Kaufman and The Stooges

Perhaps one of the more thankless tasks for a documentary filmmaker is to try to explain why something used to be funny. The trouble with comedy is that, even contemporaneously, people will often disagree quite strongly whether or not something is actually funny. Two documentaries this month illustrate the wrong way and the right way to go about this, regarding two (well, technically four) icons who are a bit difficult to get, paradoxically, because there isn’t really anything to get–the Three Stooges, and Andy Kaufman.

The Forgotten Stooges released directly to the OVID streaming platform, courtesy of CineMuseum LLC & Kit Parker Films. This documentary consists entirely of obscure footage of The Three Stooges. For The Three Stooges to warrant so little significance in the modern world of endless branding is a bit odd. Those knuckleheads Larry, Curly, and Moe were huge back in the day. Their reputation persisted for decades, especially on television, where their signature slapstick stylings endeared themselves to channel flippers all over the United States. While the second half of Forgotten Stooges mostly details that revival era, it never asks, let alone begs the question–why have we again forgotten the Three Stooges?

Forgotten Stooges itself is not very helpful about putting the Three Stooges in context. The only footage of Forgotten Stooges that actually features the Three Stooges, well, acting like the Three Stooges is a very short advertisement of a toy allowing for the viewing of Three Stooges frames that, for some unknown reason, theaters were giving away as a promotion.

The archival footage of Forgotten Stooges is interesting, albeit for reasons that don’t necessarily have a lot to do with the Three Stooges themselves. The big opening clip is noteworthy mainly because it’s the earliest known footage of Moe and Shemp Howard. Moe and Shemp’s presence on the set of A Night in Venice is nowhere near as interesting as the fact that this is candid footage of people having fun at a 1929-era swimming pool. Someone even had the presence of mind to bring the camera up to the top of the slide at some point. It’s a wonder that anyone even bothered to take this footage, let alone that someone didn’t destroy it in an era notorious for poor film preservation.

Of more relevance to the Three Stooges is the complete clip of Everybody Loves Music, a frankly dreadful 1934 short film that’s noteworthy mainly because Shemp Howard is in it, acting more like Moe than Curly. In a very roundabout way, Everybody Loves Music explains in large part why the Three Stooges were such a hit. Theatrical shorts at the time were just plain dreadful. A very thin plot with even thinner excuses for random musical songs with a few racist jokes thrown in for no apparent reason. Shemp Howard is the only bright spot, and only because he’s basically playing a stooge, fumbling around as an inexplicably incompetent undercover officer who seems more interested in getting drunk than in trying to solve any crimes. Who wouldn’t want to watch a knucklehead like that instead of an obnoxious socialite speaking in a weirdly put upon falsetto?

Andy did you hear about this one?

Which brings us to Andy Kaufman. While the Three Stooges were enjoying their second wind on television (a phenomenon Leonard Maltin briefly discusses in archival material in Forgotten Stooges), Andy Kaufman was bewildering audiences with a comedy style that you could best describe as utter nonsense. In Thank You Very Much, Alex Braverman covers Andy Kaufman’s career as a man whose schtick apparently consisted of telling non-jokes in a vaguely racist accent (for whatever it’s worth, the Iranian man who Kaufman is imitating insists that he actually encouraged Kaufman to imitate him as a gift to help with his comedy) only to lead into other routines that don’t even resemble jokes, at least not in any way I or anyone else can coherently describe in text alone.

Probably the best conceptualization Braverman is able to offer as to why Kaufman is funny is that he was basically trying to take his audience hostage as they sat mystified, trying to decide whether or not he was actually telling a joke or just being excessively awkward. Most of Kaufman’s routines wouldn’t fly today, albeit for completely different reasons depending on the bit. An entirely serious and sincere recitation of The Great Gatsby? You’re never going to get anyone to sit still that long in the streaming age when they can just click away. Challenging every available woman to a wrestling match to get him to stop making misogynist insults? That’s uh…yeah, a different controversy to be sure.

Andy Kaufman’s particular brand of performance art, where it’s impossible to tell where the act is beginning or ending or why, feels like a preamble to our irony-addicted streaming age. But it’s also nearly impossible to coherently translate to a cultural context where it’s very easy to look up, just as an example, whether or not professional wrestling is fake. Remember Man on the Moon, the 1999 biopic where Jim Carrey played Andy Kaufman who, at that point, had been dead for only 15 years? Well, don’t feel bad if you didn’t. Hardly anyone else does either. Which is especially weird when Thank You Very Much features interviews with Danny DeVito, Robin Williams, Steve Martin, and more all describing Kaufman as if he was some sort of comedy God.

Man on the Moon wasn’t alone in its failed attempt to valorize comedy that no one really understood anymore, assuming anyone ever really did. The Farrelly Brothers attempt to reboot the Three Stooges in 2012 didn’t go anywhere either. There’s a reason why the most beloved Three Stooges films are the short ones, and it’s not (just) because they were the easiest ones to fit into random TV timeslots. You can only get so far with only one joke, regardless of how well you perform that joke.

It’s also strange to think that both The Three Stooges and Andy Kaufman were the subjects of moral panic in the late seventies and early eighties, albeit for completely different reasons. Forgotten Stooges is frustratingly vague about this, due to the overreliance on footage that the filmmakers presume to be interesting just because it’s rare, although admittedly, there’s not much to say. They’re grown men slapping each other, thus encouraging children to also slap each other.

Did Andy Kaufman encourage young boys to only wrestle girls? Uh…maybe? Was that the broader point of the bit? Or was it just an excuse to try and get laid? Braverman, to his credit, definitely edits Thank You Very Much in such a way to try and make sense of these questions while ultimately acknowledging that since Kaufman’s whole bit was to be unpredictable and baffling, you can’t reproduce that element even if you can understand the bits themselves their historical context.

Ultimately, whether it’s even worth the effort to try and understand Andy Kaufman is an ambiguous exercise, since doing so plays into his hands. Rest assured, Andy Kaufman probably isn’t hanging out with Jim Morrison somewhere, laughing it up how they fooled everybody into thinking they’re dead. First and foremost Andy Kaufman was desperate for attention, and Thank You Very Much aptly demonstrates that whatever else you could say about the man, his catchphrase was always entirely sincere whether he said it in his Iranian voice or the Elvis one.

It’s a pity Forgotten Stooges couldn’t accomplish anything so nuanced, but again, this is such a simple documentary that it doesn’t even have real credits. Forgotten Stooges isn’t worth the price of an OVID subscription unless you’re such a fanatic about the Three Stooges that you’re desperate to see any footage of them that’s not public somewhere else, and I wouldn’t even be all that confident any of the footage in this film isn’t publicly available somewhere else. Whatever story about these home movies you can make about the Three Stooges, you’re going to have make up yourself. At least in Thank You Very Much, there’s several different stories from which to choose.