Bob and Andy

State of the Art

by Nick A. Zaino III

Fifteen years ago, comedy lost one of its true madmen and pioneers when Andy Kaufman succumbed to lung cancer. Bob Zmuda also lost his best friend and the man with whom he had built an impossible career out of insulting celebrities and agitating audiences. It was all part of Kaufman's bizarre world.

Together, Kaufman and Zmuda created an act that disturbed or angered audiences as often as it made them laugh. Now Zmuda is trying to give new audiences a glimpse of that world with a book and a movie. In September, he released Andy Kaufman Revealed! Best Friend Tells All!, his account of the time he spent as Kaufman's head writer and best friend, from the early days at the Improvisation in New York City in 1973 to Kaufman's death, in 1984. He is also co-executive producer of Man on the Moon, a bio-pic starring Jim Carrey that's set to open on December 22.

These are just two of the many tributes paid to Kaufman since his death. On the one-year anniversary of Kaufman's passing, Zmuda did a benefit for the American Cancer Society, reviving Tony Clifton, the ultra-offensive lounge-singer character he and Kaufman had shared. That would become the blueprint for Comic Relief, the organization that Zmuda co-founded to produce an annual benefit starring Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, and Whoopi Goldberg to raise money for the homeless.

"Andy on his death bed wanted me to do two things," Zmuda says. "Write a book about him and make a major motion picture about his life. He was very fearful that he would only be remembered for Latka. That worried him more than dying itself."

Andy Kaufman left behind a puzzling legacy. A performer who started out in comedy clubs, he hated being called a "comedian" (he preferred "song-and-dance man"). He tried to use his popularity as Latka on the hit sit-com Taxi to get a network to air a special it was terrified of; and his fascination with wrestling -- to be more precise, his fascination with wrestling women -- nearly cost him his career.

All this caused many to dismiss him as a talentless provocateur or as truly insane. "He loved that," Zmuda says. "He loved if the press was saying he suffered from multiple personalities. He thought, `Oh this is great. They're buying this hook, line, and sinker.' " Zmuda goes on to explain that, unlike many performers, Kaufman prized the attention of his audience over its adulation. "Andy threw that premise right out the window. You're not there to have these people love you. That's not your job. You're an artist. If they want to hate you, that's fine. He wanted real reactions from people. He wanted people to question, `Is this for real?' "

Zmuda wasn't always convinced the likable Jim Carrey was right for Andy Kaufman. MOTM director Milos Forman had insisted that anyone interested in playing Kaufman make an audition tape. Carrey asked Zmuda to come to his house and see the tape before he showed it to Forman. On his way to the actor's house, Zmuda was already making up a speech to let Carrey down gently. "If somebody had given me this tape and didn't tell me it was Jim Carrey and said, `Oh we found this tape of Andy's that maybe you never saw before,' I would have thought it was Andy Kaufman. I'm thrilled with his performance."

Still, Zmuda hopes his latest efforts will dispel the idea that Kaufman was legitimately crazy. "What I wanted to show in this book was the method behind the madness. That there really was method, that Andy Kaufman wasn't out there as a lunatic but as a very calculated guy that markets himself to be perceived as crazy. The only way to show that is to show what really went on. Then you go, `Oh, I get it. He really wasn't out of his mind. I see what he was doing with this.' Andy's thing was to make us all believe that he was mad as a hatter."