“Ladies and gentlemen, everything I’ve done for you, really I was only fooling. This is really me, and we’ll be right back.”

Between Liminality and the Liminoid: The Continuum of Cultural Resistance in the Performances of

A Thesis Presented by

Eloise Victoria Grills 329175

The School of Culture and Communication

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Bachelor of Arts (Honours)

in the field of

English ENGL40019

in the School of Culture and Communication at

The University of Melbourne

Supervisor: Associate Professor Peter Eckersall

October 2011

1 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement ABSTRACT

This thesis has been stimulated by a critical interest in Andy Kaufman (1949-1984) a performer whose work relentlessly defied classification. I have chosen to examine Kaufman’s work through the concepts of liminal ritualistic and liminoid expressive forms theorised by anthropologist Victor Turner (1920-83), in order to assess the efficacy of using these as a framework for decoding the cultural politics of performance. I will suggest that liminal point in the indoctrination ritual can be utilized as a model for popular entertainment forms, as they have replaced rituals of indoctrination in late Capitalist societies. I assert that the television broadcast has remediated and replaced these forms, becoming the primary authority in the articulation of cultural values. I will also examine Turner's concept of the liminoid cultural form, as that which overtly opposes the hegemony imposed through the liminal ritual. I will apply these to Kaufman's performances, suggesting that he mimics and manipulates the tropes of liminal rituals, including the stand-up performance, the variety television show, and the wrestling spectacle, while resisting their instrinsic purpose, to reinforce dominant texts. I will argue that the power of his performances lies not in a singular extreme political strategy but in his usage of the fluid of the performance medium to exploit and move within the gaps and contradictions in discursive structures, thus remaining irresolvable within culturally sanctioned cutural categories. This analysis renders the binary configuration of Tuner's theory problematic, and suggests the necessity for a more expansive theory for performance, one which acknowledges and can fluctuate to accommodate the flux of its formal resistance strategies.

2 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement CONTENTS

1. Introduction......

2. Chapter I: On Liminality, Television, And Play...... 2.1: The Liminal...... 2.2: Aspects of the Liminal Ritual...... 2.3: Techniques Of Liminal Pedagogy:...... 2.4: The Social Construction of the Liminal Subject...... 2.5: TheLiminoid...... 2.5: Kaufman and The Liminoid......

3. Chapter II: On Kaufman, the Liminal and the Liminoid...... 3.1: Approaching Andy Kaufman...... 3.2: Andy Kaufman and the Symbolic Culture Monster...... 3.3: Andy Kaufman and the Anthropology of Stand-up...... 3.4: Andy Kaufman, Liveness, and the Liminal Television Screen..... 3.5: Andy Kaufman and the World of Wrestling...... 3.6: Terminally Liminoid: Andy Kaufman Gets Kicked Off Television

4. Chapter III: Conclusion......

5. Bibliography......

6. Filmography......

3 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement INTRODUCTION

This thesis aims to participate both within established scholarship that relates directly to Kaufman, and within the theoretic tradition surrounding the concept of the 'liminal' in anthropological theory, in order to associate him within a broader performance studies framework. Little critical attention has been given to Kaufman by either entertainment or theorists (barring Auslander 1997; Keller 2005). By approaching his work through an application of the theory of liminality, which in itself is a an established trope in performance studies, I am offering an original insight into Kaufman's work and placing him more squarely within a scholarly tradition.

My methodology has largely been inspired by a tradition introduced in late twentieth century performance studies discourse where theorists began to borrow heavily from anthropological theory in order to form a basis for intercultural assertions about human performance. The most important of these to my theoretic approach to my thesis is the work of director Richard Schechner (Schechner 1985), who pioneered this cross-disciplinary approach in performance studies in his navigation of anthropological theory in the 1960s, and furthering this precedent for a dialogue between these disciplines through his continued collaborations with the anthropologist, Victor Turner. The original intervention in my method will be in how I apply these to my chosen case study, the performances of Andy Kaufman.

In the first chapter I examine the notion of liminality as theorised by Turner (1964, 1969, and 1979), assessing Turner's definition of the liminal ritual, before I use it as a paradigm for processes of cultural indoctrination which are realised in 4 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement mediatized and performative rituals in modern societies. I will also extrapolate Turner's later exploration of the evolved element of the “liminoid,” in greater detail, assessing its relationship and implications for the liminal ritual in this modern context, and problematising his priviledging of its overt subversive strategies to suggest that a negotiation between these two concepts is required to effectively examine performance politics.

