Show Business: Laughter from the Toy Chest

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This is not everyone's idea of a barrel of laughs. Which is part of the point. Like a more controlled and benign version of a happening, Kaufman's show engineers a guerrilla takeover of comic consciousness. "I try to please people, to give them a good time," Kaufman says. "But I refuse to make my act conform to traditional show-biz standards of entertainment." Presumably unaware of this, ABC gave Kaufman $100,000 for a 90-minute special of his own. The result began with Foreign Man urging viewers to turn off their sets, went on to include an interview with Howdy Doody and a variety spoof called "The Has-Been Corner." The show is altogether some of the best and most dazzling comedy done for television—but it remains unaired, deemed too avant-garde by network executives. "They said it was brilliant, like Ernie Kovacs," Andy recalls. "I never saw Ernie Kovacs, but I understand that's a compliment."

Indeed, like the TV special, much of Kaufman's work seems like an open rebuke to show-biz standards. The Carnegie Hall show featured a bunch of performing moppets called the Love Family, who bounded onstage, delivered glutinous renditions of execrable standards like The Impossible Dream and soon had the audience applauding in mockery, booing and calling for mercy. "When I bring out my performers, people think it's a put-on," Kaufman complained to TIME'S Elaine Dutka after the show. "The critics try to intellectualize my material. There's no satire involved. Satire is a concept that can only be understood by adults. My stuff is straight, for people of all ages." So straight that backstage, the Love Family burst into tears at their reception, and Kaufman was criticized in reviews for "cruelty," a charge that particularly rankles. "The Love Family is great," he insists, surely sincere. What makes Andy Kaufman great is his unassumed childishness, and cruelty, acknowledged or not, is as much a function of childhood as innocence.

At 29, living alone in Los Angeles' Laurel Canyon, drinking carrot juice and gobbling ice cream, Kaufman is still very much the kid who locked himself in his room and never came out. In conversation he retains the wary vulnerability of the shy boy who shook with fright every day at camp before his name was called at roll. "My mother sent me to psychiatrists since the age of four because she didn't think little boys should be sad," Kaufman reports. "When I was two, and my brother was born, I stared out the window for days. Can you imagine that?"

Raised in an upper-middle-class family in Great Neck, just outside New York City, Kaufman put on playground shows for schoolmates, appeared at neighborhood birthday parties with a pint-size extravaganza—comedy, cartoons, magic —that could have been an early rehearsal for Carnegie Hall. During his days at Grahm Junior College in Boston, a course in transcendental meditation eased him into performing at amateur nights and clubs like the Improvisation in Manhattan. There he would appear, often as the Foreign Man, and embarrass everyone with his desperate comedy and maladroit impressions, then let them in on the joke by launching into his superlative Elvis.