As befits a city often considered the world comedy capital, the second annual New York Comedy Festival - which began Tuesday and runs through the weekend - is heavy on big names, most of them more familiar from television than the club circuit: Denis Leary, D. L. Hughley, Joy Behar, Mario Cantone, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.
Andy Kaufman
As befits a city where comedians come to be discovered, it also has its share of lesser-known names, mostly performing in support of the stars.
And as befits a city where Andy Kaufman got his start, it has a grown man acting like a hyperactive boy who thinks the audience members are guests at his birthday party, as well as a woman who, explaining that she is too sick to talk, lip-syncs her act to a recording of her own voice.
Those performers, Ryan Flynn and Charlyne Yi, are among the eight finalists competing tonight at Carolines on Broadway, one of the festival's producers (the City of New York is also involved), for the Andy Kaufman Award. First presented last year, the award is for the performer who best reflects Kaufman's "originality, humor and courage" and who most forcefully "breaks the barriers of conventional stand-up comedy." The competition is both an answer to the question "Where are the new weirdos coming from?" and a sign that Kaufman, once known as an iconoclast, has become an icon.
"I was a big fan of his from the first time I saw him perform as a stand-up," said Mr. Leary, the star and creator of the acclaimed FX series "Rescue Me" who returns to his comedy roots tomorrow night at Avery Fisher Hall. "He was just so off the wall. There was always an aspect of 'Where is this going?' He was one of those people who had what I call a secret evil plan - the guy's performing, but you don't know exactly how you're supposed to react. What he did is hard to do; it takes a lot of commitment."
It's also hard to define. Kaufman was the comedian who wrestled women. Who disguised himself as an oafish lounge singer and was his own opening act. Who first attracted attention in comedy clubs by pretending to be a meek, confused soul with a vague accent who couldn't tell a joke to save his life, before suddenly morphing into a formidable Elvis imitator. Who played a range of roles, onstage and off, but never, ever broke character. He was such a master of the put-on that although he died of lung cancer 21 years ago, some Kaufman devotees are still not convinced he's really dead.
Whether he was even a comedian remains debatable; he once said that he considered himself a song-and-dance man. (Oddly, Bob Dylan said the same thing about himself.) George Shapiro, Kaufman's manager and one of the forces behind the Andy Kaufman Award, recalled an argument he had with his client: "He wanted to do a 'bombing routine,' a routine so bad that everybody walks out. He wanted to do eight minutes of terrible jokes - jokes that weren't even jokes - that would have people booing, people walking out. I said, 'You can't do that.' We negotiated. I finally persuaded him to keep it to two minutes."
Kaufman's younger brother, Michael, 54, a financial consultant and former stand-up who was the M.C. and a judge at the semifinals Tuesday night, agreed that his brother did not like being called a comedian. His explanation: "Andy saying he was not a comedian was just protecting himself, so if he didn't get a laugh he could say, 'It's not supposed to be funny.' But let's face it, he liked it when people laughed."
The official criteria for judging the contest, in fact, break things down mathematically: 60 percent based on originality and courage, 40 percent on humor. The prize is $5,000, courtesy of Stanley Kaufman, 83, Andy's father, who organized the first contest with Mr. Shapiro and Caroline Hirsch of Carolines. Both are judges, along with Susie Essman of "Curb Your Enthusiasm"; Bill Zehme, author of a Kaufman biography; and Kaufman's sister, Carol Kerman. Everyone involved emphasizes that the idea is to celebrate Kaufman's fearlessness and his anything-goes approach, rather than to find a performer with a similar act. ("It's really about finding the essence of Andy," Ms. Hirsch explained. "The wackiness, the off-the-cuff creativity. The shock value.")
Nonetheless, last year's winner, Suzanne Whang seemed more than a little Kaufmanesque. Born in Virginia to South Korean parents, she does stand-up as Sung Hee Park, a nervous Korean immigrant with limited English who has apparently learned her entire act phonetically without realizing that the jokes are racist, sexist or otherwise completely inappropriate. The resemblance to the fumbling Foreign Man character that first got Kaufman noticed - and led to his long-running role as the lovable mechanic Latka on the sitcom "Taxi" - is hard to ignore. She insists the resemblance is coincidental.
"It wasn't consciously in my mind," said Ms. Whang, an actress with a long list of movie and television credits who began showing up in comedy clubs as her alter ego about three years ago. "But every time I would perform in a club, somebody would say, 'Oh my God, it's like Andy Kaufman is back from the dead.' "
The competition is the only festival event designed specifically to showcase unknown or little-known performers. But most of the festival's headliners are doing their part to deflect at least part of the spotlight to others. Mr. Leary, for example, shares his bill with Lenny Clarke, Patrice O'Neal and others better known to comedy fans than to the general public.
"My inspiration comes from working with Rodney Dangerfield," Mr. Leary said. "He was such a nice guy to young comedians and went out of his way to give them a break. I always said that if I got to do big shows, I'd do the same thing.
"It's a nice thing, especially in New York in terms of a comedy festival, to say, 'Here's some faces you may not have seen, or you may have seen but not seen enough of.' It's more fun for me to do it that way, and it always makes the audience go home happy because they didn't know what they were getting."
The audience at the Andy Kaufman Award finals is likely to feel the same way.
