Andrew Geoffrey Kaufman (January 17, 1949 - May 16, 1984) was an American entertainer and performance artist often called an "anti-comedian". He disdained telling jokes and engaging in comedy as it was traditionally understood, once saying in an interview, "I am not a comic, I have never told a joke. The comedian's promise is that he will go out there and make you laugh with him.
After working in small comedy clubs in the early 1970s, Kaufman came to the attention of a wider audience in 1975, when he was invited to perform portions of his act on the first season of Saturday Night Live. During this time, he continued to tour comedy clubs and theaters in a series of unique performance art/comedy shows, sometimes appearing as himself and sometimes as obnoxiously rude lounge singer Tony Clifton. He was also a frequent guest on sketch comedy and late-night talk shows, particularly Late Night with David Letterman.
One of Kaufman's most controversial and discussed performances was his foray into the world of professional wrestling, specifically his "Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion of the World" persona.
Jerry Lawler Slaps Andy Kaufman | Letterman
Becoming the "Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion"
Inspired by the theatricality of kayfabe, the staged nature of the sport of professional wrestling, and his own tendency to form elaborate hoaxes, Kaufman began wrestling women during his act and proclaimed himself "Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion of the World", adopting an aggressive and ridiculous personality based on the characters invented by professional wrestlers.
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From 1977 onwards, Kaufman traveled America offering prize money of $1,000 and/or his hand in marriage to any woman who would wrestle him for three minutes and pin him - and it’s notable that he went on to date several of the women he wrestled.
WWE CLASSICS: Before you met Andy, did you know that he had begun to refer to himself as the "Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion of the World," and wrestled women as part of his nightclub act? JERRY LAWLER: The only thing I knew about Andy was just what I’d seen on “Taxi.” I didn’t even know that much about his history before, that he was a standup comic, and anything that he had done before “Taxi.” I only really knew him as the lovable character Latka on the TV show. And, of course, at the time “Taxi” was one of the top network shows in the country.
LAWLER: I had heard that Andy already tried to incorporate wrestling women out of the audience at his different nightclub performances and comedy shows, and apparently it was not being received all that well. People would go to a comedy club to see Andy, and all of a sudden he would bring out a mat and Bob Zmuda in a referee shirt and he’s challenging women out of the audience to come up there and grapple with him. Nobody was enjoying it but Andy. So Andy went to one of WWE’s shows in New York City and approached Vince McMahon Sr. with the idea of wrestling women out of the audience at an actual wrestling event. Andy felt like he wanted to get a crowd response from people that had actually come to see a wrestling show.
LAWLER: When I received a call from Andy Kaufman, I jumped on it right away. I was looking for us to get any kind of rub at all from a major Hollywood star coming to my hometown of Memphis and appearing at a wrestling event. The whole idea was that Andy was going to come down and wrestle some women out of the audience, which he did.
LAWLER: Bill had told me, “You may hear that Andy’s strange or kind of weird, or a little bit out there, but nothing could be further from the truth. He’s just a really nice, quiet, humble kid.” And sure enough, when I met him, I was just so taken aback by this guy who’s on one of the top TV shows in the country, a major television star, and he was just like the nicest, most well-mannered guy that you’d ever meet. Andy and I were the same age when we met, and he never, not once, ever called me by my first name. It was always, “Mr. Lawler.”
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LAWLER: Yes, he did - a tremendous amount of respect for the business. As a kid, it made such a big impact on him. Andy told me, “I would watch the wrestling so closely, and I was amazed at the response that the wrestlers could get from the crowd. One of the things that really impressed me was that some of those guys could go out there and intentionally make people despise them, but at the same time they were still popular.” And that, maybe, scarred poor Andy for life, because that’s literally what he wanted to do. He wanted to be the bad guy.
LAWLER: Andy explained to me on our first meeting, “I’m not a comedian. I’ve never gone out and told a joke in my life. I’m just a performance artist.” He would do things to elicit a reaction from his audience, and the funny thing was Andy enjoyed getting a negative reaction more so than a positive reaction. Those were the words out of his mouth: “I wanna play a bad guy.”
