Mr. Andy Kaufman was a comic genius.

Kaufman was born in New York City, on January 17, 1949, the first son of Janice and Stanley Kaufman. He grew up in Long Island, New York, and began performing at age nine. He attended the now defunct two-year Grahm Junior College, in Boston, graduating in 1971. He then began performing stand-up comedy at various small clubs along the East Coast.

He first caught major attention with a character known as “Foreign Man”, who claimed to be from “Caspiar” and would appear on the stage of comedy clubs to play a recording of the theme from “Mighty Mouse”, lip-syncing one line—”Here I come to save the day”. He would proceed to poorly tell a few jokes and perform a number of lackluster impersonations (Archie Bunker, Richard Nixon, etc.). Some variations of this performance were broadcast in the first season of Saturday Night Live; the “Mighty Mouse” number was featured on the premiere October 11, 1975, broadcast, while the joke-telling and Bunker impression were included in the November 8 broadcast that same fall.

He might speak in a fake accent and say, “I would like to imitate Meester Carter, de President of de United States”. He would continue in the same voice: “Hello, I am Meester Carter, de President of de United States. T’ank you veddy much.” The audience would be torn between outrage at seeing such a bad act and empathy for the hapless entertainer, who would cry on stage once heckled enough.

At that point, Foreign Man would announce, “And now I would like to imitate the Elvis Presley,” turn around, take off his jacket, slick his hair back, and launch into an Elvis Presley impersonation so good that Presley himself described it as his favorite. Andy Kaufman was the original Elvis impersonator

After the wild applause that almost always came after his Elvis impression, he would take a simple bow and say in his “Foreign Man” voice, “T’ank you veddy much!” The audience would realize they had been tricked, which became a trademark of Kaufman’s comedy.

Kaufman first used a version of the Foreign Man character as Andy the Robot in the pilot for the sitcom Stick Around in 1977. The character was then morphed into Latka Gravas, for ABC’s Taxi sitcom, appearing in 114 episodes from 1978 to 1983.

The producers of Taxi had seen Andy’s Foreign Man act and, according to producer Ed Weinberger, “We weren’t considering Andy for the show before we saw him. Then we wrote a part for him.” Bob Zmuda confirms this: “They basically were buying Andy’s Foreign Man character for the Taxi character Latka.” Andy’s long-time manager George Shapiro encouraged Andy to take the gig. “My feeling was that it would be a nice boost for his career… and he would be playing a character that he knew very well, the Foreign Man – this particular character speaks poor English in Taxi and his name is Latka Gravas.”

Kaufman hated sitcoms and was not thrilled with the idea of being in one. In order to allow Kaufman to demonstrate some comedic range, his character was given multiple personality disorder, which allowed Kaufman to randomly portray other characters. In one episode, Kaufman’s character came down with a condition which made him act like Alex Reiger, the main character played by Judd Hirsch. Another such recurring character played by Kaufman was the womanizing “Vic Ferrari”. Latka’s wife in the series was named Simka, who was portrayed by comic actress Carol Kane. His role did lead to two Golden Globe nominations, in 1979 and 1980. His appearance on this show included a sketch of him supposedly rehearsing for a Taxi episode but ended up being a made-up gag sequence.

Taxi was an award-winning show with a large audience and Kaufman was widely recognized as Latka. On some occasions, audiences would show up to one of Kaufman’s stage performances expecting to see him perform as Latka, and heckling him with demands when he did not. Kaufman would punish these audiences with the announcement that he was going to read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald to them. The audience would laugh at this, not realizing that he was serious and would proceed to read the book to them, continuing despite audience members’ departure. At a certain point, he would ask the audience if they wanted him to keep reading, or play a record. When the audience chose to hear the record, the record he cued up was a recording of him continuing to read The Great Gatsby from where he had left off.

Kaufman was the comedic genius/inspiration behind many TV shows, movies, and songs, including:

  • The Dean Martin Comedy World
  • Dick Van Dyke and Company
  • Andy’s Funhouse
  • Andy Kaufman Plays Carnegie Hall
  • Dinah!
  • My Breakfast with Blassie
  • Man on the Moon (starring Jim Carrey)
  • Man on the Moon (by REM from their CD Automatic for the People)
  • Heartbeeps
  • Saturday Night Live (five appearances between 1975 and 1982)
  • Taxi
  • The Rodney Dangerfield Special: I Can’t Take It No More

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