Prime Time
NO JOKE: The question remains, is Andy Kaufman really dead? His peculiar demise, as reported by the media (and we’ve been told by the media so many times that suspicion of the media is rampant nowadays that one feels a little out of it if one isn’t suspicious), had all the earmarks of one of his little jokes since obviously 35-year-old non-smokers don’t usually die of lung cancer.
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Prime Time
Creemedia
OH SURE
by
Richard C. Walls
NO JOKE: The question remains, is Andy Kaufman really dead? His peculiar demise, as reported by the media (and we’ve been told by the media so many times that suspicion of the media is rampant nowadays that one feels a little out of it if one isn’t suspicious), had all the earmarks of one of his little jokes since obviously 35-year-old non-smokers don’t usually die of lung cancer. In fact, 35-year-old three-pack-a-day smokers don’t usually die of lung cancer—that comes later, maybe. Also, celebrities, especially celebrities of Kaufman’s generation, don’t die without leaving a hookish moral behind for the Phillistines to bat around and what kind of cosmic comeuppance is lung cancer for a non-smoker into macrobiotics, no less? Like one of Kaufman’s best concepts it foils expectations, ravages cliches, upsets...
And that’s another thing. Of course it’s the civilized thing to do, to make nice-nice immediately after a person dies but the fact is that Kaufman’s popularity, always a tenuous thing, was at an all-time low at the time of his death. And as one who voted in the infamous Saturday Night Live phone poll to keep him on the show I resent all these folks who were either too dense or too dour to appreciate what the wrestling shtick was all about saying now what a wonderful comedian he was especially when he stuck to Latka and stuff like that (actually, being banned from SNL was a logical thing in the context of the ever-widening scope of one of Kaufman’s longest running gags— the one that involved him being rejected by his fellow performers on the old Fridays show, being assaulted by a fellow performer on the Letterman show, being rejected by the audience on SNL...).
Anyway, a month after hearing about his death I’m still not totally convinced it isn’t a joke. Sure they had a funeral, but that could have just been a coffin weighted down with old wrestling magazines. The problem is that Kaufman so rigorously adhered to the nouveau satirist’s tenet of “thou shalt never tip thy hand” that even if he isn’t dead we’ll probably never know. Besides, Kaufman’s legacy, as far as I’m concerned, is that even if I come to learn that he’s actually truly dead I still won’t be totally convinced that it isn’t, in some way, a joke. If you know what I mean.
☆ ☆ ☆
LIFE GOES ON, SORT OF: Avid fans of awfulness are advised to be on the lookout for a movie called (sometimes) Legacy Of Horror, currently available on TV stations around the country. Horror is the work of writer/director Andy Milligan, an auteur who’s every bit as out to lunch as the late, great Ed Wood, Jr. Andy’s climb to fame is a series of splatter costume dramas, and every line of dialogue, every editing decision, is informed by a total, unspoiled ineptness, making his movies a total delight. Only complaint is that, for TV, the celebrated Milligan gore moments, the film’s raison d’etre, have been cut. A reminder that TV censorship is based on the same premise as those block letters one finds on the back of shampoo bottles that say “NOT TO BE TAKEN INTERNALLY,” i.e., that most people are idiots. One doesn’t know whether to be insulted or just agree and move on to something else...like that Still The Beaver has spawned an upcoming cable series, no surprise now that the Beaver phenom has penetrated the mainstream. One notes that experts on talk shows and in the Sunday supplements are now explaining how the Beaver series is so popular in reruns because it represents the values and so forth of a simpler and better time, an annoying point of view given the fact that the Beaver revival was started mainly by people who liked the show because its representation of ’50s life was so fucking stupid and off the mark that it was funny. However, that there are those who believe that the series accurately depicts some lost golden age is not too surprising in a society where people have to be told not to chug-a-lug their shampoo.
