Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [69]
He jubilantly drove back to Grassfield Road sometime before dawn and wrote a note to his family while preparing his ice cream: Feb. 8 [really 9], 1973, Dear Mommy, Daddy, and Carol [Michael was now a Business major at Penn], I had a very prosperous day today. I auditioned at a niteclub of the type which I attended with Uncle Sammy in L.A. and was asked to perform tonite. The man who runs the show really understood my act much more than anyone else I’ve met in this business … and I’ve been asked to return this Friday and Saturday nites. Tonite’s show went well and Jackie Mason was in the audience. So it was a good day. And Mon. nite I am at the Improvisation and Wed. nite I audition at Dangerfield’s. So everything is going well. Thank you very much. (He had now begun closing all family correspondence with Foreign Man’s signature stamp of gratitude.) And that morning, while he slept, his parents scrawled at the bottom of the note, “Great! There’s nothing we like better than to see you have things go your way—Loads of good luck.” They also told him to use the car as he needed it, which he did. The note that he left them the following night reported further onstage prosperity and news that people from The Dating Game had called and wanted him to be on the program in two weeks, but he had told them that that probably wouldn’t work out, so they had suggested he call them collect before his next trip—So I made it after all! On Sunday, he performed again at Catch and wrote afterward, Boy, tonite was exciting. I met Doc Pomus, who wrote many many Elvis Presley songs and some Fabian songs and many more. He liked my act very much. It was almost as though Elvis had been watching him, he thought. He also reported that both Rodney Dangerfield (whose nearby Upper East Side club would audition him on Wednesday) and Jackie Mason were there watching him as well.
Then, on Monday night, he walked into the all-important Improv, where Greg Garrison would find him fourteen months hence and put him on the Dean Martin summer comedy show, which would be the break that preceded all other breaks that propelled him to where he needed to go. And Silver Friedman, wife of Budd Friedman, and possessor of certain mystical visionary powers, would remember his first steps into the club—“He was in a total state of discovery always. Everything he would look at, it was just as though he was seeing it for the first time. And so he stood there in the doorway, looking all around him—I mean, I don’t want to seem like too much of a witch—but I remember seeing a basement ceiling over his head, a low ceiling, and I saw carpeting and drums and him in this rec room … a den. He gave off a very strong energy. Then later we found out about him practicing in his Long Island basement all those years and I went oooooo!” And Budd Friedman would remember greeting him—“I said, ‘Where you from, kid?’ ‘An island in the Caspian Sea.’ Okay. So he went onstage and the people were sort of laughing—I didn’t know what to make of him. Until he did his Elvis and I just fell on the floor. Who knew there were no islands in the Caspian Sea?” And that night he wrote—Dear Mommy, Daddy, and Carol. They liked me at the Improvisation and I can come back, so I’ll probably be doing two shows a night—one at the Improvisation, and one at Catch a Rising Star. Thank you verr-rry much.
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To crack a nut is truly no feat, so no one would ever dare to collect an audience in order to entertain it with nut-cracking. But if all the same one does do that and succeeds in entertaining the public, then it cannot be a matter of simple nut-cracking.
—Franz Kafka,
A Hunger Artist
Like never before, this was their time. Those possessed of youth and hubris who stood alone with microphones, telling clubdrunks about their mothers fathers wivesgirlfriendsboyfriends lovetroubles neuroses ethnicities fears, sharing their Observations about life dating commercials