Man on the Moon

No comedian ever tried harder to make an audience not laugh than Andy Kaufman. Most comedians consider silence the kiss of death, but for Kaufman, it was just another weapon in his arsenal, an instrument he knew how to play better than any other. There’s no doubt he knew how to entertain — his stint on Taxi and his endlessly rehashed Elvis imitation are evidence of that. But Kaufman’s most famous routine, his lip-synching to the Mighty Mouse theme on Saturday Night Live, is in some respects a study in just how little you need to do to get a laugh. Standing almost motionless, with only a nervous jitter in his eye, Kaufman waits through the entire verse before eagerly mouthing the chorus — "Here I come to save the day!" — and then falling silent again, once sipping from a glass of water when the wait becomes too long.

Kaufman’s SNL appearance, his first exposure to a national audience, was a prototype for what was to come. Like the comic equivalent of John Cage’s 4’33", Kaufman’s on-stage inaction turned the audience into the real show, attacking the boundary between what was performance and what was not. Whether reading aloud from The Great Gatsby (sometimes in its entirety) or embarking on a bizarre quest to become the World Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion, Kaufman refused to tell his audience what was supposed to be funny and what wasn’t. In order to appreciate Andy Kaufman’s unique brand of humor, you have to enjoy laughing at your own bafflement.

Man on the Moon gets this wrong about five minutes in, and it’s a mistake from which the movie never recovers. After a brilliant prologue (which I’ll come back to in a moment), the film whisks us through Kaufman’s Long Island childhood and deposits us on the stage of the Improvisation, where he’s doing his famous Foreign Man/Elvis bait-and-switch. Entering as his squeaky-voiced Foreign Man character (which he later commercialized as Taxi’s Latka Gravas), Kaufman shuffles nervously toward center stage and begins doing a series of the worst impressions anyone has ever heard — Jimmy Carter, John Wayne, none of them any different than his "normal" speaking voice. When he announces his plan to do "dee Elvis Presley," the audience chuckles, as it has to: How on earth could this talentless buffoon ever incarnate the King of Rock ’n’ Roll? But he turns his back to the audience, and when he swivels around again his gyrating hips and perfectly twitching lip tell the audience exactly how much of a fool they’ve been played for.

As shot by director Milos Forman, the mistake in the scene is simple: reaction shots. While Kaufman made hay out of an audience’s discomfort, Forman keeps cutting away from Carrey to show us laughing people in the Improv audience. It’s like having someone in the next seat reach over and nudge you: "See, he’s funny." After the show, Kaufman’s future manager George Shapiro (Danny DeVito) meets him backstage, and a minute later he’s telling him, "You’re insane, but you might be a genius."

If Andy Kaufman stood for anything, it was for letting audiences make up their own minds — forcing them to, in fact. But Forman, whose rep as a great director continues to mystify me, isn’t nearly so trusting. In every way, the film keeps telling you: Andy Kaufman was a genius, and the people who didn’t like him were buffoons. Not only is this intensely patronizing, but it effectively undercuts everything the movie is supposed to be about.

The introduction is about the only part Man on the Moon really gets right. Shot in black and white, it features a skittish Foreign Man warning the audience to go home because the movie is "so stupid." "We had to cut out the baloney," he explains, "so now the movie is much, much shorter. In fact, this is the end of the movie." Then, after walking off and leaving us with a blank screen, Foreign Man returns and congratulates the audience for staying — turns out the earlier bit was just a ruse to get the squares out of the room.

