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Andrew Geoffrey Kaufman  (January 17, 1949  May
16, 1984) was a New York-born American self-described song and dance man.
Though many refer to him as a comedian, Andy
himself hated this, saying I never told a joke in
my life. He is one of the most famous
practitioners of anti-humor. He was also a
composer. He graduated in 1971 from a now-defunct
Grahm Junior College where he studied television
and completed projects that informed his later
work.   

==His early work==
Kaufman first caught people's attention with a
character named Foreign Man in the early 1970s.
Foreign Man, who claimed to be from Caspiar, an
island in the Caspian Sea, would appear on the
stage of comedy clubs and perform a number of bad
impersonator|impersonations (Archie Bunker,
Richard Nixon|Nixon, etc). For example, he might
say in a phony accent, I would like to imitate
Meester Carter, de President of de United States.
He would then say in the same voice, Hello, I am
Meester Carter, de President of de United States.
Thenk you veddy much. The audience would be torn
between outrage at seeing such a bad act, and
sympathy for the hopeless Foreign Man, who would
cry on stage once heckled enough. At that point,
Foreign Man would launch into an Elvis Presley
impersonation good enough that Elvis Presley
himself would later describe it as his favorite.
The audience would realize they had been tricked,
which became a trademark of Kaufman's comedy.

Kaufman also made a name for himself on NBC's
Saturday Night Live, starting in 1975, as a guest
on the show. He would often do odd things, such as
lip synch to the Mighty Mouse theme or doing his
Foreign Man impersonation.

==Latka==
Kaufman later reprised his Foreign Man character,
renamed Latka Gravas, for the Taxi (sitcom)|Taxi
Situation comedy|sitcom in 1978. Kaufman hated
sitcoms and was not thrilled with the idea of
being on one. In order to allow Kaufman to
demonstrate some comedic range, his character was
given multiple personality disorder which allowed
Kaufman to display other characters.  In one
episode, Kaufman's character came down with a
condition which made him act like the character
played by Judd Hirsch.

On a few occasions, audiences would show up to one
of Kaufman's performances requesting to see Latka.
Kaufman would announce that he was going to read
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald to them.
The audience would laugh thinking that Kaufman was
joking. They were soon horrified to find out that
he was completely serious and would read the
entire book to them.

==Tony Clifton==

Kaufman's second most well known character would
be Tony Clifton, the abusive lounge singer.
Clifton began opening for Kaufman at comedy clubs
and eventually even performed concerts on his own
around the country. Sometimes it was Kaufman
performing as Clifton, sometimes it was his
brother Michael or his friend Bob Zmuda. For a
brief time, it was unclear to some that Clifton
was not a real person. News programs actually
interviewed Clifton as Kaufman's opening act. The
interviews would usually turn ugly whenever
Kaufman's name came up, because Clifton would
claim that Kaufman was using him to get rich. 

Clifton was, at Kaufman's insistence, hired for a
guest role on Taxi (sitcom)|Taxi, but after
throwing a tantrum on stage, had to be escorted
off of the American Broadcasting Company|ABC
studio's lot by security guards. Much to Kaufman's
delight, this incident was reported in the local
newspapers. 

In 1979, Kaufman performed in front of a Carnegie
Hall audience, which he later took out for milk
and cookies, via 35 buses that were waiting
outside. At the beginning of his Carnegie Hall
performance, Kaufman invited his grandmother to
watch the show from a chair he had placed at the
side of the stage. At the end of the show, his
grandmother stood up, took her mask off and
revealed to the audience that she was actually
comedian Robin Williams in disguise.

==Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion==
Kaufman grew up admiring professional
wrestling|professional wrestlers and the fantasy
world that they perform in. For a brief time,
Kaufman began wrestling women during his act and
was the self-proclaimed Inter-gender Wrestling
Champion of the World. He offered $1,000 reward to
any woman that could pin him. Later, after a
challenge from Professional wrestler Jerry Lawler,
Kaufman would step into the ring (in the Memphis,
Tennessee wrestling circuit) with a man —
Lawler himself. Lawler's ongoing feud included an
apparent broken neck for Kaufman as a result of a
Piledriver (professional wrestling)|piledriver by
Lawler, and a famous on-air fight on the Late
Night with David Letterman television show.
Kaufman and Lawler's famous feud and wrestling
matches were all later confirmed as a gag (or, in
wrestling parlance, a work (professional
wrestling)|work) and not real as many believed at
the time. In reality, Kaufman was not injured
while wrestling Lawler, and in fact, the two were
friends. 

Kaufman made ten appearances on David Letterman's
morning and late-night shows, including one where
he claimed to be homeless and begged the audience
for money, and one where he talked about his
adopted children, who turned out to be three full
grown African American men. Kaufman also made a
number of legendary appearances on NBC's Saturday
Night Live, until he angered the audience with his
female wrestling routine. The SNL audience voted
to ban Kaufman from the show for good, though it
was never made clear whether or not this was a
gag.

