Andy Kaufman Quotes

Baby, Andy once said that beauty is a sign of intelligence.' She turns slowly to look at me. 'Who, Victor? Who? Andy who?' She coughs, blowing her nose. 'Andy Kaufman? Andy Griffith? Who in the hell told you this? Andy Rooney?' 'Warhol,' I say softly, hurt. 'Baby...

I never told a joke in my life.

If you can't offend people in a free society, then the question you have to ask yourself is, "Just how free is it?

Pure entertainment is not an egotistical lady singing boring songs on stage for two hours and people in tuxes clapping whether they like it or not. It's the real performers on the street who can hold people's attention and keep them from walking away.

For a stand-up comic, a minute on TV without a laugh was death. And Carson was adamant about the formula. He had recently stopped by the Improv to see Jay Leno and Andy Kaufman perform and had pronounced both of them “not ready,” telling Budd Friedman, “They’re funny, but they don’t have six minutes.” By

WORK IS NOT FUN! As the brilliant clinical psychologist Dr. Stan Martindale said, “Once they pay you for something you love doing, they kill it for you.

Then he closed his eyes and said grace silently. I noticed that any meal set before Andy was given respect. Dinners in diners--frozen shrimp with canned tomato sauce, canned vegetables, salads made with the worst part of the lettuce. And then chocolate and vanilla ice cream for dessert. "I'll pay extra for it if I have to," Andy said to the waitress.

LORNE MICHAELS: I taught at an art school in Toronto, I was teaching improvisations, the conceptual art movement which was being talked about and on the edge of things in the early seventies. Where that and entertainment met was what Andy Kaufman was doing. It wasn’t just that he lip-synched to “Mighty Mouse”; it was that he only did that one part in it, that one line, and stood around for the rest. It was very conceptual, and it instantly signaled to the brighter part of the audience that that was the kind of show we were going to do. And they weren’t getting that anywhere else on television. In the first couple years, Andy must have been on close to ten times. One night he even read from The Great Gatsby. In the beginning I had Penn and Teller on a few times, because that was the DNA, but I couldn’t do that now. The pure variety show part of it is over. It’s a straight comedy show now.

I believe that fact had been haunting Danny for all these years. But now he could change all that. He could right a wrong and rewrite history, for in his film not only he but also the entire cast of Taxi would be at Andy’s funeral.

The Internet was made for Andy; if it had existed in the early ’80s, Andy would have had a camera in his house and recorded his every movement. He would have invented reality TV.

He introduced me to some of the very strange people he had grown up with, like Andy Kaufman before he started doing whatever that thing that he did was.