I'm not trying to be funny," he explained. He said that he felt insulted when he saw reviews calling him a comedian. "I wouldn't mind being compared to Charlie Chaplin or W. C. Fields," he said sadly. "But I don't find most comedy funny."

People were surprised when they heard Andy speak on TV for the first time. He spoke with a foreign accent, but it was impossible to be sure what kind of accent it was, because it sounded in between Pakistani and Jamaican. Someone with the name "Andy Kaufman" was probably from New York, not Pakistan, and this made the accent even more mysterious.

"No one else would have me when I got put on Saturday Night Live in 1975," Andy told me when I met him. After the first show, when the cast appeared to wave good-bye, Andy wasn't there. The time he did come out, at the end of one of the later shows, he stood by himself and stared into the camera. He wore a gray hooded sweatshirt with the hood on his head.

"I wasn't trying to be funny," he said when I asked about the the sweatshirt. "I was dressed to leave and they said to come out onstage for the good-byes, so I did. This is what I really wear outside. I can't help it if people think it's funny."

It hadn't been easy to get to talk to Andy for the first time. "What's it for, some kinda movie magazine or what?" Andy's manager, George Shapiro, asked me over the phone from Beverly Hills. I explained what, but George wasn't impressed. "Yeah, well, Andy doesn't like to do these things, and he's gonna be very busy when he's in New York for Town Hall. But, listen, he's also gonna perform the same week at his high school, in Great Neck, and this is a great triumph for him, because he was so shy in high school. You can go out there and talk to him for a few minutes after the concert." I realized that a number of people in Beverly Hills spoke with New York accents.