I am an unapologetic Andy Kaufman fan. I say unapologetic because some people will say “I liked when he did such-and-such, that was funny, but I don’t like blah-blah-blah”. Not me. I love it all. Wrestling women? Yes. Reading “The Great Gatsby”? Hilarious. Getting up on stage and singing “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall”? I’ll take that and go back for seconds, thank you very much. Sorry, but everything he did was brilliant. Wait. I said I was unapologetic then I said I was sorry. I confused myself.
Anyway, the Onion’s A.V. Club runs a fantastic feature where they review classic SNL episodes one by one. This week features a clip of one of my all time favorite Kaufman bits. He starts by playing the bongos and singing in a made-up language. Then he segues into doing a stand-up routine, still talking total nonsense. He is masterful in the way he nails the cadence and body language of stand-up without any of the content. A lesser artist might have done this bit, but made the comedian terrible. Kaufman smartly chooses to make it seem like this routine might actually be pretty funny if we could understand it.
It’s just brilliant the way he says, um and uh and draws out the first words of sentences, just like you do when you are searching for the next thing to say, and how he quickly back pedals after presumably insulting a woman in the first row. You can’t understand a word, yet you know exactly what is happening. In a four-minute clip, he manages to satirize not just stand-up comedy and language, but ultimately the human condition. Plus, he’s pretty good at the bongos and he dances.
Yeah, this is about as good as it gets. And it’s pretty damn good.
http://www.avclub.com/content/tvclub/classic_saturday_night_live/mary
-Dan
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You are spot on. Andy Kaufman was completely unrestrained and WAY out there. He did not censor himself when it came to subject matter or presentation. He totally sold whatever he did.
I remember a TV special he did where he did a talk show parody and his desk was like 25 feet tall and the guest was having to crane her neck to talk to him. Every time I think about that, it cracks me up.
I love that special. He just understood the medium of television so well and subverted the expectations you don’t even realize you have.
When I first saw that special, I thought it was hilarious that the guest for the talk show part was Elaine Boozler, who just seemed like one of those random B-list celebrities, like Regis or Richard Simmons is to Letterman, but later I learned that Andy and Elaine Boozler were actually good friends, which is why she is on the show, and was a ground-breaking and pretty talented comedian and is unfairly forgotten now. I don’t know what the point of that story is, other than I shouldn’t judge people when I don’t know the full story.