Will anyone ever understand Andy Kaufman?

When I was a kid, one of the ways adults had to entertain us, in those pre-internet, pre-cell phone, pre-PC days, when all our games consisted of climbing trees to steal fruit, playing ball or chasing sardaniscas, one of the ways (I said) adults had to entertain us was to tell jokes or riddles – almost always jokes a little spicy for our age.

One of the sayings must have been repeated to me hundreds of times and consisted simply of the question “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”, which left us paralyzed, because we knew that every riddle that adults proposed to us consisted of a trick and the purpose of the trick was to emphasize our ignorance.

I confess my laziness here: I never bothered to find out who was born first. But from those days I still have an appreciation for those characters who always have a joke slipping out of the corner of their mouth, for storytellers, for the guys (at that time they were mostly men) who had the gift of, when they spoke, making an entire café stop listening to them when they came up with a funny story or a joke.

[the trailer for the documentary about Andy Kaufman, available on Filmin:]

In America, where everything is monetized, a variation of this figure has taken on the form of a stand-up comedian : someone who goes on stage and tells jokes, not necessarily popular jokes, but material that he or she has created. And I know at least one thing that came up earlier in my life: before I knew who Andy Kaufman was, through Man on the Moon (the excellent 1999 biopic directed by Milos Forman), I already knew that Andy Kaufman existed, when I read (in some foreign publication) that Man on the Moon , that amazing song by REM, had the aforementioned Kaufman as its subject. In my case, therefore, first came the song, then the film and finally the comedian. But, and taking a shortcut, I still didn't know who Andy Kaufman was until I saw the recently released Comedy and Chaos: The Legacy of Andy Kaufman , available for a few days on the Filmin platform – a documentary that seeks to answer the question that the comedy world has been asking for years: “Who was Andy Kaufman?”, or, more specifically, “Why was Andy Kaufman like that?”. There are never complete answers, but the doc at least gets to the roots.

If it occurs to you how it could have been so many years since I actually knew who Andy Kaufman was since I first read that Man on the Moon was about him, my only defense is that it was extremely difficult to get Kaufman material; as my obsession with comedians grew, I was able to get my hands on books and cassettes of Woody Allen stand-ups, or old VHS tapes of George Carlin specials , but nothing of Kaufman.

I knew a few things, at least from watching and reading about Man on the Moon (the movie): that Kaufman, more than just doing stand-up, kind of sabotaged his stand-ups, creating a kind of existential discomfort in people – people would go to clubs to see someone introduce the joke, set up the joke, deliver the punchline and then move on to the next joke, and here was a guy who would cry during the act, apologize for being shitty, or get attacked by an audience member.