hygiene pets fashion fastfood toiletseats politics movies doc-torslawyers agentsshrinks conveniencestores hotelrooms airlinemeals sexdrugsandrockandroll—it was their time to say notice me and it began a rush, then an onslaught, wherein more and more of them kept coming forth to display their singular/similar attitudes. And if it were not for this being their time, it could not have also been his time, even though he did not do what they did. He was theater whereas they told jokes—but he belonged with them; there was nowhere else to put him. It was the only context in which he made sense, not that he made sense, not that he ever tried. So the others, the joke people, they always stood in the back of the room, whatever room, to watch what he would do next. To them, he was spectacle and mascot, not a peer; scant few of them could ever manage what might resemble normal conversation with him. He would not/could not drink beer with them or talk sports or chicks or news of the day with them; after his sets, he busied himself with the club’s supply of ice cream or chocolate cake, sometimes asking mommyish waitresses to spoon it into his mouth (“I had to feed him as if he were in a highchair,” said Zane Busby, who willingly indulged him at Catch. “Like here-comes-the airplane-open-the-hangar-doorrrrr!”). But they all watched him work—Robert Klein (revered elder statesman of young comics); Gabe Kaplan (bound for television sitcom); Jimmie Walker (also bound, who observed, “The foreign thing always amazed me because sometimes he actually communicated without speaking English…. People responded and you’d go, ‘My God! How is this working?!’”); Freddie Prinze (also bound); Richard Lewis (chief intellectual neurotic, who observed, “Andy was almost like Ionesco doing stand-up”); Richard Belzer (emceed at Catch, often helped lug Andy’s props into the club basement before shows, who observed, “I couldn’t believe the courage. Either consciously or unconsciously, Andy was challenging and educating audiences, stretching their imaginations…. He made other performers more daring—he had that effect…. He was a performance artist before the term existed”); and Jay Leno (attitudinal iron man, who observed, “Most of us thought he was very funny, but we worried that no one else would get him. We even felt sort of sorry for him…. He just behaved strangely, in order to get a reaction of any kind, even hostile. There were nights at Catch a Rising Star when he would lie onstage in a sleeping bag”). No comic ever wanted to take the stage once he departed from it, for he never left an audience the way he had found it—the room would be transformed, rendered giddy or dizzy or dumbstruck or irate. “It didn’t take very long to realize as a young comedian that Andy Kaufman closed the show,” said Lewis. “You couldn’t follow him unless you just ran around the room setting furniture on fire. I think he tried that, too. He was devastating in every sense, great but sometimes completely insane.” Of course, they all believed him to be crazier than they were; he believed it was just the reverse—but only whenever he gave it, or them, thought, which was not usually, not to be aloof no really.
So The New York Times came to take his photograph onstage at the Improvisation in May 1974—about a month after he taped his Dean Martin appearances and about a month before the appearances aired. He was wearing a feathered Indian headdress (his unspoken homage to wrestler Chief Jay Strongbow; he often wore it to and from the club, even on subway trains) and a yellow T-shirt with silkscreened palm trees swaying across his chest which was the sublayer of all other layers and it was the layer he wore when performing at conga the various “folk songs” from his home island of Caspiar to celebrate seasonal harvest. (One such song, “Aba-Dabbi,” was performed in native gibberish to the tune of “Alouette”—with perplexed audience sing-along always attendant.) And then the photograph was published in the esteemed newspaper of record on May 28—which could not have been more exciting—since his