I was reminded of this one earlier today. Warning: this post requires basic knowledge of all things Andy Kaufman. My wife will not understand why any of this is funny.
SiriusXM does a series called Town Hall. Basically you lock a celebrity (looking to promote something) in a room with 10-20 fans and let the fans ask the celebrity some questions.
We were under constant pressure to come up with more Town Halls and more Town Halls and more Town Halls. And more Town Halls. One day in the Town Hall brainstorm we came up with an idea for Andy Kaufman Town Hall.
Now you’re thinking to yourself that Andy is dead. How could he answer questions? Well…
We had broadcast The Kaufman Awards on Sirius(-XM) for a couple of years and I had gotten to know the organizers and Andy’s brother Michael a little bit. I knew Michael would pretty much approve anything and approve a quote “from Andy” for anything.
What I wanted to do was announce Andy Kaufman Town Hall with some quote “from Andy” saying something like, “I didn’t want to come back from the dead for just anything, but when SiriusXM offered me….”
I planned to ask the wonderfully talented (and former Kaufman Award winner) Kristin Schall to act as moderator.
What we would have done is gone through all the mechanics of a Town Hall. Promos, press release, soliciting questions, setting up the studio, going live and….
Either Andy would show up or Kristin would have to vamp to fill time. Assuming the latter, Kristin could have answered the questions “as Andy” and I have no doubt she would have crushed that.
Then it occurred to me that this was the sort of event that Tony Clifton would crash.
I had gotten to know Bob Zmuda a little bit over the years, and what I loved about Bob is that he would never ever reveal that he is the man behind Tony Clifton (post Andy’s death anyway. They used to split time as Tony back in the day.) Bob will tell stories about Tony, but always refers to him as Tony like it’s someone else.
So figure we would be a few questions into the event – Tony Clifton storms in, does his usual disruptive Tony Clifton routine, hopefully hilarity ensues…find a graceful out and done.
In one of the variant ideas Kristin would have killed time waiting for Andy by reading The Great Gatsby.
I pitched it a few times but nobody “got it.” Shame, I think it could have been great and Kaufman-esque.
…
When I first met Michael he was a little late for the meeting. After a while I got all kinds of insane wondering if this itself was a Kaufman-esque joke. Maybe the Kaufman People were pulling a Kaufman on me.
Eventually Michael came, was cool as hell, but now that I had the crazies I kept wondering “hey maybe this is Andy.” It’s 30 years later, I see the same eyes, maybe this is Andy and Andy is messing with me. I guess we’ll never truly be sure.