On one of the shows, one of his opponents was this really feisty young girl named Foxy. Andy had already beaten a few of the women that night, but this Foxy, when the bell rang for their match, she charged across the ring like a veteran wrestler, picked Andy up in the air and bodyslammed him. The roof almost blew off the Coliseum. You couldn’t have written a better scenario. She wore Andy out, and he was literally trying to crawl out of the ring. Finally, she just got tired, Andy got the best of her and pinned her. But the crowd reaction through the whole thing was phenomenal.
He came backstage after that match and I said, “My god, did you hear the reaction?” And he was so excited. So I said, “Why don’t we do this? Come back next week, we’ll bring Foxy back and I’ll go out on TV and I’m going to train her. She was so close to beating you that with me in her corner, I can teach her in just a matter of days all she’d need to know to beat you.”
I was in her corner, but Foxy didn’t do nearly as well in this match as she had done in the first one. Andy just kinda manhandled her and pinned her. And then Andy started pushing the envelope. He started stomping on her, kicking on her, showing his muscles, and then got down and rubbed her face in the mat. Suddenly, 10,000 fans in the Mid-South Coliseum started yelling, “Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!”
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I got in the ring, grabbed Andy by the arm, and pulled him off of her. He staggers, falls across the ring, jumps up and starts screaming, “I will sue you! You can’t put your hands on me! I will sue you for everything you’re worth! I’m a big Hollywood star and you can’t touch me!” And that’s how it all started.
They aired locally on our NBC affiliate, Channel Five - WMC-TV. We had a 90-minute wrestling show every Saturday morning there on Channel Five. He would tape some in LA and some when he was here at the Coliseum. In one he said, “Ladies and gentlemen of Memphis, I’m going to do you all a favor. I’m going to teach you some personal hygiene.” And he held up a bar of soap and said, “This is soap. Say it with me. Soooaap. You run it under the water, you lather it up, and you wash under your arms, and you’ll be surprised how much better you’ll smell.”
He also did one about toilet paper, and after that one aired, the station manager, Mori Greiner, called up and said, “We can’t air more of these Andy Kaufman videos. We’re getting so many hate calls it’s tying up our switchboard. Not just on Saturday, but all week long people are calling and threatening Andy and threatening the station for airing these offensive interviews.”
We had so much media coverage. Up until that time, the only people that would cover our wrestling was the station we were on. But everybody was interested in this. Andy and I finally have this so-called match, and in the Memphis Wrestling Association, the piledriver was an illegal move. If you used a piledriver on your opponent, you were immediately disqualified. But that’s what I was famous for. That was my finishing maneuver.
Yeah, I said, “Did you come down here to wrestle or to act like an ass?”
I got in the ring, put both hands behind my back and said, “Come on, I’m going to give you a free headlock. You’ve talked about all of these moves that you know. Put a headlock on me and let’s get this thing started.” He put me in the headlock, I hesitated for a few seconds, then lifted him up into the air and gave him a back suplex. Then I got up and immediately gave him a piledriver, and that caused the referee to ring the bell and I was disqualified.
Well, Andy was down, so I pulled him up and gave him the second piledriver, which really pleased the crowd."I slapped the taste out of his mouth.
That was basically what the match consisted of. But after the match, Andy was just down. Normally in Memphis after the main event, people would make a mad rush for the exit to try and beat the traffic. But Andy had been declared the victor by disqualification, and after the bell was rung, Andy just laid there and everybody stuck around. They wanted to see how badly Andy was hurt. Bob Zmuda was checking on Andy. George Shapiro, who was Andy’s manager, was in Memphis as well for the fight. And he was in the ring all concerned. Danny Davis was managing me that night, and he was there in the ring with me. Andy was just lying there motionless like he was dead.
Well, finally, I tell the referee, Jerry Calhoun, a good friend of mine, “Go help Andy up, and get him back to the dressing room.” He kneels down, talks to Andy and comes back over to me and he says, “He says he wants an ambulance.” I told Calhoun, “No, no, no, just get him back to the dressing room.” So he bends down again, gets up, shakes his head and says, “He says he really wants an ambulance.”
Very seldom had we done anything where we needed to get an ambulance. It was like $500 to get an ambulance there, but Andy tells Calhoun that he’ll pay for it. So we wait around, and all of sudden we hear the back door of the Coliseum open up. All the 10,000 people had stayed right there in the building, and here comes this ambulance. The EMTs put this big neck brace on Andy, put him on a stretcher, and took him to Saint Francis Hospital here in Memphis. He was admitted and stayed in the hospital with his neck in traction for three days. It was national publicity. All over the country on TV news shows and newspapers the very next day said that this big star had been injured in a wrestling match in Memphis.
