Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [22]
“… With a C,
And an O,
And an N,
And an F,
And an I,
And a D,
And an ENCE!
Put ’em all together and what have you got?”
How the act came together: He learned to play the guitar from a friend named Charlie—the simplest chords, really, so as to be able to strum with minor proficiency—and this helped greatly. Also, Mommy had forced piano lessons on both him and Michael and they drove their teacher crazy, actually once made the poor guy cry, which was fun, but he did pick up the basics of the keyboard. So he would sit at the piano in the living room where Mommy always played and sang her music and he plink-plunked until he came up with a little melody of his own and made it a song about animals and the noises they made, which he could maybe have the young children sing along with him. (“Say! I’ve got an idea! Let’s all sing the song together!”) He could play it on the guitar, too, in case there wasn’t a piano in somebody’s house. Ohhhhhhhh—it began—hhhhhhhhh, the cow goes moo and the dog goes woof and the cat goes meow and the bird goes tweet and the pig goes oink and the lion goes roarrrrr and that’s the way it goes! The idea was to get the kids to make the noises (“This time I’ll sing the name of the animal and you sing what the animal says, okay? Okay? Every time I say okay, everybody say okay, okay?”), since everybody liked doing that with “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” which he had practiced on the phonograph in the den, using the big orange record with the Humpty Dumpty label that Grandpa Paul had given him long ago. It was a funny old version of the song sung by the ensemble of Billy Williams and his Cowboy Rangers, in which a bunch of western galoots took turns doing the animal sounds as directed by Mr. Billy, who did the chickchick part himself and then Little Tex did the quackquacks and Joe did the gobblegobbles and Eddy did the oinkoinks and Gabe finished off with the moomoos. He practiced all the different parts, which he knew well anyway, then decided that he would be Mr. Billy (moving his lips in perfect synchronization with the record) and have children at parties come up and play the other cowboys while he comically pulled them back and forth as they pantomimed their parts. He nervously tried it out at one party in the neighborhood and it all worked like a charm and everyone clapped along and loved him—and laughed at how silly the whole exercise looked. (The production became even funnier once he began wearing a straw farmer’s hat.) He showed the Little Rascals film (Hide and Shriek) and old cartoons (Thomas Jefferski, about racial tolerance, was a favorite) and scary bits of The Creature from the Black Lagoon for good measure and then got the musical chairs going and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, too, and did some magic with intentional ineptitude (the Ball Cup and the Mummy Case were always good for bad close-up) so the children could gigglingly try to foil him and deduce his (fumbling) sleight of hand, which was the best part of any trick anyway. Sometimes, for added novelty, he brought along a big reel-to-reel tape recorder (Grandpa Paul got it) on which he would record every kid’s voice, then play it back and make them all happily cringe. He always left his drum at home, however, because the drumming was kind of a private thing that sort of helped him to feel brave and not so shy, which was essential if he was going to be performing in front of people, even such small people.
The business began—once he had really decided that it was, in fact, a business—by word of mouth. It was a very occasional enterprise at first, starting really in his tenth year. But he was adamant about his own professionalism and showed uncommon poise when he took control of a party, summoning depths of adrenaline to combat all shyness. (Still, he preferred that the adults leave when he began