Andy Kaufman Revealed! Read Online Free Page B

married, I was an
actor
first and foremost, so I approached her at the after-show party, empowered with the knowledge that I was doing my duty to my public. When she vigorously blew me off I knew I’d been had. Given the choice between punching Albrecht’s lights out and laughing with him, I chose the latter. It was a good decision, as we became very close friends.
    Chris and I talked a lot about acting. Eventually the subject all
real
actors discuss in their careers came up: when do we move to New York? Brenda would not endure the chaos of the Big Apple, so she and I parted, at least temporarily. It was a tough decision, but I knew that my destiny lay in New York, so I reluctantly said good-bye and rendezvoused with Chris in New York to assault the acting world.
    By late 1972, Andy had become the cause célêbre of the New York comedy-club scene as the vanguard of new comics arrived. The year before, Andy’s uncle Sam Denoff, a very successful television writer and producer, had introduced Andy to Carl Reiner. Thoroughly impressed, Reiner recommended Andy to his nephew and manager, George Shapiro. George saw Andy’s potential and helped him gain a foothold in the burgeoning world of club comedy. Though the clubs didn’t pay back then, they were great places to receive exposure if one hoped to move up to paying gigs or even television. Every night, Andy would borrow his dad’s car and shuttle between the two main venues, Budd Friedman’s the Improv and Rick Newman’s Catch a Rising Star. Andy’s act was impossible to categorize. Though agents and managers all desperately wanted him, they just didn’t know what to do with him. Imagine a man coming out on stage, eating a bowl of potatoes, then climbing into a sleeping bag and snoozing while an alarm clock ticks down. No one had ever seen such an act, and incredulous audiences laughed constantly for the twenty minutes until the bell rang.
    Some described Andy’s presentations as performance art before the genre even existed. Some were reminded of the late comic genius Ernie Kovacs, but, still, Andy was too edgy, too unusual to permit definition. Despite the local acclaim, Andy could not even afford to buy his own beers, let alone his dream beer-tap system. But the growing perception of him as a comic “artist” was compensation enough.
    Andy came to be known as a comedian, a categorization he would grow to hate, as he felt it didn’t begin to express the depth of his talents or the breadth of his vision as an artist. Though Andy would have accepted “con man” or even “bullshit artist” over “comedian,” he preferred to think of himself as a song-and-dance man. But the young “comic’s” evolving act encompassed a blend of the real and the unreal, often woven into a demonstration where some or all of what the audience witnessed did not occur. While the other stand-ups were simply telling jokes, Andy created a whole world for his audience — a world they were frequently unsure of. Andy was honing the birth of what I call Kaufmanism, his original interpretation of smoke and mirrors.
    Unfortunately for the acting team of Albrecht and Zmuda, the light of stardom did not shine in time to save us from squandering our savings as well as from losing our apartment. Soon we were starving and homeless, which was the real, unglamourous introduction to the entertainment business that most people don’t talk about. Luckily, Chris and I weren’t on the streets for long, as a kingly gentleman named Dick Scanga offered us a tiny salary and lodging in the back of his Upper East Side theater. Dick was not only best friends with actor Chuck Grodin but also the proprietor of the Little Hippodrome, New York City’s first dinner theater.
    Dick’s notion was that since Broadway shows were expensive and usually preceded by dinner, a thrifty combo would be just the ticket for budget-minded seekers of live culture. Unfortunately for Dick, New York theatergoers considered