The Comedian Who Anticipated Our Reality-Bent World

You’re in a comedy club, and the guy onstage has gone quiet. He looks down at his feet, fidgets with the microphone, smiles a queasy, tight-lipped smile and, after nearly a minute of this, looks as if he might be about to cry.

His name is Andy Kaufman, and it’s 1977. Maybe you’re unfamiliar with him, or maybe you’ve heard he’s an up-and-coming comedian with a gift for prankish anti-bits. He has performed on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and “Saturday Night Live,” and he killed on those shows. But tonight, taping his part in an HBO “Young Comedians Special,” he has told one stinker after another, and the people who have laughed have laughed in the wrong places: at him, not with him. Other people have started to groan and boo, and Kaufman seems to be breaking down. “I don’t understand one thing,” he finally says. People laugh again, sure it’s a put-on, or hoping it is, because the alternative would be too embarrassing. He goes on: “No, seriously, why everyone is going booo, on, like, when I told some of the jokes, and then when I don’t want you to laugh, you’re laughing? Like right now.”

He continues to stammer, and then he’s sobbing outright, scolding the crowd through tears. “You really showed me where I’m at tonight,” he says, emitting a raw, ugly sound, like the honk of a sick goose: Heegh-heegh. “I was just trying to do my best heegh-heegh.” He keeps scolding and honking, but as he does, the honks form a rhythm. With one hand, then both hands, he begins to play bongos in time with the honks, shaping it all into a ridiculous song. The crowd laughs harder at this twist than they’ve laughed all night, and their delight seems mixed with gratitude — for this reassurance that Kaufman wasn’t really upset, for this slippery return to terra firma.

In the history of comedy, no one has shown a fuller commitment to cultivating silence, awkwardness, concern, bewilderment and vitriol than Andy Kaufman. Any comedian trades in misdirection on the way to the surprise of a punchline. But Kaufman, as much of a performance artist as he was a stand-up, saw misdirection as the main event. “I’ve never told a joke in my life,” he once said. Laughter was one among many responses he sought to engineer. “He just behaved strangely, in order to get a reaction of any kind,” Jay Leno, who worked the same clubs as Kaufman in the ’70s, has recalled. “Even hostile.”

Trading against his air of childlike sweetness, Kaufman scrambled the line between entertainment, tedium, self-indulgence and combativeness. For years, he assumed the persona of a snarling misogynist and wrestled women in clubs and on TV. Some of the women were plants, some were volunteers. Kaufman beat them all. This routine, along with his belligerent lounge-act alter ego, Tony Clifton, proved so unpopular that Kaufman’s manager feared it was ruining his career. But Kaufman, more interested in provocation than adulation, only dug in more.