His first television appearance, from 1972. At this point Andy is strictly an Elvis impersonator, and he doesn't break character for the entire interview:

What an odd duck he was.
But he was funny,at least at the start of his career.

I was fortunate to be a kid when Kaufman came to Memphis to wrestle women, and later Jerry Lawler. The chemistry between Lawler and Kaufman was like dynamite and they exploded on Saturday morning televised wrestling before they went to the Coliseum on Monday nights for the main events. Good times.

To wrestle women? I am intrigued.

According to Man On The Moon he wrestled women because he wanted to be a heel. Kaufman was so skinny and physically unimposing he couldn't be a convincing one facing men.

Kaufman wrestled women because he liked fucking with people. He got a kick out of how seriously people take wrestling and how they would boo him thinking that it was all legit. For him, getting those kinds of reactions out of people was the ultimate joke.

And he was great at it. They hated him.
There is a documentary about his wrestling time called Andy Kaufman I'm From Hollywood.
All 67 minutes are available on YouTube.

I knew it was a joke, but it made me uncomfortable. It was the way he NEVER blinked or broke character. I do think, however, that he is directly responsible for how far wrestling has come, from a jokey Saturday afternoon show of sweaty old guys acting tough to the soap opera it is today. He gave wrestling its theater back.

This bloke was a genius.

I used to watch that over and over -- seems like they would show it on E! or VH1 or something. I became a huge Kaufman fan over his wrestling stuff -- I was a big fan of David Letterman back in the day and there was a famous "confrontation" between him and Jerry The King.

The comedy is how he would stay in character, act dead serious, and taunt them for being women. And taunt the crowd for being hicks. And brag about being from Hollywood. And they way the crowd would get into it, knowing full well he's a heel, but they would still work themselves up into a froth.

I'm pretty sure I completely believed the Letterman appearance.Years later I was truly surprised that Kaufman and Lawler were friends.

And this was the problem with a lot of what he did toward the end. It was hysterically funny to him and those who knew (or figured out) what was going on, but entertaining the audience became subordinate to amusing himself.

Lawler first started as a "bad guy" and the ringside announcer was a man named Lance Russell, whom Lawler called "Banana Nose." Lawler would go off on Russell for several minutes with some of the funniest insults. The second announcer in the video below is Dave Brown, who was and still is the weatherman at WMC TV in Memphis. When I was in the 5th grade, my family and I were standing in line at Disney World behind him and his family. That was awesome.



Later Lawler would become a "good guy," usually tag-teaming with Bill Dundee, but the insults continued and he only got funnier. My dad once got to hang out in the waiting room at a Nissan garage with Bill Dundee and he said that he was a really nice guy. My dad's brother was one of those mysterious evil wrestlers who, for a couple of years, wore a mask and wrestled on the Saturday morning show so they had a lot to talk about.

Most people don't know that Kaufman was in Memphis for medical treatment and that the pile driver that Lawler used to put him in the hospital was really a cover for Kaufman's medical tests to diagnose his illness. They released pictures of him in the hospital with a neck brace on for the local papers and TV news with Kaufman still mouthing off about how he was going to sue Lawler.

That makes me sad. But also happy that he did not let his illness get in the way of his comedy.

The man was crazy.

He was ahead of his ti...

No. He was crazy.

I think I believed it because of Lawler's performance. He really came off as a guy who had nothing but disdain for Kaufman.
Kind of like what actually happened between Hulk Hogan and Belzer

And I know Andy is dead............but there is a part of me that would like to believe he pulled the ultimate hoax

With weirdness like that going on in his life it's not hard to see how some believe that he succeeded in faking his own death. If any celebrity was ever capable of doing it, it would have been him.

This is the earliest known video of Andy Kaufman, a dramatic performance from a college production in 1969: