Sex and the smackdown: the crazy world of wrestling cult comic Andy Kaufman

By the time he died in 1984 of lung cancer aged only 35, Andy Kaufman had wrestled more than 400 women. One of those who grappled for three minutes in the ring with him, the mud wrestler Red Snapper (AKA Robin Kelly), says that his impulse to rumble in the ring was very sexual. This raises the possibility that the entertainer who claimed to be both the intergender wrestling champion of the world and women’s wrestling champion of the World was sublimating his desires in spandex. From 1977 onwards, Kaufman travelled America offering prize money of $1,000 and/or his hand in marriage to any woman who would wrestle him for three minutes and pin him – and it’s notable that he went on to date several of the women he wrestled.

Alex Braverman, who has spent the past seven years working on a documentary that gets its world premiere at the Venice film festival this week, isn’t sure about the sexual explanation for why the hitherto sweet and mild-mannered Jewish kid from Great Neck, Long Island, who played goofy mechanic Latka Gravas in the sitcom Taxi and was a Saturday Night Live regular, acted the violent misogynist. “I don’t know what was on his mind or what was part of his sexuality,” says Braverman. “I only know that if [wrestling women] were an interest of mine, I don’t know that I would have the courage to pursue it.”

But what, if not some crypto-sexual S&M fantasy, was Kaufman pursuing? His shtick involved acting up as a proto-Andrew Tate misogynist. “It takes a certain mental energy to wrestle, a certain strategy,” Kaufman said in one clip recorded at the Comedy Store that is included in Braverman’s film. “Women, I do not think, possess this. Now, there are times when the woman does have this mental energy, for example in the kitchen, scrubbing the potatoes, washing the carrots, scrubbing the floors, raising the babies …”

Not surprisingly, such taunts outraged some women. After his death, Kaufman’s girlfriend Lynne Margulies published a compilation of the best hate mail he received called Dear Andy Kaufman, I Hate your Guts! “On behalf of the women of America,” says one typewritten note on the cover, opposite a picture of a threatening woman in grappling pose. “He needed a lesson larned [sic]”. Well, quite.

Wrestling was career suicide for Kaufman. In 1982 he appeared on the show that had brought him fame, Saturday Night Live, and offered out women in the audience. After turning down a pregnant woman, he wrestled Lacoste heiress and dancer Mimi Lambert, kicked her and pinned her. “I am not choking her,” he yelled as the audience booed. “Shut up!” The show’s executive producer Dick Ebersol later put Kaufman’s future on the show to the public vote. Viewers ended his SNL career. The official stats are that 195,544 people wanted to “Dump Andy” while 169,186 people voted to keep him. He never worked again on the show that had given him his TV break in 1975.

“I love this idea that as his career is going down in flames, for him it’s not a negative thing,” says Braverman. “It’s a positive thing. That’s part of the act: the act doesn’t solely exist on TV or on stage, it’s like a full-life commitment. The venue is the whole world.”

But wasn’t Kaufman’s wrestling hideously sexist, typifying a misogyny that, as the Luis Rubiales case demonstrates, we still haven’t overcome? Braverman demurs. “There’s a line in the movie from Laurie Simmons, who was a childhood friend. She says: ‘Was it misogynist? Was it humorous? Was it feminist? It was all of those things.’”

Laurie Anderson, with whom Kaufman collaborated, says in the film: “He was a mirror, and sometimes people didn’t like what they saw.” Much of wrestling, after all, from Kendo Nagasaki, Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks to AEW and WWE is performance: a melodramatic morality tale in which avatars of good and evil seemingly try to put each other in traction.

For Braverman, it’s important to realise that Kaufman the wrestler was a performance. “One of his main fascinations as a young person was the performative nature of wrestling and the fact that it was all set up.” In professional wrestling there’s a term for it: kayfabe, the code whereby fighters adhere to the illusion that pro wrestling is not staged. Shattering the illusion by breaking character or breaking the fourth wall is a no-no.

Kaufman’s sense of reality, from an early age, was skewed. He spent long hours alone in his bedroom putting on shows for imaginary television cameras. He produced, he later claimed, “four hours of programming” each day. In his late teens he became a drug addict and lived rough on the streets. He was saved by his interest in transcendental meditation and by creating an innocent, daffy comic persona, argues executive producer Josh Safdie. “The mask that he attached himself to was a safety mechanism,” Safdie says. “It was filled with naivety in an effort to hold on to a childhood that preceded the darkness discovered in the truth of death, when he lived on the streets and abused drugs.”

