Andy did you hear about this one?

For many people outside of America, REM’s 1992 song may have been the first time they’d heard of Andy Kaufman. By the time “Athens’s finest,” asked if Kaufman was having fun and goofing on Elvis, he’d been dead for eight years, taken by lung cancer at the age of 35. For comedians, however, Kaufman was a cult figure, admired for the way in which he blurred the lines between his own personality and that of the many characters he created during his brief but memorable career. He’d first come to attention with his Foreign Man character on “Saturday Night Live” in the 1970s before becoming a household name thanks to his role as the immigrant taxi driver Latka Gravas on the sitcom “Taxi“from 1978-83, a show which also made the names of Danny DeVito and Christopher Lloyd. Kaufman never referred to himself as a comedian, preferring if pushed to say that he was “a song and dance man” and he never became comfortable with the recognition that playing Latka gave him, choosing instead to work wholeheartedly against the expectations of audiences and talkshow hosts through creations such as the foul, loud-mouthed, lounge singer Tony Clifton — a persona he sometimes shared with fellow comic and writer Bob Zmuda. He was also a fan of professional wrestling and used the format to his advantage when he pretended to be a misogynist antifeminist who challenged women to match-ups and created a hilarious fake feud with pro-wrestler Jerry The King Lawler. By the time he died, Kaufman had firmly staked his reputation as one of comedy’s most edgy, unpredictable and thoughtprovoking performers. When he died he’d spent so much time making people guess and scratch their heads that for many years it was rumoured that he’d faked his own death just to disappear from the limelight — a plausible final sick joke played on fans by a man of whom fellow comedian Carl Reiner once said: “Nobody can see past the edges, where the character begins and ends.”