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Only time will tell whether “Andy’s Army” will get its wish. “If Ozzy Osbourne and Kid Rock are in it, why not Andy?” he says. “Kaufman was an interesting guy, but he was also a secondary sitcom character and an experimental comic… Was he really a big enough star to bring that much attention to wrestling?”īut Beekman admits that given the unique nature of the WWE Hall of Fame-he calls it a “Vince McMahon vanity project,” with a special celebrity wing featuring inductees like Snoop Dogg, Drew Carey, and William Shatner-there’s no reason not to include Kaufman. “I view him as a footnote-a fascinating footnote-but nothing more,” Beekman explains.

And while Kaufman’s stint as a wrestler took on new life after his untimely death, most serious wrestling scholars remain skeptical of his true impact.

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Scott Beekman, a history professor at the University of Rio Grande and the author of Ringside: The History of Professional Wrestling in America, says that Vince McMahon’s shift toward Hollywood was inevitable, with or without Kaufman. Not everyone agrees with that assessment, though. “They saw how popular it was, how successful it was with Andy, and jumped on the bandwagon,” says Lawler. Just a few short months before his tragic death from lung cancer, Kaufman filmed a Thanksgiving-themed promo in which he was named to that year’s “Turkey list.” He enlisted Jimmy “Mouth of the South” Hart as his manager and hired Jesse “The Body” Ventura as a bounty hunter, and he took a fireball to the face and threatened to sue the league. He once spent three days in a hospital pretending he’d broken his neck after Lawler performed two piledrivers on him.

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The stunts came fast and furious: Kaufman filmed multiple promos in which he’d bash the people of Memphis, teaching them how to use soap, mouth wash, and toilet paper.

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“But the movie doesn’t really show how amazing he was… He came down to Memphis and became the best heel of the territory.”

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“ Man on the Moon depicted Andy’s foray into pro wrestling as this dumb, short little thing that killed his career,” says Brown. Brian ‘Box’ Brown, the author of Is This Guy For Real? The Unbelievable Andy Kaufman, notes that while most casual fans know about the infamous Letterman appearance, few realize how deeply committed Kaufman was within the Memphis wrestling scene: for the better part of two years, right up until shortly before his death, Kaufman would appear on a near weekly basis at local shows.

Kaufman and Lawler struck up a quick friendship and began working on an outrageous wrestling plot that would get more elaborate each week. “They used to wrestle Frankenstein monsters and stuff like that,” Apter says. So Apter connected Kaufman with Jerry Lawler, the co-owner of the rough and rowdy Mid-Southern Wrestling league in Memphis, known for its zany theatrics. He thought using a Hollywood entertainer would expose that.” “Nobody knew it was fake except the people on the inside, and Vince wanted to keep it that way. “Pro wrestling back then had the illusion of a sacred sport,” Apter says. – the father of WWE’s McMahon – who politely declined. Kaufman, at the height of his Taxi fame, had pitched himself that night as a wrestling heel to the WWF’s then owner, Vince McMahon Sr. Longtime wrestling journalist Bill Apter recalls meeting Kaufman a couple of years later at Madison Square Garden during a World Wrestling Federation event. Eventually, he would incorporate actual wrestling into his act in 1979, challenging women at his live shows as the overly chauvinistic “World Intergender Wrestling Champion.” Deceiving audiences and making them uncomfortable would become a hallmark of his career, from his crowd-pleasing “ Foreign Man” routine to his obnoxious “Tony Clifton” lounge-singer persona.

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