Later, the demons came out in Kaufman’s standup performances. He created not only a misogynistic wrestler persona but the alter ego of an angry, talentless, lounge singer, Tony Clifton. “I’ve thought about this persona thing quite a bit, and the idea that he was always on, and that he never really broke character,” says Braverman. “You could look at it in the opposite way, where the majority of us are living within one persona that we’ve created for ourselves, that doesn’t really leave a whole lot of room to explore all of the variations within us. I’ve trapped myself in this character of someone who grew up in California and speaks in a monotone voice, but Andy could be whoever he wanted.”

This makes what happened in Memphis on 5 April 1982 all the more surprising. Kaufman, seemingly insanely, had agreed to fight professional wrestler Jerry “the King” Lawler, following a feud that began when the latter had become outraged at the former whaling on women. Minutes after the bell sounded, Kaufman was on his way to hospital with a broken neck. He later appeared with Lawler on the David Letterman Show in a neck brace and the two rekindled their feud. Lawler slapped Kaufman in the face and Kaufman threw coffee at Lawler. Only years after Kaufman’s death did Lawler say that the feud had been an act and the two were close friends.

It’s easy to believe Kaufman’s whole life was an act; that he was always on. Margulies tells the story of how they would pull up next to another car in traffic and Kaufman would start strangling her. “That,” says Braverman, “was like a one-man show intended for the singular audience in the car next door.” Living in San Francisco together, Kaufman and Margulies had a roommate who complained that Andy used too much toilet paper. “And his response to that was, without saying anything, every single day he would buy a single roll of toilet paper and stack it on top of the one from yesterday until it got to the point where the toilet paper was touching the ceiling.”

Kaufman’s life story has been told many times, not least in Miloš Forman’s 1999 film Man on the Moon, starring Jim Carrey as Kaufman and Courtney Love as Margulies. There have been many documentaries about his life and this summer it was announced that the Andy Kaufman estate has authorised another one, with heavyweight backing from the likes of David Letterman and Dwayne Johnson. Why so much interest in this long dead entertainer’s work? Braverman argues it’s because he was a revolutionary whose career resonates profoundly with our times. “You can really hear the echoes of his work today. You’re constantly looking at public figures and wondering to yourself, is what they’re doing real? Are they being themselves? Is this part of an act? Is it somehow part of some larger media strategy? I don’t know that it all began with Andy, but he’s certainly the first person I’m aware of that was doing that.”

Safdie adds that Kaufman “was an anomaly, which is what helps propel him to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century. Whether it’s Sacha Baron Cohen, Pee Wee Herman, Jim Carrey, Stephen Colbert, Tim Heidecker, Martin Short, Mike Meyers, Andrew Dice Clay, Tom Green … he walked so they could run.”

Kaufman’s anti-entertainer, audience-baiting shtick came out early. In one routine, Kaufman would come on stage and read The Great Gatsby in an English accent for several hours, despite protests and walk outs from the audience. In another bit, he came on stage, sat down at a table and ate a bowl of ice-cream.

Braverman and Safdie believe his devotion to transcendental meditation helps explain such anti-entertainment. “Not only was meditation hugely helpful for Kaufman personally,” says Braverman, “but the idea of meditating is to be absolutely in the moment. And his work, whether it was boring or enraging or hilarious, really demanded your full attention. You had to be fully in the present moment with him in that room.”

Safdie agrees, arguing that, “behind all of our masks rests a deeper self and a naked reality. That is what drew him to TM. A lot of my heroes and idols practice TM, which is to enter an empty room with no other stimuli but your own breath. In that space, the deepest questions arise and, though no answers are given, there is a sort of truth that exposes itself. I think Andy was saved by TM, and I think that this strange fluid space where nothing and everything is known at the same time is reflected in everything he did.”

One question remains. Did Kaufman really die in 1984 or was even his death, like so much else in his life, a put-on? Fuzzy footage from 2009 in Braverman’s film shows a man, purporting to be Kaufman, panhandling outside a Walmart in Albuquerque. As Kaufman’s friend and collaborator Bob Zmuda puts it in the film: “It’s been 40 years … that’s real commitment to the bit.” So perhaps Kaufman is still among us. “It is fun to think about what he would be doing now,” says Braverman. “He used to tell Lynne that his dream was to have cameras follow him 24/7. And that’s what has happened since, with reality shows such as Big Brother and The Real World. He was thinking way ahead.” Maybe he still is.

• Thank You Very Much screens at the Venice film festival on 31 August