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Quote[/b] ]The legendary comedian loved to shock, but rising from the grave might be too much even for him, says Emma Forrest
Tomorrow night, eccentric comedian Andy Kaufman is set to play a comeback show at the House of Blues in Los Angeles. It's a big comeback: he's been dead for 20 years. Since 6.27pm on May 16, 1984, to be precise. And it's that precision that has led the late provocateur's best friend, Bob Zmuda, to book the Sunset Strip venue.
According to legend, Kaufman swore that, if he wasn't really dying of an inoperable brain tumour at the age of 35 - and if, as many people have since suspected, he were faking his own death - then he would re-appear, 20 years later on the dot.
Zmuda has placed more than a hundred adverts in magazines and newspapers all over the world, reminding Kaufman of his promise.
The Andy Kaufman: Dead or Alive? show is selling fast. In death, Kaufman's cult has grown. He has become one of those disparate dead icons - like Jim Morrison, Che Guevara and Frank Zappa - whose poster adorns student bedrooms the world over. Andy Lives posters are the most popular Kaufman items on eBay.
REM frontman Michael Stipe, a long-time Kaufman obsessive, wrote the song Man In the Moon about him (in the video, Stipe does an impression of Kaufman doing an impression of Elvis - a staple of his act long before impersonating Elvis became a cottage industry). The song became both the theme to and the title of Milos Forman's 1999 biopic in which devotee Jim Carrey starred as Kaufman. There are over 80,900 listings for Kaufman on Google, many of them by conspiracy theorists.
Their hope finds its foundation in Kaufman's work. Abhorring the word comedian (It suggests, he said, that the audience has to laugh), he was more of a performance artist and practical joker.
Kaufman achieved a life-long dream when, after playing a sell-out gig at Carnegie Hall in New York, he took the entire audience out for milk and cookies after the show. Appearing on the first episode of NBC's Saturday Night Live, he did nothing but put a needle on a record and then mime along to the theme from Mighty Mouse for two minutes.
In his nine appearances on the show, he also introduced the character of Confused Foreign Man, a befuddled, non-specifically accented naif who, just when the audience were squirming with embarrassment, would segue into an immaculate Elvis impersonation.
Confused Foreign Man would become Latke Gravas on the long-running sitcom Taxi. While fellow cast member Danny DeVito was a close friend, others on the show, including Judd Hirsch and Jeff Conaway, resented the fact that Kaufman was permanently in character on set. One day, he broke character by turning up to work as his foul-mouthed lounge lizard alter-ego, Tony Clifton. Clifton was so abusive, he was thrown off the Paramount lot.
The dark side of the eternally child-like Kaufman also came out on Fridays, a short-lived ABC live sketch show he hosted. Once. Deviating from the script, he rambled and cursed so interminably that a flummoxed cast member - Michael Richards, later of Seinfeld - threw a a pile of cue cards in his face before the whole set became one giant fist fight. There remains much debate as to whether it was all a set-up that Richards was in on.
Bob Zmuda, the organiser of tomorrow's show, often dressed as Tony Clifton so that Kaufman, when in the same room as him, could prove that Clifton wasn't him. Zmuda, whose sense of theatre matches his best friend's, has announced that no one will be allowed to enter or leave the theatre for the last half hour of the show. Preceding that, comic Caroline Rhea and actor Paul Rudd, along with Lynn Margulies, Kaufman's devoted girlfriend (portrayed in the biopic by Courtney Love), will pay tribute to the star.
Rudd, best known as Phoebe's husband, Mike, in Friends, has had a Kaufman obsession for years. I think it would be amazing if he returned, he says. It would be one of the most legendary moves ever. I doubt it will happen, but I love that people are thinking it's possible.
Kaufman's was a benign madness, the equivalent of white lies, or what Kurt Vonnegut called foma - the harmless untruths that make us healthy and happy. And that's what is fuelling the excitement about Saturday's show. That and the fact that his comic timing was as much about extending the space before the punchline as the punchline itself. Twenty years sounds about right
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