While the news media dutifully calls our attention to anniversaries of great historical import, they occasionally are asleep at the switch. Consider the 40th anniversary of the passing (I think) of Andy Kaufman, the self-proclaimed Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion of the World. This anniversary occurred on May 16th, and I must admit I overlooked it myself.
To those of tender years who are not familiar with Andy Kaufman, he is a difficult fellow to explain, to put it mildly. For lack of a better word, he was a comedian. Yet he asserted, “I never told a joke in my life.”
Kaufman’s sense of humor was to humor what theater of the absurd was to theater. He never thought of himself as a comedian but as a performer or an entertainer. Some observers classified him as a performance artist, but without the pretentious baggage that job description often comes with. Looking back on Kaufman’s career today, it appears he was ahead of his time. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he invented the concept of Clown World, but he certainly pitched the tent for it.
You might look up some of Kaufman’s old television appearances on YouTube and find yourself laughing without knowing why. Attempts to describe his appeal generally fall flat. As the saying goes, you had to be there.
Probably the most normal gig he had was playing an immigrant mechanic on the Taxi sitcom. He also made numerous appearances on Saturday Night Live (15 starting with the show’s premiere in 1975), but when Producer Lorne Michaels held an on-air referendum on whether or not he should be invited back to the show, the naysayers won. It only went to prove that his humor, if you can call it that, was not for everyone. Exhibit A was his series of wrestling matches with women, which attracted a great deal of attention but probably cost him the female vote in the SNL election.
Professional wrestling is many things to many people. It might be considered a staple form of entertainment by the lower class, trash by the middle class, and possibly a guilty pleasure or slumming by the upper class…if they pay any attention to it at all. Andy Kaufman, a fan of pro wrestling while growing up, was weaned on the likes of Bruno Sammartino, Haystack Calhoun, Killer Kowalski, and “Nature Boy” Buddy Rogers, his favorite.
Professional wrestlers, whether heroes or villain, violate just about every standard of middle-class propriety. Obviously, that alone would be enough to make it attractive to adolescents in training. What impressed Kaufman, however, was that the wrestlers always remained in character. While actors typically play a part in one movie, TV show, or play, then move on to another role, professional wrestlers played the same role forever, in and out of the ring. They were nothing if not consistent, and Kaufman appreciated that:
These guys are the real purists in show business. They have hair vs. hair grudge matches, spit on old ladies, taunt people outside on the street after the match.
A private detective hired to follow a wrestler might never once see him act out of character. Fans might suspect he would let his hair down somewhere, but it never happened in public. This brings up the concept of kayfabe. I defer to the internet definition:
In professional wrestling, the term kayfabe refers to the practice of maintaining the illusion that everything is real – including the scripted personas, rivalries, and storylines. This often extends beyond the in-match performance to other contests, such as backstage footage and interviews.
While it is easy to dismiss professional wrestlers as fakes, the wall-to-wall consistency of their characters also brings up the nagging possibility that they might have become the characters they portray. This particular approach to “acting” was in synch with Kaufman’s performances. The conventional comedian will occasionally step out of character in some sort of “But seriously, folks…” moment in support of his pet charity or some political candidate or natural disaster victims or world hunger. Kaufman never did that. As described by Bob Zmuda, his silent partner in comedy, “He would never break character – never, ever. Not in a million years.”
Kaufman, like the wrestlers he admired, was always onstage, which means he was never offstage, which in turn calls the whole concept of the stage into question. When Kaufman was ten years old, famed sociologist Erving Goffman published The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life which basically argues that everyone in every society is onstage, incessantly attempting to control the impressions of others. Of course, Shakespeare famously said that “All the world’s a stage.” If so, does the world have the equivalent of the theater’s fourth wall? If it does, can it be breached? Or is the concept of the fourth wall an illusion? Do theater and real life intermingle? Or are they merely two prongs of an artificial dichotomy?
All right, enough with the sophomoric musings…this ain’t no term paper. Let’s get back to pro wrestling.
