i mean wrestling for one its theatrics 101 and wrestling women, did they really not get the joke?
that he was playing the bad guy for laughs, all of a sudden he's a loveable character, everyone knows he's a joker but he does a total change of personality and people believed now he really was a misogynistic sexist pig who really wanted to beat up women.
not a comedian playing up a character?
Wrestling wasn't that big in the 70's and early 80's. I don't even remember it ever being televised in that era. But anti-sexism was huge.
However, i think that Carrey played the part a bit more tongue-in-cheek that Kauffman did. I remember seeing the Merv Griffin show with Kauffman on it and it wasn't as "playful" as Carrey made it out to be.
Frankly, as I remember it, it appeared to be a more sad, pathetic and desperate grasp as fame.
It's not like he was a reknowned comedian in American living rooms. He was Latka and he did a stint on SNL. That was the extent of Andy Kauffman to 90% of Americans. Had he built a stronger reputation, put out comedy albums like Steve Martin or George Carlin, gotten more TV standup gigs, then he might have been better received.
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Trouble was the "act" wasn't as funny as it was just obnoxious and had a definite vibe of trying too hard, for me at least.
There was a line in the movie that summed it up very well--something about "who are you trying to entertain?"
Andy was having a lot of fun with it but the audience wasn't.
Kaufman was always hit-or-miss. I remember seeing the Fridays bit where he stoppped the skit dead--it was weird, but it wasn't very funny.
Andy sometimes forgot or didn't care he was supposed to entertain the audience and took the put-one-over-on-the-audience schtick too far. Andy's bad guy wrestler wasn't likeable or appealing--it wasn't that the audience thought this was the real Andy. It just wasn't a very funny Andy.
This movie does a pretty good job of telling his story, but nothing compares to having seen his rise and fall as it happened. He was pretty much a has-been (fall from SNL was a very sad spectacle) by the time his cancer became known, and I don't recall much speculation as to "is this another prank by Andy?" in public anyway. I remember thinking it was just a sad end to his life, and that Andy wouldn't use cancer as part of an act.
As weird as he was, that was a line I think he had the good taste and decency not to cross--I never thought it was anything other than he really had cancer.
There are lots of people that nuts though. I mean take a look at Victoria Jackson who on paper you'd swear would have to be pulling some Andy Kaufman routine, only she's not.
shareI remember watching some of this at the time so let me give you my perspective. This may get lengthy so bear with me. I wondered for over 20 years if the incident on Letterman where Jerry Lawler slapped Andy out of his chair was real.
Andy wrestling women was obviously an act, but even as a fan I didn't find it entertaining. The problem was it simply wasn't funny (I've read that Andy liked doing it because he got a sexual charge out of it).
Most people (myself included) knew that pro wrestling was "fake". But it was also well known that if someone approached a pro wrestler and said that it was fake, the traditional response was for them to put you in a headlock or something and say "Is that fake, huh?". It was a way of protecting the business. This type of thing stopped later after John Stossel sued the WWF after David Schultz attacked him when he said wreslting was fake.
Kaufman's battles with Jerry Lawler took place in Mid-South Wrestling, which was based in Memphis. Mid-South wrestling was only broadcast locally, not nationally. So most of us missed how the feud played out. Had I been watching, had I known the whole "storyline", I would have realized it wasn't real.
From what I had heard, Lawler didn't like Kaufman bullying women and found it offensive. I knew they had some sort of match which ended when Lawler put him in a piledriver. Now here's Andy's brilliance: He went on TV and threatened to sue, complaining because he said there are ways to put someone in a piledriver where it isn't supposed to hurt, but Lawler had intentionally hurt him. This made sense if you believed Lawler was offended by Andy bullying women and maybe not respecting wrestling.
Add in the fact that I didn't see everything Andy ever did, I didn't know about the Fridays incident for example. So the Lawler slap on Letterman looked real to me. But I wasn't sure. It wasn't until years later when I saw the "I'm From Hollywood" documentary showing footage of the Mid-South shows and the entire feud that I realized it wasn't real.
I can't speak as to if people believed it was real or an act back in the day but I can say it was a different time back then. When most people thought they could trust what celebrities and politicians were saying. There were not many people who questioned things, and those who did really did not have a forum to present their disbelief like we have with the internet. Prime example of how people's trust in what we hear has changed in just the last decade. 1999 Blair Witch Project is released as a 'true story'. Although, I did not believe it, there were many who did. It was the first movie (that I know of) to claim to be 'based on true events' that was completely fabricated. Now days though, nearly ever horror movie claims to be based on actual events. The line has been thrown around so much that it has lost all meaning when it comes to horror movies.
