Exclusive Excerpt: Andy Kaufman’s First Show at Budd Friedman’s Legendary Improv

Budd Friedman is a true legend in the world of comedy. As the founder and original owner of the Improv, Friedman launched the careers of some of the biggest comedians of all time, while also helping define the very concept of the stand-up club. With over 50 years in the business Friedman has seen it all, and he’s finally put it down in words, along with the help of many of his friends and colleagues. The Improv: An Oral History of the Comedy Club That Revolutionized Stand-up, out today through BenBella Books, gives a detailed account of Friedman’s career, the history of the Improv, and how crucial both have been to countless stand-up comics. Each chapter begins with Friedman’s own recollections before moving into extensive thoughts and quotes from Bette Midler, Jerry Seinfeld, Judd Apatow, Jimmy Fallon, Billy Crystal and more. It provides not just a look at Friedman and the peerless Improv franchise, but a snapshot of the last fifty-plus years of stand-up.

In this exclusive excerpt, Friedman describes his first encounter with one of the most brilliant comedians of all time, the one-of-a-kind Andy Kaufman. It’s a crucial anecdote for fans of Kaufman and comedy in general. The full chapter follows Friedman’s vignette with thoughts on Kaufman from Fallon, Michael Richards, Jerry Stiller, Dick Cavett and more, including remembrances from Kaufman’s collaborator Bob Zmuda and girlfriend Lynn Margulies.

From The Improv: An Oral History of the Comedy Club That Revolutionized Stand-up, by Budd Friedman with Tripp Whetsell:

The story of how our early California years evolved wouldn’t be complete without devoting a couple of full chapters to some of the comedians we had in New York who were beginning to gain notoriety around this same period. Many of them would eventually light up the Hollywood Improv as well, but I’d be remiss not to mention their beginnings back East first.

Of these, the one I’m still asked about most frequently is Andy Kaufman, who arrived at West 44th Street about six months after our tenth anniversary in the fall of 1973. An enigmatic provocateur whose unflagging penchant for pranks and controversy often blurred the line between imagination and insanity almost beyond recognition, he was a wonderfully colorful kaleidoscope of contradictions from the get-go.

Above all, he helped redefine the very notion of what it means to be a comedian. In large part, this is because he never considered himself one and openly hated telling jokes. And nothing—and this shouldn’t come as any surprise—could have prepared me for meeting him for the first time. No other audition on either coast ever had the distinction of going from completely disastrous to utterly mesmerizing in a matter of seconds the way Andy’s did.

The event leading up to it was a random call I received one afternoon from a local coffeehouse owner from Andy’s hometown in the New York suburb of Great Neck, Long Island. At the time, Andy was twenty-three and still living with his parents in Great Neck. He had also recently been fired from his gig at the coffeehouse.

Instead of telling me this, however, the exact words of the same person who had given Andy the ax were, “You should see this guy. He’s terrific.” Other than that, I don’t remember much else about the conversation except for taking him at his word and saying something to the effect of, “Send him in.”

But while I agreed to let him audition for me, I didn’t really have any expectations. Keep in mind that I had been doing this for nearly a decade by then and I’d been disappointed before. In fact, very early on, I learned to adopt a wait-and-see attitude to avoid disappointment. And when a new performer does exceed your expectations, the excitement of seeing them before the rest the world knows who they are can be exhilarating.

So waiting and seeing was what I decided to do with Andy. In this instance, it turned out to be the right decision. When he showed up on the same night I got the call from this guy on Long Island, Andy immediately tried to catch me off guard by doing “Foreign Man”—an early prototype for Latka Gravas, the character that eventually became the basis of his role as the goofball auto mechanic on the late-seventies hit sitcom Taxi.

Though I was suspicious before he even opened his mouth, I still reasoned that I should give him the benefit of the doubt. As I always did with a new act, I began the audition process by asking where he was from—at which point his voice became childlike and he replied in badly broken English, “An island in the Caspian Sea.”