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Andy Kaufman: Audiences
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For newcomers to Kaufman, Man on the Moon will entertain, but may be a shallower experience. Discerning audiences will get an unpleasant eyeful of completely fabricated love scenes with Courtney Love, and may leave the film grumbling. Undiscerning audience will laugh out loud and forget they ever heard the name as soon as the next posthumous John Belushi resurgence occurs.
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Kaufman, by all accounts, was devastated—despite the fact that he had orchestrated the entire charade, including the dustup with Ebersol. The audience’s verdict was real.... The viewers had actually phoned in to ban him, as Kaufman had suspected they might. He had spent the previous week holed up in a hotel room, fretting about the outcome. When the referendum came, he regretfully abided by it. Unfortunately, so did most other TV producers. Other than David Letterman, few wanted to hire him for guest spots anymore; the controversy, increasingly, didn’t seem worth it. In a way, his years of needling his audience—drawing out queasy pauses, unleashing on-stage tantrums and on-air fistfights—had led inevitably to this end.
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On a few occasions, audiences would show up to one of Kaufman's performances requesting to see "Latka." Kaufman would announce that he was going to read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald to them. The audience would laugh thinking that Kaufman was joking. They were soon horrified to find out that he was completely serious and would read the entire book to them.
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Kaufman's twist became darker and was often offensive. Not everyone was amused at the cruelty he leveled at an audience, but eventually, his viewers simply got tired of the abuse. In 1982, after his 14th appearance on SNL, viewers voted him off the show in a call-in poll and the following year, "Taxi" was canceled. Late in 1983, he was exiled from the TM movement, a bitter blow.
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To salvage their own audience, the producers of SNL decided Kaufman was still worth the gamble. In 1980, after the end of the fifth season, Michaels and the last of the original cast retired from the show. The new incarnation, run first by the producer Jean Doumanian and then by Ebersol, struggled to live up to its predecessor. Sex and drug jokes that once seemed daring now felt lazy; SNL, the vanguard just a few years earlier, came off as tepid and bland. If anyone could inject some vigor into a stale formula, though, it was Kaufman.
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The performance is most famous for Kaufman ending the show by actually taking the entire audience, in 20 buses, out for milk and cookies. He invited anyone interested to meet him on the Staten Island Ferry the next morning, where the show continued.
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