The Infamous Letterman Appearance
Finally, three days later when Andy checked out of the hospital and went back to California, he taped some more interviews saying, “This is not over! You tried to end my career! You tried to break my neck!” We aired them and we were waiting to do a rematch when I got a call to ask me to be on the David Letterman show with Andy. Like I was going to say no, right? So I said, “Yeah, what are we going to do?” They were planning to show the match, and we were going to talk about what happened.
Right. When I got to New York, Andy and I had to meet together with a segment coordinator, but he refused to do it, he would not come anywhere near me. So we went in separately. They told me we were going to be on for two segments. They said, “The first segment, Dave is going to show the clips of Andy harassing you. Then we’re going to show the clip of you piledriving Andy. After that, you’re both going to have a little bit of lighthearted confrontation. Dave will take a break, and after the break, Andy will apologize to you for making fun of wrestling. You’ll apologize to Andy for hurting his neck. Then Andy will stand up and sing “What the world needs now is love sweet love.”
No! What they didn’t tell me is that Dave had ...
One day after the historic 1,000th episode of Raw, WWE Classics sat down with Jerry Lawler to celebrate the 30th anniversary of this other important moment in television history.
Andy Kaufman and Jerry Lawler on David Letterman.
Reactions and Fallout
By the time he died in 1984 of lung cancer aged only 35, Andy Kaufman had wrestled more than 400 women. One of those who grappled for three minutes in the ring with him, the mud wrestler Red Snapper (AKA Robin Kelly), says that his impulse to rumble in the ring was very sexual. This raises the possibility that the entertainer who claimed to be both the intergender wrestling champion of the world and women’s wrestling champion of the World was sublimating his desires in spandex.
“I don’t know what was on his mind or what was part of his sexuality,” says Braverman. “I only know that if [wrestling women] were an interest of mine, I don’t know that I would have the courage to pursue it.”
His shtick involved acting up as a proto-Andrew Tate misogynist. “It takes a certain mental energy to wrestle, a certain strategy,” Kaufman said in one clip recorded at the Comedy Store that is included in Braverman’s film. “Women, I do not think, possess this. Now, there are times when the woman does have this mental energy, for example in the kitchen, scrubbing the potatoes, washing the carrots, scrubbing the floors, raising the babies …”
Not surprisingly, such taunts outraged some women. “On behalf of the women of America,” says one typewritten note on the cover, opposite a picture of a threatening woman in grappling pose. “He needed a lesson larned [sic]”. Well, quite.
Andy Kaufman on stage in 1978.
In 1982 he appeared on the show that had brought him fame, Saturday Night Live, and offered out women in the audience. After turning down a pregnant woman, he wrestled Lacoste heiress and dancer Mimi Lambert, kicked her and pinned her. “I am not choking her,” he yelled as the audience booed. “Shut up!” The show’s executive producer Dick Ebersol later put Kaufman’s future on the show to the public vote. Viewers ended his SNL career. The official stats are that 195,544 people wanted to “Dump Andy” while 169,186 people voted to keep him. He never worked again on the show that had given him his TV break in 1975.
“I love this idea that as his career is going down in flames, for him it’s not a negative thing,” says Braverman. “It’s a positive thing. That’s part of the act: the act doesn’t solely exist on TV or on stage, it’s like a full-life commitment. The venue is the whole world.”
“There’s a line in the movie from Laurie Simmons, who was a childhood friend. She says: ‘Was it misogynist? Was it humorous? Was it feminist? It was all of those things.’”
Laurie Anderson, with whom Kaufman collaborated, says in the film: “He was a mirror, and sometimes people didn’t like what they saw.” Much of wrestling, after all, from Kendo Nagasaki, Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks to AEW and WWE is performance: a melodramatic morality tale in which avatars of good and evil seemingly try to put each other in traction.
“One of his main fascinations as a young person was the performative nature of wrestling and the fact that it was all set up.” In professional wrestling there’s a term for it: kayfabe, the code whereby fighters adhere to the illusion that pro wrestling is not staged. Shattering the illusion by breaking character or breaking the fourth wall is a no-no.
