“The fight with Jerry Lawler was an ongoing thing throughout his whole career. There was never a boring part of his career…” He made the audience feel awkward, weird, and some times even mad, just for the fuck of it. And this was his specialty, there was a lot of silence in his comedy, both by not doing anything or just simply doing something that’s not particularly funny at all.
#Andy kaufman elvis tv#
He made his major TV debut on the first-ever Saturday Night Live episode by lip syncing only Mighty Mouse’s parts in the theme song for Mighty Mouse, which is only three lines. He pretended to make TV shows in his room when he was a kid, and got his father to watch as he invited guests, sang, made jokes and hosted the show all together. “Just to clarify, Andy Kaufman has always been somewhat different. Curious as I was I checked into him, and not long after I’d stumbled into a new obsession. Well, somebody in a forum compared him to Andy Kaufman, and said that he might just be trolling everybody.
“I first discovered him in a time in my life where I was completely obsessed with Riff Raff,” Pen Gutt says, “and when people discussed on forums whether he was the real deal or just simply an act pretending to be a rapper.
While his Scandi upbringing is an influence, he’s also into philosophy books, Norwegian musicals, Japanese anime and a man he describes as “the father of performance art,” Andy Kaufman, an individual Gutt cites as the inspiration behind characters in his videos. Delivering hooks in indie-rapper sadboy fashion, he laces jazzy, languid beats inspired by Norwegian folk music with his native tongue. (It would finally be broadcast on the network two years after it was made–and draw better ratings than NBC’s Tonight Show, a fact that isn’t in the movie.Hailing from a quiet town in Norway, Pen Gutt doesn’t quite fit into the brazen incarnation of contemporary rap. In life, as in Man on the Moon, apoplectic ABC execs declined to air the special. The 90-minute program included segments such as Kaufman chatting with his idol, Howdy Doody, and renditions of songs such as “It’s a Small World.” As Kaufman’s co-writer Bob Zmuda reports in his book Andy Kaufman Revealed!, it also contained a few seconds in which the screen was made to deliberately roll.
In the film, Kaufman is given the special as an incentive for starring on Taxi, whereas in life, it was made a year before Taxi went into production. He was far more excited about the money ABC gave him to film his own special in 1977. As Man on the Moon correctly shows, Kaufman hated sitcoms and wasn’t crazy about the Taxi job: He eventually felt trapped by the “foreign” character that viewers adored. Always trying to purify himself through meditation and a strict vegetarian diet, he was at the same time addicted to chocolate and sex, and he often visited prostitutes.Īnd while Kaufman was desperate for fame, he deeply resented the vehicles that were best equipped to deliver him fame. Even though he was earning good money at Taxi, Kaufman took a night job as a busboy. A devotee of transcendental meditation, he was also prone to temper tantrums, and his stage personae–particularly the sexist wrestler–upset some fellow travelers (in life, as in the movie, the TM movement threw him out at one point). The film does a good job of capturing the contradictions in Kaufman’s personality.
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