Show Business: Laughter from the Toy Chest

Andy Kaufman, comedy's stand-up Pirandello

Awkwardness. Embarrassment. Gradual. . . shame. The eyes start to bulge. The body tries to move, but the feet stay still. He runs in place from the waist up. Perspiration starts to form on the upper lips. There is just the suggestion . . . yes . . . a smile. But it is camouflage, a thin subterfuge hiding disorientation, incipient humiliation, blind panic.

He tries to speak, manages a halting, coverall "Thank you very much" delivered in some unheard-of accent that sounds like south-of-the-border Maltese. Then he dives ahead, attempting another impersonation. Same accent. Same tone. Same delivery. Now the fear hits again, so bad this time that he forgets everything . . . and has to go back to the start of the act. He takes it all from the top. Already accomplice in his fate, the audience becomes part of his misery, both the reason and redemption for it. The man will not stop, either. Finally he bails himself out with a saving, dazzlingly accurate impersonation of Elvis Presley.

Andy Kaufman sheds characters like a cold-sufferer discarding Kleenex. He is not only this indomitable overreacher called simply "Foreign Man." He can be, as easily, a lowlife Vegas saloon singer named Tony Clifton; a heartsick yearner after a lost love from the seventh grade; a ringmaster for a kind of rainy-afternoon kiddie show, full of cartoons and silly songs. In all those guises, Andy Kaufman is a little like a stand-up Pirandello. But what adds particular piquancy to his lavish charades is Kaufman's adamant refusal ever to drop his own mask.

Kaufman's most familiar incarnation is also his most comforting, a benign extension of Foreign Man tailored for situation comedy and appearing weekly, under the name Latka Gravas, on ABC's smash sitcom Taxi. But Latka fans who sought out Kaufman at his frequent unscheduled appearances at comedy clubs or who checked out his recent concert at Manhattan's Carnegie Hall got something of a shock. Lovable Latka is there all right, but reduced to supporting status; his cute malapropisms ("America is a tough town") are cut entirely; only his accent, and the loony-tune vocabulary, remain to reassure. The concert was like a childhood Saturday spent with the strange little boy down the block. Kaufman takes skits out for random amusement like a kid pulling old toys from a chest.

"When I perform, it's very personal," Kaufman says. "I'm sharing things I like, inviting the audience into my room." He means this literally. The Mighty Mouse record he sings along to is his own, from childhood; the cartoons he shows—including a couple of kindergarten antiprejudice tracts—were long-ago gifts from his grandfather. "The audience," says his collaborator Bob Zmuda, 29, "is asked to become babies again." This is a sort of low-level exercise in primal manipulation that might turn precious, like a Steve Martin extravaganza of silliness. But Kaufman, whether he chooses to acknowledge it or not, is up to something a good deal more ambitious. He is continually questioning, then undermining the idea of what is funny. "Andy takes a lot of risks," Zmuda says. "What performer in his right mind would go onstage and deliberately bomb?"