This makes what happened in Memphis on 5 April 1982 all the more surprising. Kaufman, seemingly insanely, had agreed to fight professional wrestler Jerry “the King” Lawler, following a feud that began when the latter had become outraged at the former whaling on women. Minutes after the bell sounded, Kaufman was on his way to hospital with a broken neck. He later appeared with Lawler on the David Letterman Show in a neck brace and the two rekindled their feud. Lawler slapped Kaufman in the face and Kaufman threw coffee at Lawler. Only years after Kaufman’s death did Lawler say that the feud had been an act and the two were close friends.
Jim Carrey as Kaufman in the 1999 film Man on the Moon.
Why so much interest in this long dead entertainer’s work? Braverman argues it’s because he was a revolutionary whose career resonates profoundly with our times. “You can really hear the echoes of his work today. You’re constantly looking at public figures and wondering to yourself, is what they’re doing real? Are they being themselves? Is this part of an act? Is it somehow part of some larger media strategy? I don’t know that it all began with Andy, but he’s certainly the first person I’m aware of that was doing that.”
Safdie adds that Kaufman “was an anomaly, which is what helps propel him to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century. Whether it’s Sacha Baron Cohen, Pee Wee Herman, Jim Carrey, Stephen Colbert, Tim Heidecker, Martin Short, Mike Meyers, Andrew Dice Clay, Tom Green … he walked so they could run.”
Andy Kaufman was changing wrestling into sports entertainment, whether he knew it or not. Soon afterward, the WWF, under the tutelage of Vince McMahon Jr., would bring celebrities into their promotion.
Danny DeVito and Kaufman had dressing rooms next to each other during those sitcom days, he recalled. “One day somebody was delivering a package and it was a woman,” DeVito said. “And (Andy) started yelling at her because she was, I don't know, UPS. Maybe it was the government, I don't know what the f*** it was. But she's walking in, she's got a uniform on. Backstage at Taxi, the UPS driver was pretty mad as well, enough so that Kaufman goaded her into a wrestling match.
“I was there for that one. Wow. Right in the hallway,” remembers DeVito. “Both of 'em turning red, you know what I mean? Choke holds! Spade offered that Kaufman couldn’t get away with that behavior in 2024, and DeVito acknowledged that it would play out differently. “If that was today, somebody would be out with a cell phone and the next thing you know, it would be online and people would comment about it. But I'll tell you, the woman that he was fighting was as big as he was,” he said. “And she did a good job, man. She had his ass down, big time.”
But Kaufman’s biggest critic was a guy, a wrestler himself-Memphis heavyweight champ, Jerry “The King” Lawler. After Kaufman’s act aired, he kept touring around the states, showing down with over 400 women. Lawler saw him in Memphis. The fourth and final challenger that night was a tall, sturdy woman named Foxy Brown (not that one). Unlike Kaufman's early opponents, Brown stood a real chance. In the footage from that night, she grabs Kaufman’s leg, and throws him to the ground. But he recovers quickly and pins her.
Lawler hated it, the idea of a man striking a woman. The irony here barely needs stating-Lawler, 66, was arrested in 2016 for domestic violence against his 27-year-old girlfriend. But his moral umbrage launched a feud that lasted until long after Kaufman died.
In April of 1982, they faced off in the ring. Kaufman taunted Lawler in an unhinged Southern accent: “I’m from Hollywood! Where they make movies and TV shows! I’m not from down here in Mayn-fuss, Ten-uh-see!” As far as fighting, the comedian had some moments. At one point, as the referee held Lawler, his lavender onesie disheveled, Kaufman slapped him in the face three times. But Lawler slipped aside, and charged Kaufman for a suplex: lifting him up and slamming his back to the mat.
The melodrama peaked months later, when the two appeared on David Letterman-Kaufman in a neckbrace, Lawler dressed like an Elvis impersonator (red pants, polyester button-down, popped collar, buttons undone to his navel). Tense small talk gave way to snide insults and, in a gorgeous piece of television, Lawler smacked Kaufman out of his chair. The comedian exploded into a tantrum, hollering words the FCC doesn’t like, throwing coffee in his face, and storming off set. (The obscenities were so unkosher, NBC threatened legal action; Kaufman responded with his own lawsuit for $200 million in damages).