In the second chapter, I will apply these two terms, utilizing these in order to come to an argument about Kaufman's performances, and how these function as gestures of political resistance. I will closely examine Kaufman’s performance oeuvre through a selection of key performances in the genres of stand-up comedy, and wrestling, and those which occurred through the television broadcast. I will closely examine the ways in which they interact with and exploit the inner assumptions and the ideological functions of liminal ritual forms, informing this analysis through an examination of performance and media theories. I will suggest that the symbolic threat posed to cultural maxims in his performances emanates from his ability to remain relentlessly in between liminal structures and outright liminoid subversiveness a point which is further elaborated in my conclusion.

5 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement CHAPTER I

ON LIMINALITY, TELEVISION, AND LIVENESS

This chapter will present a detailed overview of Victor Turner's work on the 'liminal' stage of the rite of passage. I wish to take up his hypothesis that the liminal ritual can act a universal model for cultural procedures of disseminating and indoctrinating subjects within value systems (Turner 1979: 468). I will demonstrate the appropriateness of this through decoding the liminal project within popular mass media and performance forms, which I argue have replaced rituals of initiation through enacting methods of socialization in late capitalist societies.

I will look at several performance forms, but will predominantly focus on the television screen as it re-mediates and repackages previously existing liminal rituals. I will posit the television as the dominant space where the liminal ritual was staged in late modern societies. The television transmission functions as a liminal teacher, or elder, in Turner's terminology, as it both suspends and reinforces cultural values through explicit and implicit methods. I will draw the work of television theorists (McBride and Toburen, 1996; Miller, 2007; Fiske, 1987) and focus finally on Auslander, (1997), whose theories on the ontology of liveness illuminates aspects of the aesthetic construction of the liminal form, and will assist in my transposition of Turner's theory to television.

I will also address Turner's later reconfiguration of the liminal in an oppositional relationship to its evolved 'liminoid' form which serves to subvert cultural values propagated through liminal ritual texts. I will problematise the binaristic trope with which he structures these, considering, alternatively, that their

6 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement relationship, especially in a modern context, may be better characterised as a continuum which ranges from a reinforcement to a radical rejection of cultural values, encompassing diverse expressive forms and tones of resistance in between. Hence, in this formulation his theory can be helpful to us as it provides a paradigm for understanding the complex inter-relationship of expressive forms in late Western societies.

Finally, I will posit Kaufman's performances as representing this gamut. I suggest that some of his performances serve as liminoid subversions of late modern liminal rituals, as he exploits the rhetoric of the liminal but defines its normative outcome of re-integration. However, I will contend that his usages of liminal conventions are extremely ambivalent; the political purpose left purposefully unclear. I will suggest that the friction in the shifting styles and registers of his performance both associates it within the rhetoric of late modernism, and serves to resist its entrenched cultural practices through remaining relentlessly in-between semiological structures.

I will begin by offering a close analysis of the terminology which forms the architecture of my analysis, elaborating on Turner's examination of the liminal and the liminoid.

THE LIMINAL

The term, “liminal,” derives from the Latin word, limen, meaning quite literally a 'threshold.' Its first known theoretic exegesis was expounded through anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep's study, The Rites of Passage (Gennep 2004 [1909]). Herein, he identifies “a complete scheme of rites of passage,” which “theoretically includes pre-

7 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement liminal rites (rites of separation), liminal rites (rites of transition) and post-liminal rites (Gennep 1909: 11)”. Van Gennep asserts the essential nature of these three components to human ritual as s a universal phenomenon.

The term was left fairly untouched until the central, liminal part of the ritual became of continuing theoretic interest to the anthropologist Victor Turner in the latter half of the twentieth century (La Shure, 2005). In his essay, “Betwixt and In-between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage (1964)” Turner meditates upon and examines fieldwork on the initiation rituals of tribes of Ndembu in Zambia, linking these to van Gennep's model of liminality. He uses his findings from this research as the basis for broader statements about the behavioral patterns of larger, non-tribal societies. I wish to elucidate the basic structuring characteristics of the liminal ritual, the liminal subject, and the Communitas as it is extrapolated by Turner in order to appropriate it to the context of the late modern ritual.

ASPECTS OF THE LIMINAL RITUAL: COMMUNITAS AND FLOW

Turner theorises the liminal ritual context as a non-hierarchical space wherein the normative rules of society can be safely manipulated, and parodied through the interactions between an equal Communitas of liminal subjects.