When I first heard Jim Carrey was going to be playing Andy Kaufman, I was instantly excited. There’s no question that Carrey is among the most brilliant comics of his generation, but he too often gets sidetracked into toothless entertainments which mine his talent for physical goofiness without touching the reservoirs of deeper, more malicious humor that lie beneath. It’s surely no coincidence he followed the scabrous box-office dud The Cable Guy — one of the best movies of the ’90s — with the dull, crowd-pleasing Liar Liar. Kaufman, as much provocateur as comic, seemed the perfect role to draw out Carrey’s fascinating dark side, and indeed, the stories circulated about his on-set behavior indicate he thoroughly submerged himself in the role. (Among them, that Carrey would frequently dress up as Tony Clifton, Kaufman’s anti-social lounge singer persona, rub himself with Limburger cheese until he stank, then get as close as possible to anyone who wasn’t wise to his tricks.) But that kind of without-a-net acting rarely shows up on the screen here. In Man on the Moon, Kaufman’s writer and accomplice Bob Zmuda (Paul Giamatti) lays out the plan for Kaufman’s future career: "You make them love you now, and later, you can fuck with their heads." Man on the Moon never gets past the first part of that formula.

It’s worth pointing out that of the three screen biographies scripted by Moon writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, Ed Wood is the only one that comes close to succeeding, and it does so because Tim Burton put some of Wood’s boundless energy into his own movie. But just as Forman took the sleaze out of The People vs. Larry Flynt, not understanding that Flynt could be a First Amendment martyr without being a particularly nice guy, so he takes the confrontation out of Andy Kaufman. It’s not that we never see Kaufman confronting anybody; the film revisits most of the major events in Kaufman’s career, like his semi-staged feud with professional wrestler Jerry Lawler and the brawl on the set of the sketch comedy show Fridays. But Man on the Moon never confronts us, never leaves us wondering what’s real and what isn’t, and without that aspect of Andy Kaufman’s art, we might as well be watching a biography of Denis Leary or Steven Wright.

For whatever reason — stunt casting, most likely — Forman casts many figures from Kaufman’s life as themselves, from Lawler to the cast of Taxi (Tony Danza is notably absent) to David Letterman and Lorne Michaels. But the main attraction is Carrey’s performance, and sad to say, even that disappoints. He’s certainly got the anti-social part of Kaufman’s character down (although he doesn’t seem quite sadistic enough), but where you’d see a kind of blissed-out hippie innocence in Kaufman, Carrey radiates childish irresponsibility; he’s an imp instead of a Buddha. Kaufman had a way of seeming completely uncalculated, where Carrey can’t resist showing you the puppet strings. It’s hard to imagine Carrey waiting years to deliver a punchline, as Kaufman did with his extended dalliance in the wrestling ring.

Perhaps the real problem Man in the Moon comes up against is that Andy Kaufman is fundamentally inexplicable. Even the people who knew him best seem to have been baffled by him, and his work certainly stands as a testament to his desire to place himself beyond the bounds of psychology or logic.

There’s a perfect moment at the end of Sound Stage, Kaufman’s 1983 PBS special, which shows how far he was willing to go to avoid being explained. After beginning the show with the end credits, where Kaufman waves goodbye while talking inaudibly underneath the theme music (à la TV newscasts), the show ends with the same credits, but this time Kaufman’s voice is clearly audible (although he supposedly doesn’t know it). Launching into a rant against the TV audience, he derides them as "idiots" and "sheep" who will "do anything I tell them to do." Contradicting his opening monologue, in which he claimed to have given up meat and become less aggressive, he loudly demands, "Where my hamburger? Who wants to wrestle?"

Cut to backstage, where Kaufman, now talking in Tony Clifton’s voice, screams at a stagehand that he "could buy you and keep you as a pet." Suddenly, Foreign Man enters, and the two halves of Kaufman’s psyche are face to face.

"Why do you have to say such mean things to people?" Foreign Man asks. "Really, underneath it all, I don’t think you’re such a bad person. I think you’re a shy little man.… You’re afraid of being hurt.… When you mature and come to terms with your own deficiencies, then you won’t have to hide behind this macho act."

Hearing this, Kaufman/Clifton breaks into sobs and slinks off, leaving Foreign Man to finish the show. "Good night everybody," he squeaks. "Be good, and I love you very much." Then, a perfect pause. "OK, are we off the air? Where’s my hamburger? Who wants to wrestle?"

—Sam Adams