Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Andy Kaufman

One of my very favorite comedians of all-time is Andy Kaufman. I wasn't really alive or paying attention while he was alive, but I love to find YouTube clips of his material.

Jim Carrey depicted him in a film that portrayed his life on the big screen, "Man on the Moon." And I see a lot of Andy Kaufman in Jim Carrey in general. Andy was an inspiration to many modern-day comedians.

Nothing was out of bounds for him; you never knew where he was going to go next. My very favorite skit ever of his involved him lip-synching & dancing to a portion of the Mighty Mouse song on the very first ever episode of SNL.

But here are a couple other favorites of mine. Here he is banging on a Bongo...



And he did Elvis impersonations before they were unfashionable. He was darn good at it, too...

3 comments:

Mark said...

I never knew anything about him until I saw Carrey's movie. If it's even 50% true, this guy was amazing.

Anonymous said...

I love Andy's style of humor. It's like he would just do things for himself, but somehow they were hilarious to the rest of us too. Too bad he died so young (if he's really dead of course...).

III said...

Dan, that's exactly right! It's like he did things that amused himself, but we found them funny too.

For example, he liked to come out & read "The Great Gatsby". He was amusing himself more than the audience.