Andy Kaufman

Song & Dance Man

Wrestling women, eating ice cream, "Nature Boy" Buddy Rogers, hamburger eating contests, Elvis, whore houses, Turko the Half Man, faking my death, Howdy Doody, Macrobiotic foods, Transcendental Meditation, Pro Wrestling, antibacterial soaps

The Great Gatsby

Fellini's 8 1/2, A Face in the Crowd, The Bank Dick, God Told Me To, Viva Las Vegas

Elvis, Slim Whitman, Freddy Cannon, Babatunde Olatunji, Oklahoma, Aba-Dabbi, Cash for the Merchandise, Cow Goes Moo

Howdy Doody, Superstars of Wrestling, USWA Wrestling

Currently I am, ummm, well, trying to lay low. It seems that
with all
the fakesters on Friendster, this would be the perfect place to
flourish as myself and still not be acknowledged beyond this
profile, which you no doubt think is phony anyway. So why
bother
trying to legitimize what is already believed to be a fraud?
For fun I
guess... Here are the basics:

I came from a nice family. I was born January 17, 1949 in New
York City. I spent my early life in Great Neck, New York, a
suburb
of Long Island. I started my creative direction at an early
age,
playing and dancing to records by the time I was one year
old. It
was as a child that I seemed to form my two most distinct and
defining traits. It's no coincidence that people referred to
me as a
fully-grown child. I did all the growing I needed to before
I was six.
At age four, I started performing for my favorite audience,
myself.
That's what gave my "comedy" its power, its character, its
beauty.
The fact that I paid no attention to the expectations of an
audience
is what made me such a revolutionary voice in the realm of
performance. In some respects, it's not what I did, it's
what I didn't
do, and what I didn't do was what made me laugh, not you. And
that's why it worked; I catered to myself, which meant I
catered to
only those who liked me. I didn't rant and rave, trying
everything to
make you laugh. I didn't come on like a big hairy dog,
begging to
be loved. In other words, I was not Robin Williams. I
understood
what it meant to be in the public eye and I understood the
fact that
people tend to be sheep. I recognized the fact that people were
going to laugh, even if what you were doing wasn't that
funny. As
long as you were supposed to be funny, you were, to some idiot
somewhere. I resented that fact, I resented that the
performer got
off so easy, simply because he was catering to the audience. I
didn't need the audience, or anyone, to feel whole. And I
showed a
hell of a lot more respect for my audience than any
performer of my
time (or any time) by giving them the chance to figure
things out. I
was not a comic dictator; I didn't tell you a joke and
expect you to
laugh. I allowed my crowds to run free though my mind. I gave
them the power to question reality and to wonder what was
really
going on up on that stage and out in the world. And that's
why so
many people found me annoying, pompous, rude, childish,
conceited, stupid, trite and so on. It's ironic that people
saw me as
an irritant simply because I trusted them enough to understand
and enjoy what I gave them, without me telling them. Maybe if I
had been an overwhelming demander of comic arbitration, then
people would have loved me. People would have spent years
singing the praises of the great comedian Andy Kaufman. It's
strange that things work in opposites like that, that common
sense
is actually uncommon. But I never gave into the comfort zone of
simplicity. I tried to expand the horizons of humor and make
things
more real, by making the fantasy of my stage persona more real
than reality. For me, questions were answers, and vice versa.

In the early 80's, I appeared on the Tom Cottle show to do an
interview. It was the only time I ever let my guard down and
gave
the TV world Andy as myself, without any strings attached. I
talked
about an event in my childhood that seemed to shape my psyche
in a strange way. Cottle was looking for some insight into
why I
was the way I was, and it seems as though he got more than he
bargained for with my honest and sad response. I spoke of my
Grandfather, Papu. My grandfather was my best friend when I was
a boy. I did everything with him. He was the only 3-D person
who
understood me. One day, I asked my parents where my
grandfather had gone. My parents told me he had gone on a trip.
In reality, he had died and my loving parents were afraid to
tell me
the truth, for fear of sending me into an early spiral of
depression.
Instead of going on with my daily routines of cartoons and
chocolate, I would sit in front of the living room window,
waiting for
my grandfather to return. He never did, and I never returned
from
the fantasy, from the lie that made the truth easier to
accept. No
doubt my perceptions were warped and my concepts of the
importance of real life were blurred by this event. I
learned that real
life didn't have to be real, it was all in your head. Of
course it is true
that I've always thought that critics try to intellectualize
my material,
when they couldn't be more off base. I just did what I
thought was
fun.

short, thin, blonde/brunette who likes to wear white
bra/panties
and wrestle.