Watch rare footage of Andy Kaufman from 1969
Far more than simply a comedian, Andy Kaufman was actually considered to be something of an ‘anti-comedian’ and preferred to refer to himself as a “song and dance man”. After all, Kaufman refrained from telling actual jokes and once said: “I am not a comic; I have never told a joke. The comedian’s promise is that he will go out there and make you laugh with him. My only promise is that I will try to entertain you as best I can.”
Kaufman worked in small clubs in the first part of the 1970s and rose to significant fame in 1975 when he played his skits and sketches on the first season of Saturday Night Live. He famously went on to play the obnoxious lounge singer Tony Clifton and the professional wrestling antagonist Jerry ‘The King’ Lawler.
Some excellent rare footage exists of Kaufman’s performance from 1969 when he was a student at the Graham Junior College in Boston. He performs ‘Indignation’ Jones in a production of Edgar Lee Masters’ collection of short free verse poems Spoon River Anthology, telling the stories of the residents of the fictional titular town.
The book Lost in the Funhouse: The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman by Bill Zehme explains how the comedy legend managed to score a part in the TV production class. Zehme writes: “He became a stalwart among TV thespians in the innovative live-tape class productions conceived by Don Erickson, climbing into whichever personas were requested of him—he would somberly sing Jacques Brel dirges or issue grandiloquent soliloquies or pantomime street loon histrionics in sync to Top Forty hits.”
It was the Spoon River Anthology that looked to stick out in Erickson’s classes for Kaufman, though. Zehme went on to explain how he took to Masters’ characters with deft skill. “He inhabited several deceased lamenters who populated the ghostly town of Spoon River, Illinois, in Spoon River Anthology,” Zehme wrote. “A failed Broadway show based on a collection of woebegone poems by Edgar Lee Masters, which Erickson adapted for a class television project.”
Zehme continued: “He played a dead laughing guy and some dead old guys and a mystical dead guy and one dead extremely angry guy who spouted scorn through pursed and smacking lips that flapped and pouted under his thick-droop moustache (this was a very good look for a mean bastard, he thought).”
It wasn’t only ‘Indignation’ Jones that Kaufman played from Masters’ collection then, showing the excellent range that Kaufman undoubtedly possessed. From the footage below, we can see that Kaufman was far more than a mere subversive funny-man; he was a fine actor too, almost to the point of a thespian of yore.
