Chapter One
Not Funny
"I just want the audience to have a wonderful, happy feeling inside them and
leave with big smiles on their faces," Andy told me with a blank stare the first
time I met him. "I can't help it if people laugh, I'm not trying to be funny,"
he explained. He said that he felt insulted when he saw reviews calling him a
comedian. "I wouldn't mind being compared to Charlie Chaplin or W. C. Fields,"
he said sadly. "But I don't find most comedy funny."
People were surprised when they heard Andy speak on TV for the first time. He
spoke with a foreign accent, but it was impossible to be sure what kind of
accent it was, because it sounded in between Pakistani and Jamaican. Someone
with the name "Andy Kaufman" was probably from New York, not Pakistan, and this
made the accent even more mysterious.
"No one else would have me when I got put on Saturday Night Live in 1975," Andy
told me when I met him. After the first show, when the cast appeared to wave
good-bye, Andy wasn't there. The time he did come out, at the end of one of the
later shows, he stood by himself and stared into the camera. He wore a gray
hooded sweatshirt with the hood on h ... read full excerpt from Was This Man a Genius ebook