In wrestling, as in movies and melodramas, the villain is often more compelling than the hero. And what could be more villainous than a man throttling a woman? Of course, there have been numerous female professional wrestlers over the years. Kaufman himself had a collection of 8mm films of female wrestlers. But the idea of pitting a man against a woman in a wrestling match has an element of absurdity to it. At least it did back when Kaufman was in the ring. Today, of course, it might be acceptable, even stunning and brave, for a trans woman to go to the mat against a biological woman. But none dare call it absurd. Not anymore. Clown World has rendered the concept of absurdity absurd.
The numbers of opponents Kaufman faced in the ring vary greatly. Bob Zmuda estimated 300. The first time was in April 1978 during a series of concerts in Tucson, Arizona. By 1979 it is a regular feature in his gigs. “Ladies and Gentlemen, I am here to wrestle tonight. This is not a comedy routine, this is not a skit. Okay? This is real! I am here to wrestle a woman!” His first match on TV was on the Saturday Night Live telecast of October 20, 1979.
Kaufman’s shtick was pretty much in keeping with conventional pro wrestling bluster: Say the most outrageous things that come to mind to rile the audience. Kaufman asserted that women belonged in the kitchen or that they were too stupid to defeat him in the ring. The men were not on his side, however, because he belittled them for having lost control of their women. The goal was to alienate as much of the audience as possible – to leave no fan untriggered. In one of his more inspired bits, he appeared to be defeated by an “offended” man, only to turn the tables on him after eating a can of spinach while the Popeye theme song played over the public address system.
At one match, Kaufman vowed he would shave his head if a woman defeated him and had a barber standing by just in case. The amount he offered potential challengers varied ($500 and $1,000 are the amounts usually mentioned), but he never lost a penny because Bob Zmuda was the referee. In case a challenger came a little too close to pinning Kaufman, Zmuda would take it slow with the three- count. Kaufman did lose one time – but with an asterisk. He was mudwrestling six girls at once at Chippendales, the famed night club featuring male strippers. It was strictly an exhibition and was not an “official” match.
Kaufman had as many as five matches in one night. He once sponsored a tournament of four husky females to see which one would face him in the ring. One of his bouts on Saturday Night Live was particularly controversial because his opponent was supposedly pregnant.
Bob Zmuda speculated that Kaufman’s love of inter-gender wrestling was inspired by his shyness around women when he was young. He also estimated that he slept with around a third of his opponents. Say what you will, Kaufman’s inter-gender wrestling matches were a novel way to get jiggy with the opposite sex in a hurry.
Adding to the zany atmosphere in the ring, Kaufman wore boxing trunks over thermal underwear. He was nowhere near as imposing as the bulked-up males who regularly appeared in wrestling matches. His nerdy appearance made it appear plausible that a woman could beat him, but Kaufman had more upper body strength than appeared at first glance. He astounded his 9th grade phys ed class by leading the group in chin-ups with 35. After watching his Midnight Special rendition of “It’s a Small World” (highly recommended and readily available on YouTube), it occurs to me that one needs to be exceptionally well-coordinated to believably portray a spaz.
With typical wrestling showmanship, Kaufman basked in the hooting and hollering his behavior inspired in the crowd. He would ask for a volunteer (?) who would jump out of the audience, and the bout would begin. After a brief struggle, Kaufman would pin his opponent, then arise triumphantly, arms raised, and prance around the ring. Profuse abuse ensued.
I think it’s safe to say this is another form of entertainment that would not be permitted today. The violence-against-women crowd would be all over it. Even the most dedicated wrestling promoter would wilt in the face of the demonstrations and bomb threats. And yet…
In more and more legit sports contests today we see biological men competing against women with the latter emerging with not just hurt feelings but hurt bodies. Kaufman’s matches can be condemned as misogyny but no women were injured in his farcical matches.
Lest we forget, in Kaufman’s day, no one was pushing quotas for women in physically demanding jobs with police and fire departments, or in the military or the secret service. When a woman got in the ring with Andy Kaufman, there was no such thing as grrrrrl power, no female empowerment, no Mary Sues, no DEI. Oh, there was perfect parity in every bout – one male versus one female – every time! Alas, there was no equity in the outcomes. Fixed or not, Kaufman’s matches were closer to biological reality than the pipe dreams of today’s egalitarian ideologues.
