“Is This Guy For Real?”

Box Brown loves professional wrestling. If you follow him on Twitter, or read his “Andre the Giant: Life and Legend” graphic novel, you know this. Andy Kaufman also loved professional wrestling, and so that is the portion of Kaufman’s life that Brown focuses most on in this new biographical graphic novel. If you’re looking for an in-depth explanation of his time on Taxi, or the making of Heartbeeps, this isn’t the book for you. But if you want to know how “Classie” Freddie Blassie came to sit in the front row of Kaufman’s funeral, dig in.

Cover by Box Brown

Written, illustrated, and lettered by Box Brown

Comedian and performer Andy Kaufman’s resume was impressive—a popular role on the beloved sitcom Taxi, a high-profile stand-up career, and a surprisingly successful stint in professional wrestling. Although he was by all accounts a sensitive and thoughtful person, he’s ironically best remembered for his various contemptible personas, which were so committed and so convincing that all but his closest family and friends were completely taken in.

Why would someone so gentle-natured and sensitive build an entire career seeking the hatred of his audience? What drives a performer to solicit that reaction? With the same nuance and sympathy with which he approached Andre the Giant in his 2014 biography, graphic novelist Box Brown takes on the complex and often hilarious life of Andy Kaufman.

The fact that pro wrestling is choreographed, pre-determined, fixed, or fake – choose your term based on your level of appreciation – is common knowledge to just about everyone over the age of 10. But at the time of Andy Kaufman’s childhood, and even into his adulthood, that simply wasn’t the case. There was still an air of mystery to the business and, despite whispers of the truth, the idea of wrestling being anything less than 100% authentic was denied up and down by those in the business.

This situation – the public being suspicious of what they are seeing in front of them – was the crux of everything that Kaufman was about. His comedy rarely worked in a setup/punchline capacity. The context and the setting were as important to his comedy as the words he actually said. It is that aspect of Kaufman’s career that Brown so perfectly illustrates in “Is This Guy For Real?”

Brown introduces Kaufman as a lover of many things, and someone who could get lost in those obsessions. The book is almost a document of what Kaufman loved, more than a document of what he did. Taxi gets very few mentions in the book, and there is nothing of his famous ‘take them out for milk and cookies’ Carnegie Hall show or his ‘sabotage an episode of Fridays‘ incident. Aside from the broad strokes of his career, the book covers his two great obsessions: Elvis and wrestling.

For those that read “Andre the Giant: Life and Legend,” you are aware how Brown’s seemingly simple style works incredibly well in a wrestling context. For something that is so built upon physique and flash, the comic landscape can somewhat neutralize that. Brown makes up for it by absolutely nailing the subtleties of the industry: the sequined ring gear, the expressions of ‘selling’ hard blows, the illuminated ring in the sea of darkness, punctuated only by flashbulbs. Brown’s wrestling sequences make you smell the sawdust and taste the cheap beer of the arena, and by placing you in that setting, you don’t tend to notice what is lost by trying to properly illustrate what makes a suplex look cool.

Brown’s style focuses on finding what makes a person and leading with that. For Kaufman, it’s his eyes: although rendered as simple dots under eyebrows, Brown is able to preserve Kaufman’s innocent, sweet eyes, which always stood at such contrast with his Tony Clifton character, which had to hide behind those big sunglasses. For Jerry “The King” Lawler, it is his nose. For David Letterman, the teeth give him away. It is always tricky to illustrate a book based on real people, as the urge to go photorealistic is obviously there, but Brown falls for no such temptation.

Brown also offers no real easy answers when it comes to Kaufman’s wrestling of women. While the misogyny was a clear put on, there are some complexities involving why Kaufman wanted to wrestle women. It boils down to Kaufman both wanting to get laid, and also wanting to continue his meta-commentary on what entertainment is. Brown doesn’t whitewash the events, nor does he really come down on Kaufman for his actions, but rather presents it all for the reader to decide. Brown’s book has limited editorializing, and seems to want to give as even an account of Kaufman’s life as possible.

If there is something as difficult as sport to show in the comic form, it is music, but Brown, again, goes simple with the Elvis obsession. Instead of trying to build grand cinematic moments out of Kaufman singing Elvis, Brown steals his approach from the real world. In 2018, far more people know who Elvis is based on his jumpsuits and hair than they do by his music. Elvis remains a cultural touchstone, but not a musical one.

The place where music plays the biggest role is in Kaufman’s love of conga drums, and Brown manages to get a legitimately surprising reveal for the congas. This is one of the places in the book where he uses the page in a less traditional manner, with word bubbles eschewed and panels on top of each other. Unlike his “Tetris: The Games People Play,” where the panel layout was very much matched to the subject, “Is This Guy For Real?” is presented in a much more straightforward way. I’m not sure if this was intentional or not, but the predominantly square shape of the panels and the lack of color reminded me of how Kaufman would have first encountered wrestling, on a black and white television set.

For people who wanted a more thorough Kaufman biography, the book lacks any real insight into Kaufman’s illness, or love life, or even his family life once he became famous. Even his longtime friendship/co-writing relationship with Bob Zmuda is somewhat glanced over. But this book, unlike any of the numerous Kaufman books I’ve read, really gives you a sense of who the guy was based on what he liked to spend his time consuming. This is less of a biography and more of a list of recommendations from Kaufman to the reader. Want to understand showmanship? Watch Elvis. Want to see how to get a crowd to eat out of your hand? Watch Buddy Rogers and Bruno Sammartino wrestle.

To see Kaufman in his element, surrounded by congas and suplexes and Elvis records, you get a sense of what the guy must have been like to hang out with. And when there are dozens of documentaries, feature films, books, and articles about the guy for the historical details, wouldn’t you want to see another side?