But as for Andy, I believe the fact that he was so good at acting the part... plus he would really get under the skin of his fans with his many other antics over the years... they could see him being a misogynistic sexist pig. I mean, one of the most beloved celebs from that era, Sinatra, was said to be the biggest sexist pig in the industry. But back then, that was just the status quo. If not that, then they may have thought he was having a mental breakdown. I mean, how many people 10 years ago would think the 'great' Mel Gibson would have fallen as much as he has in resent years?
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I'm thinking, can anyone name famous wrestlers from the 70's- in the pre-Hulk Hogan era?
I honestly think it's the doll-makers with an excess of "He-Man" dolls that promoted wrestling to what it became in the 80's.
I remember watching Henry Winkler play Gorgeous George in a movie back in the 70's, and even that couldn't help the "sport". Hell, I'm not even sure the homosexual community got in on it. Wrestling itself was just a sad, pathetic farce in an era where such farcical entertainment wasn't that big.
So the stint on Griffon just looked like the same old sad, pathetic farce...x2 because it was a guy wrestling a girl which was basically a "battle of the sexes" that had already been done and upstaged by the King/Riggs tennis match of '73. So not only was Andy a has-been. He was doing a has-been sport and doing a has-been stunt.
It really just came off as pathetic.
Morgan Freeman will outlive Chuck Norris- he's the only one who can deliver the eulogy
Without cheating by using the googles, I recall Moose Cholack, BoBo Brazil, Dick The Bruiser, The Sheik,and I think Andre the Giant was around before WWF became big in the 80s. I remember watching it on Sunday mornings on a UHF station out of Chicago, maybe ch 44 or 32. We used to call it the 'phony fights' in our little circle of friends in grade school.
Love's turned to lust and blood's turned to dust in my heart.
The very fact that it was on an upper-echelon UHF channel just solidifies my point that it wasn't that big of a deal in the 70's. it might have been bigger in other regions (though I question the supposed size of the audience shown for Andy's first encounter with Lawler), but on the West coast, it was barely a blip on the radar.
Speak louder, Mr. Hart! Fill the room with your intelligence!
No one did this kind of stuff. Or no one committed to it the way Andy did. A fair number of his pranks wren't revealed as pranks until much later. His feud with Jerry Lawler wasn't revealed as a set until after Kaufman had died.
Plus, wrestling revolves around characters like what Andy portrayed. It's called being "the Heel", you break rules, cheat, and do everything to piss off the audience, rile them up, then the hero ("The Face") charges in, beats you up, and the crowd goes wild. Everyone knows it, but it never fails.
Just because it was an act doesn't mean Kaufman wasn't really a misogynist misanthrope who hated pretty much everybody. Hard to know. People are complicated.
Kinda like the scene in the movie where Kaufman acts like a naive manchild being brought to the prostitutes and we later learn he was already a regular customer.
What better scam on the human race than to pretend to be an innocent who is pretending to be a jerk all so you can do all the nastiest things you ever wanted to do and get paid for it. Perhaps his years of Latka were just paying the dues so he could do what he really wanted in his later years.
He truly lived the life of a performer.
shareAndy was so serious and relentless with pro wrestler Jerry "The King" Lawlor when I was a little kid I thought it may have been real. Back then pro wrestling still wanted to appear to be a legitimate. They referred to keeping up the illusion of reality as kayfabe. Rassln' is real ... real entertaining.
shareUnless the audience was made up largely of actors, of course a satisfactory amount thought it was real. One of the great things about Kaufman's put-on was the energy he was able to draw from the audience, his act propelled forward whether reactions were positive or negative. Whether savvy commenters in this thread knew it was fake at the time, plenty of electricity and entertainment value remained in observing that many audience members did believe.
shareAndy kaufman was a performance artist not a comedian.What he did was he put people on.He made them question what was going on was real or not .People for the most part judge a book by its cover .He played off this expectation ,he knew the audience's first impression was to look at him a certain way.Just when they thought they had him figured out he'd fool them. He challenged their realities constantly.People just learn to except what is they never question their reality .
"What's real? What's not? That's what I do in my act, test how other people deal with reality"
My friends Aunt who is in her 70's says she HATES Andy Kaufman because of his views on women. I tried to explain to her it was an act but she wasn't hearing it. Also now a days wrestling commercials will say "this is entertainment" or that it's "choreographed" but back then lips were shut tight about it being "not so real" if a guy was a heel that's how he must have been in real life and vice versa.
I wish I can go back in time and pinch those chubby little cheeks and tell you nothing will be ok.