Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [167]
ANDY: Well …
ZMUDA: You’ve lost all credibility. I’m just saying that you used to be an original performer, see?
And, of course, the audience felt embarrassment beyond any embarrassment ever felt for the pitiful Foreign Man when Foreign Man was new and innocent and lost. This was now the disemboweling of an actual life and career—and, whether or not what was happening was real, it was nevertheless all very true and all very profoundly true. What the room felt was hot sticky suffocating devastation and the man down in front of the stage did not stop—he attacked that stupid character Latka and called that movie Heartbeeps a piece-of-shit-bomb and said that Andy Kaufman would never make another movie because who would hire him now? And a guy in back, who was Pat Benatar’s uncle, who was an off-duty security cop, screamed for Zmuda to shut the fuck up and Zmuda told him to fuck himself and Zmuda returned to his interrogation and the cop reached for the gun that he kept in his boot and Rick Newman crawled over and grabbed the cop’s ankle and whispered, “Shut up! He’s a plant! This is a taping!” And Zmuda demanded to hear new material and Andy responded by doing the twist while singing booboobooboobooboo over and over and the audience laughed and Zmuda said that they were laughing only because they knew him from Taxi and Andy said, “I guess you’re right. I don’t have any new material. I don’t have anything new to do.” And the tears started welling and then came the little gulping sobs and Zmuda said, “See, now this is the old crying routine, the bombing.” And Andy stopped suddenly and said, “You’ve seen me do that?”
ZMUDA: Yes! Everybody’s seen you do that! Kaufman, look, call a spade a spade. You don’t have anything new to do. [Turning to the audience] As a matter of fact, that is why he hired me tonight to come here. Look—there’s a little mike on me, you see this? He hired me tonight to come here and criticize him, you know? See, today he was saying, “Zmuda, here’s what we’re gonna do … I’ll take my old material and I’ll call it Variation on a Theme….” The theme is the old material and the variation is that I’m told to sit here and criticize it. [To Andy] Well, it’s true. Am I being honest? Am I a plant? Be honest—am I a plant? Come on! Am I a plant? Is this another Kaufman put-on? Is this more bullshit? Am I a plant? … Tell the people … there’s a mike here. [To audience] Come on, you see it. There’s a mike, they sat me down here to do this …
ANDY: Yeah … [sotto voce] You’re not supposed to say anything.
ZMUDA: Fine, then just cut it out [of the tape].
ANDY: [s.v.] You just fucked up the act!
ZMUDA: Fine! Fine!
ANDY: [s.v.] You weren’t supposed to …
ZMUDA: Fuck you! Fffff—
At which point, on the tape of the program that was broadcast, there would be an awkward edit, as though something had happened and needed to be removed when in fact nothing had happened except the execution of Andy’s notion to make an obvious edit to suggest that something had happened—“It was planned that way,” said Rick Newman. “The public went crazy when the show was broadcast. HBO and Catch got hundreds of phone calls from people demanding to know what happened. We told them there was nothing to be discussed—‘We can’t tell you. Just leave it be.’” And when the program resumed, Andy said, “Ladies and gentlemen, right now I’d like to do my oldest routine, which I’ve done so much that many people are sick of it. Um … but I’m gonna do it anyway, and it’s my imitation of Elvis Presley. Thank you.”
Elvis, bewigged, hoarse, no longer lean or taut—it did not matter, really. Elvis cleansed the palate with familiarity, with “Jailhouse Rock.” People still hooted, if not screamed. Meanwhile, many people would consider Variations on a Theme—or whatever he wished to call this act of self-immolation—to be perhaps the most brilliant thing that he had ever done. In any case, he felt very extremely liberated afterward.
The brace finally disappeared. It itched.
New material: the Fakir, mystical Eastern wonder-worker/fraud. Wearing diaper