Download e-book for iPad: Andy Kaufman: Wrestling with the American Dream by Florian Keller

When Andy Kaufman succumbed all at once to lung melanoma in 1984, a few of his lovers believed that his loss of life was once another complicated prank. Over the former decade, Kaufman had completed unbelievable status for his strange antiperformances—lip-synching the amazing Mouse subject music, interpreting The nice Gatsby aloud in its entirety whilst humans anticipated comedy, asking viewers individuals to the touch a boil on his neck—that at a loss for words, frustrated, or indignant his viewers. 

In Andy Kaufman, Florian Keller explores Kaufman’s occupation inside of a broader dialogue of the ideology of the yank Dream. Taking as his start line the 1999 biopic Man at the Moon, Keller brilliantly decodes Kaufman in a manner that makes it attainable to understand his radical time table past avant-garde theories of transgression. As an entertainer, Kaufman submerged his identification underneath a multiplicity of personas, enacting the yankee trust that the self can and may be eternally remade for the sake of happiness and luck. He did this so carefully and continually, Keller argues, that he uncovered the interior contradictions of America’s ideology of self-invention. 

Keller posits that Kaufman provided a appreciably different—and possibly extra potent—logic of cultural feedback than did extra brazenly political comedians similar to Lenny Bruce. featuring shut readings of Kaufman’s most important performances, Keller indicates how Kaufman mounted—for the good thing about a regularly uncomprehending public—a sustained and noteworthy critique of America’s obsession with big name and individualism. 

Florian Keller is a fellow on the Institute of Cultural reviews, tuition of paintings and layout, college of technologies and humanities, Zurich.