In 1981, Kaufman made a couple of memorable
appearances on Fridays, a variety show on American
Broadcasting Company|ABC that was similar to SNL.
Kaufman's first appearance on the show proved to
be the most memorable one. During a sketch set in
a restaurant, Kaufman broke character and refused
to say his lines. The other comedians were
embarrassed by the position that Kaufman had put
them in on a live television show. In response,
Michael Richards walked off camera and returned
with a set of cue cards and dumped them on the
table in front of Kaufman. Andy responded by
splashing Michael Richards with water. A stagehand
stormed onto the stage, leading to a brawl on
camera before the show finally cut away to
commercial. The entire incident was apparently a
gag conceived by Andy Kaufman, but how many people
were in on the gag (if any) was never made clear.
Regardless, Kaufman appeared the following week in
a videotaped apology to the home viewers. Later
that year, Kaufman returned to host Fridays. At
one point in the show, he invited gospel singer
Kathie Sullivan on stage to sing a few gospel
songs with him and announced that the two were
engaged to be married and talked to the audience
about his newfound faith in Jesus. It was of
course entirely a hoax. 

Throughout his entire professional career, Kaufman
kept his day job, waiting on tables at Jerry's
Famous Deli.

==Kaufman's death, rebirth and legacy==
Kaufman died on May 16, 1984 of lung cancer and
was interred in the Beth David Cemetery, Elmont,
New York  (Long Island). Over the years, many
people doubted Kaufman's death, thinking that he
staged it as the ultimate Andy Kaufman stunt. For
one thing, friends and family said that Andy never
smoked and lung cancer is rare in non-smokers, and
it is also rare in people under 50.  For another,
Kaufman himself even said that were he to fake his
death, he would return 20 years later, on May 16,
2004, a claim which has become urban legend.

Since the passing of this date, there have been
unsubstantiated reports claiming that Kaufman is
back from the dead and has
http://andykaufmanreturns.blogspot.com/ a blog
apparently chronicling his comeback. However,
these claims are highly questionable and are even
self-contradictory in places (on the blog he
contradicts the, now suspended, press release
which he apparently wrote and paid for himself).
Potentially dozens of fake Kaufmans were expected
to appear around this time and this appears to be
another example of urban legends inspiring real
events.

Another partly facetious theory making the rounds
on the Internet is that Kaufman got plastic
surgery to dramatically alter his appearance and
is a current-day comedian or celebrity. Usually
the celebrity mentioned is Jim Carrey, who starred
in Man on the Moon, the 1999 film about Kaufman's
life that was directed by Milos Forman, and
inspired by the 1992 R.E.M. (band)|R.E.M. song of
the same name. Carrey is a long-time fan of
Kaufman's and fought hard for the role, and even
owns Kaufman's conga drums. (Also interestingly,
he and Kaufman share the same birthday: January
17th.)  Additionally, Carrey's acting was
considered uncannily close to the way Kaufman was
normally, even according to Kaufman's friend Bob
Zmuda. (Incidentally, Zmuda was in Batman Forever,
which co-starred Carrey.) To support this theory,
parallels are often drawn from Kaufman's life to
Carrey's movies, which include The Majestic, in
which Carrey plays a man who loses his memory and
lives another person's life, and Me, Myself and
Irene, in which Carrey plays the white father of
three African-American males. However, even if one
were to discount Carrey's childhood as a
fabrication, he first emerged as an actor in 1983,
which is a year too early. More likely is that
Carrey's sense of humor was influenced by and is
similar to Kaufman's.

The rock band R.E.M. (band)|R.E.M. wrote and
recorded a song about Kaufman, Man on the Moon
(song)|Man on the Moon, for their 1992 album
Automatic for the People. The lyrics refer to the
conversation in his 1983 movie with wrestler Fred
Blassie, My Breakfast with Blassie. The song was
also used as the title track for Man on the
Moon|the film of the same name. The band also
composed the song The Great Beyond for the film.

==See also==
* Grahm Junior College

==External links==
* http://andykaufman.jvlnet.com/toc.htm Goofing On
Elvis: The Short and Extraordinary Life of Andy
Kaufman
* http://andykaufman.jvlnet.com/death.htm Andy
Kaufman's death certificate carcinoma, renal
failure
* http://www.andykaufmanlives.com/enrique Andy
Kaufman Lives!
* http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/kaufman.asp
Snopes' report on his 'return'
*
http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/1299/zehme/tra
nscript2.html Transcript: Andy Kaufman and Jerry
Lawler on Letterman, 1982
*imdb name|id=001412|name=Andy Kaufman