The following are two excerpts from the book "Lost in the Funhouse: The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman," by Bill Zehme, available here.
"But his crowning achievement came when Erickson instructed each student to invent a dramatic interpretation of the exquisitely tortured pop aria 'MacArthur Park' that had been a major radio hit for the actor Richard Harris. Erickson would recall, 'Each of the students would go alone into the studio with two cameras and a couple of spotlights on them, and the rest of the class and I were in the control room, where we would tape this stuff. Everyone had given a very good dramatic reading of the song, but no one was prepared for what Andy would bring. He sat down and buried his head in his hands, leaned over forward, and when he came up he was an anguished eighty-year-old Jewish man dripping Yiddish dialect.' Someone left their cake out in the rain? Oyyy, I don't think that I can take it . . . Cuz it took so lawwnnnngggg to bake it? 'We were laughing so hard--I actually fell on the floor and was gasping for air. I had him repeat it just so I could see it again all the way through. It was just so f---ing funny. For that alone I gave him an A in the course. I mean, the boy was incredible.' "
" 'One week we worked out the following: Andy would come out after I introduced him as Andy, which was kind of rare. He was usually somebody else. And he would do a terrible stand-up comedy routine, just horrible unfunny jokes like "Why did the chicken cross the road?" So he did this and, of course, nobody in the studio audience was laughing. One joke was worse than the next. Finally, Andy looked up with those eyes and got very upset with the audience--"Look, all I'm trying to do is make a living while going to college and help pay tuition and you people don't have the decency to laugh at me! I don't know what you want, but I'm trying and trying here, but you!--you don't care if you ruin everything for me!" And he began to cry and get hysterical and there was this question in everyone's mind--Was he or was he not sincere? Finally, after crying crying crying, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a gun! Then he put the gun to his head and just as he was going to shoot himself, I ran over and tackled him to the ground and--commercial! And then when the show returned, we just sat at the desk talking as though the gun incident never happened--we never mentioned it in any way. Which was the whole idea. People asked me for days afterward if I knew he was going to try to kill himself on live television. And I just said, "Of course not!" He saw this as a remarkable triumph.' "
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