Speaking of reality, we should mention that Kaufman’s inter-gender wrestling matches might have been inspired by a real fetish. About the time Kaufman was just starting to make a name for himself, I was doing free-lance writing for local publications. I remember going to the office of one such publication to receive a check for a recently-published article when I noticed a stack of tabloids sitting in a corner. I could see it was not the publication I had written for, so I went over for a closer look. The entire publication was nothing but pictures of nude black men wrestling nude white women. There was no penetration and there were no erections, so it wouldn’t qualify as pornography. I don’t know what you would call it, but it certainly wasn’t the sort of periodical one would leave on a coffee table in the living room.
While the office manager was writing out a check to me, I asked him what the publication was. He said, “Oh, that’s The Wrassler.” Funny, I’d never seen it at the local newsstand. For all I know, this may have been just one riff on an inter-gender wrestling kink. Perhaps there were Asian/white, brown/black, black/Asian publications out there, along with niche markets involving midgets and amputees – consider the possibilities! This was almost half a century ago, but for all I know, these kinks may now be readily abundant online, maybe just a few clicks away. I can’t help but wonder if Andy Kaufman had seen a copy of The Wrassler or some variation thereof before he embarked on his inter-gender wrestling career.
Unsurprisingly, Kaufman retired undefeated. His record against male professional wrestlers was not so good. Famously, after taunting the crowd with some redneck and white trash baiting at one of his favorite venues, the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis, local hero Jerry Lawler cleaned his clock…or did he? Afterwards, Kaufman wore a neck brace for months but whether he needed it or not was debatable. The important thing was that fans ate it up. Whether they believed it or not was immaterial. Kaufman and Lawler got into an impromptu(?) re-match on the July 28, 1982 airing of The David Letterman Show. Was it real or fake? Who cares? It was a great moment in television history! Right up there with Lee Harvey Oswald getting gunned down by Jack Ruby! Say, was that real or fake or…well, let’s not get into that.
While fake news has become a common concept today, fake entertainment has not been called on the carpet perhaps because suspension of belief is an integral part of entertainment. Even given the preface “Based on a true story” no one expects a faithful adherence to the facts. To paraphrase George Orwell in Animal Farm, “all forms of entertainment are fake but some forms of entertainment are more fake than others.”
In a display of what feminists might call poetic justice, Kaufman, a non-smoker and health food fanatic, died of lung cancer at the age of 35 in 1984. His reputation as a faker was so good that even those closest to him figured it was all a practical joke. After all, he had often talked about faking his death. They guessed he would show up at his funeral and dispel the hoax.
He didn’t.
Then people figured he had gone into hiding for a period of time known only to him…10, 20, maybe 30 years…before he would triumphantly return. He was into Hinduism, so it is not impossible that he would have joined some religious community in a remote corner of the world. If he is still walking the planet somewhere, he would be 75 years old today. In other words, he would have been “dead” longer than he had been alive. Of course, a lot of people born in 1949 are still fogging mirrors, so he might be one them but, alas, too old to make a wrestling comeback; at age 75, he might legitimately lose to a female challenger.
The ultimate question regarding Andy Kaufman was “Is this guy for real?” The answer remains elusive. I can state, however, that he was inducted into the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) Hall of Fame. And you can take that to the bank!
The question remains, however, as to whether or not his induction was posthumous. To be sure, he wasn’t there for the ceremony, but was he still drawing breath somewhere on planet earth? If so, that would be after four decades of seclusion. If you despair of Clown World today and find yourself mumbling, “Andy Kaufman, thou shouldst be alive at this hour,” take heart! He might be!
If you start young enough, you can fake being dead for ten, twenty, thirty, even forty years – maybe longer if you have good genes and take care of yourself. In the end, of course, the grim reaper will not be denied.
In the meantime, if Andy Kaufman isn’t dead, he can fake it till he makes it.
