![]() He’d taunt them with sexist trash talk first. And, towards the end, sour.” He wrestled mostly female volunteers, because he couldn’t wrestle that well, and because he liked wrestling women. “Because he had embraced a world with so much sugar in it,” Lorne Michaels once suggested in a GQ oral history of Kaufman’s life, “his comedy became much more astringent. It was about him feeling hemmed-in by Latka and by the show, which was a good sitcom but also a constrictive space for a restless talent. And in the last few years of his life he poured most of his creative energy into a quixotic second career as a bad-guy pro wrestler. After he was famous, he took a night job as a busboy at the Posh Bagel restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard, just to see what would happen. He had to find new ways to provoke and confuse while incorporating his growing fame into the gag.Īnd he did. Presumably the show’s success made it harder for him to mess with people in public without being recognized. He also stopped walking around with his tape recorder. Kaufman stopped doing Foreign Man once he became Latka. Latka was a version of Foreign Man that NBC ABC owned, and he never turned into Elvis, but sometimes he turned into a smooth-talking ladies’ man named Vic Ferrari. Kaufman’s transformation into Elvis revealed that Foreign Man’s sad, sweaty failure, his abjection, had been just part of the show all along Elvis released the audience from the discomfort Foreign Man had created, because if Elvis was the reality then Foreign Man was just a mask, and this was somehow comforting. Then he would announce that he wanted to im-ee-tehhht de Elvis Presley, and he’d turn around and do a costume change, and when he faced the crowd again, Kaufman would do his extraordinary Elvis impersonation, an Elvis impersonation even Elvis himself was said to have praised, and people who’d never seen the act before felt amazement and relief. Foreign Man, who hailed from an island in the Caspian Sea, spoke with a thick, unplaceable accent and did jokes and impressions so ineptly you began to feel bad for him. Latka was based on “Foreign Man,” a character he’d developed years earlier in his nightclub act. He amassed around 80 hours of taped material, but never got around to doing anything with it.īy the end of the ’70s, he was into his second season playing the immigrant mechanic Latka Gravas on Taxi. When people asked him what he was doing, he told them he was making a record, and that they’d be on it. Sometimes he’d just set the recorder down in a crowded room, on the off chance that it would pick up something interesting, and capture long stretches of wordless ambience instead. ![]() ![]() He’d record himself talking to his grandmother. He’d record phone conversations with women he was seeing, often antagonizing them just to see what they’d say. He’d record the moments of strange, often confrontational improvised street theater into which he liked to draw unsuspecting strangers. ![]() There was this period in the ’70s when the comedian and actor Andy Kaufman always kept a tape recorder close at hand.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |