Rise to Fame
He got on SNL's very first episode by lip-syncing the Mighty Mouse theme song and not telling a single joke. Lorne Michaels had seen his act and took a chance on something nobody could classify. His 'Foreign Man' character, a hapless immigrant from nowhere who fumbled through bad impressions and then pivoted to a devastating Elvis, was barely an act at all. It was a test. Taxi producers saw him at The Comedy Store and handed him the Latka Gravas role in 1978, which gave him a mainstream audience he mostly spent confusing and provoking.
In the Spotlight
Nobody was sure his death was real. When he died in May 1984, friends at the funeral discreetly poked his body to check. That's the measure of the career: even the exit felt staged. He was a nonsmoker who did yoga daily and died of lung cancer at 35. Jim Carrey won a Golden Globe playing him in Man on the Moon in 1999, and the 2017 documentary Jim & Andy tried to answer where Carrey ended and Kaufman began.
Side Notes
He spent years touring America as the 'Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion,' offering $1,000 to any woman who could pin him. More than 400 women took him up on it before he died. His Tony Clifton persona, a spectacularly obnoxious Las Vegas lounge singer, was so separate that he sometimes had Bob Zmuda play Clifton while he appeared onstage simultaneously. The staged brawl with Jerry 'The King' Lawler on Letterman looked real enough that it took a decade to confirm it was staged.
Final Chapter
Over 300 friends and family gathered for his funeral in Great Neck, New York in May 1984. Elayne Boosler, his former girlfriend, wrote a tribute for Esquire in November 1984. R.E.M. released 'Man on the Moon' as a tribute in 1992. NBC aired 'A Comedy Salute to Andy Kaufman' on March 29, 1995.