In “Liminality and Communitas,” (1969) Turner describes the situation of Communitas as occurring between peers in a society, or as in this case, subjects participating in the same ritual. It is a state where the normative functions of the hierarchy of society can be reversed, or temporarily suspended. The liminal subjects relate to each other outside status distinctions, interacting and behaving in ways which would be impermissible by the 'real' culture. He develops this in his later essay 8 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement “Frame, and Reflection: Ritual and Drama as Public Liminality (Turner 1979, 465- 479)” where the notion of liminal “ritual or status reversal,” is extended to include rituals in larger societies, where at “major calendrical turns” “turnabouts of normal social status,” are performed (Turner 1979: 467). Through inversions of hierarchies, as the poor play at being rich, etc, a “society finds in these public rituals of commenting (ways) of commenting and critiquing itself (Turner 1979: 467)”. Through inverting the normative structure of society, the ritual process becomes a 'meta-language' for the expression of a social critique. He notes that the ritual is shaped by its society's conventions and technological advancement (Turner 1979: 468) so that we may, in later performative genres, perceive a commonality of origin in this ritual archetype.

The liminal ritual embodies both the “ludic” (Caillios 1962: 29) and the solemn, the fixed and the improvised and these contradictory elements manifest in performance styles, both serious and entertaining (Turner 1979: 468), which are not distinguished or elevated from one another in terms of their real-world cultural currency. I would like to expand this notion, to link the notion of the Communitas to the ahierarchical construction of mediatized performance, as it is articulated by Auslander (1999), associating it within the tropes of the television broadcast.

The structure of the television broadcast is characterised by an uninterrupted forward progress. The constant stream of the television signal means that no image, or in Turner's terms, no single member of its Communitas is prioritized, as the television signal gives equal weighing to its subjects. The programming and the commercial requirements which underscore its existence (such as notes from sponsors, and ad-breaks), flow undistinguished into one another without hierarchy.

9 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement The only status order that exists is projected upon the television screen through the viewer's implicit assumptions of it. These assumptions are informed through the particular attitude which they cultivate based on their exposure to cultural conditioning, and their exposure to the form itself. Thus, personal, semantic distinctions are made between day-time and prime-time programming, children's and adult's shows, advertising and content, which the television's flat representative mode is not capable of articulating. The television offers juxtapositions and paradoxical configurations of social norms in a temporary zone, exploiting a discourse of equality, of flattened hierarchy akin to the Communitas. I wish to problematise this, however, when I apply Turner's notion of the axiomatic authority of the elder in the liminal ritual to the discursive project of the television.

Turner borrows Goffman's term "guided doings" to term the events in the liminal ritual, and the liminal screen acts similarly, as a guide for television content (Goffman in Turner 1947 [1979]: 489).The conventions of the television, which are both technologically and contextually determined, guide audience reactions and evolve these, through continual reinforcement of conventional ways of operating, into expectations. These presumptions must be anticipated by the broadcast, and met, so as to wholly immerse the viewer. The broadcast, like the ritual, requires the participant's willing and uninterrupted belief in its intrinsic rules of functioning, in order to work.

. This state of uninterrupted “autotelic experience;” of “complete involvement,” has been termed, by Czikszentimihalyi, as "flow (Czikszentimihalyi 1975: 36)." The flow-state occurs when the individual is focussed on a limited field of stimuli, which I suggest occurs when one concentrates upon the television, and its

10 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement condensed signification of cultural ideas, and as such the subject can temporally forget their own personal identity. This amnesiatic state echoes the 'forgetting,' of cultural roles which occurs in the situation of the Communitas. Czikszentimihalyi contends that the flow state occurs in participative activities (Czikszentimihalyi 1975: 36-9). The television broadcast adopts the surface qualities of a participative artform, as a host figure often directly addresses the 'home audience,' in an intrinsically artificial interpellative trope (which, if the audience responds to, structures them as a subject to the television broadcast in Althusser's sense of the term 1970, 163). If audiences become explicitly aware of this artificiality its assimilative cues and ability to interpellate the audience fails, as "awareness becomes split, so that one perceives the activity from "outside," flow is interrupted Czikszentimihalyi 1975: 38)." This echoes Turner's description of the conditions for the state of mind required for the completion of the liminal ritual; as to break from this similar belief, “breaks flow,”and thus inhibits the progression of the ritual (Turner 1979: 488). In a similar manner, the liminal structure is dependent on its frame in order to function.

. The liminal space, as a form of play (in Huizinga's (1947) sense of the term as a culturally sanctioned property) is given meaning through its rules, which “give credence to whatever make-believe or innovative behavior, whatever subjective action, goes on within the frame (Turner 1979: 488).” We can interpret, then, that the suspension of rules of the normative society, requires an adherence to its inverted set of rules adapted from its frame, in order to function. The liminal ritual must rely in some way upon on inherited laws of the social structure that it disrupts, lest the liminal ritual itself be disrupted. Turner states that “in ritual and carnival it may not be too fanciful to see social structure itself as the author or source of scenarios (Turner 1979: 490);” and that destabilizing the author through manipulating its texts 11 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement can still be a partial act of submission to its cultural authority. Similarly, the television image is always symbolically bound by its outer cultural frame. Even if a television show parodies dominant ideas and practices of the ideas it represents, it is always inscribed by these same representative strategies and implicit discourses, and is hence bound by the centralized, real world authority which presides over these.

One of the most frequent evidences of cultural authority in the liminal ritual, is in the use of abstracted symbols of the dominant culture. I have deemed it effective to term this tool in Turner's theory as the use of a liminal cultural monster, a move I will explain in the subsequent section.

TECHNIQUES OF LIMINAL PEDAGOGY: THE SYMBOLIC CULTURE MONSTER

In the liminal ritual, the authority of the elders is still absolute; they represent “the axiomatic values of society in which are expressed the “common good” and the common interest (Turner 1964: 4)” and it is through the influence of these figures, who exemplify the cultural values, that the liminal subject is shaped. Turner's description of the authoritative elder is paralleled in a predominating discourse in media-studies which presumes that the culturally hegemonic project of television broadcasting arises from its centralized political economy, a presumption implied in the works of Fiske (1987), McBride and Toburen (1996), Miller (2007) and Auslander (1999).

McBride, Miller and Auslander's theories all share a similar assumption, that “television has become the major player in disseminating and molding social values (McBride and Toburen, 1996: 181)." Miller similarly suggests that "since its 12 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement inception, TV has been regarded principally as a means of profiting and legitimizing its controllers, and entertaining and civilizing its viewers (Miller 2007: 12).” Thus, in the similar manner to the liminal ritual elder, the television serves to disseminate dominant values and indoctrinate them in orthodox ways of thinking about these.

Despite the television signal's material appearance, which seems to operate in a flattened hierarchy of content, we cannot forget the source of such content, as it is approved and transmitted from a single, axiomatic elder-figure. Thus, the "potential meanings,” of content are controlled and focused by the centralised owner into “a more singular preferred meaning that performs the work of dominant ideology (Fiske 1987:1).” The television transmission appears, at least outwardly, to approximate a consensus of values. However, as McBride and Toburen suggest, “the specific direction,” is toward a “homogenization of turnout,” (McBride and Toburen 1996: 195-196)" to assimilate all discourses under a “single code (Auslander 1999: 5).” While this concentration of a variety of ideologies into a single, authoritative message may not always succeed, it is nonetheless a central aim of the television broadcast.

One of the symbolic induction processes identified by Turner is the instructor's performance of fantasy, or often a monster, through the use of a mask. They utilize masks and effigies which “are so radically ill-assorted... they stand out and can be thought about (Turner 1964: 7).” The use of bizarre conflations of symbols, of monstrous juxtapositions, throws ideas into a relief which is helpful in pedagogic terms. Thus, if you “put a man’s head on a lion’s body and you think about the human head in the abstract (Turner 1964: 8)”. The use of grotesque or monstrous symbol is not necessarily a tool of terror or coercion, but a means of

13 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement eliciting a rapid and instinctive awareness of what may “be called the “factors” of their culture (Turner 1964: 8).”We can observe an appropriation of the symbolic vernacular of mass culture in other liminal ritual forms. Normative ideas and functions are given an exaggerated, or monstrous treatment, as they are juxtaposed with other discordant symbols, or conveyed out of context, in a surreal abstraction from their logical source. I will refer to this process of symbolic abstraction in the liminal ritual hereafter as the symbolic culture monster.

The television also has the capacity, through audiovisual effects to represent symbolic culture monsters. The medium's capacity to juxtapose recognizable auditory and visual symbols is often enacted in the servitude of commercial aims. This is achieved through advertising, as symbols of wealth (such as celebrity) stand abstracted from their context, edited into neat aesthetic packages with fitting music tracks, and given an exaggerated quality in order to promote their cultural values, and to reinforce and indoctrinate viewers within their embedded capitalistic ideals. The exact formula of this construction “is “historically contingent effect of their culturally determined usages (Auslander 1997: 54);” it is intrinsically shaped by the outlook of the dominant culture, which in Western capitalist societies, constitutes that of the wealthy, those who economically control liminal apparatuses and hence decide the direction of its ideological impetus.

I will now look more closely at television content, through an exposition of Turner's theory regarding the cultural construction of the liminal subject.

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE LIMINAL SUBJECT

Turner identifies the liminal subject, the prospective inductee of the dominant 14 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement culture, as necessarily “ambiguous (Turner 1964: 5).” By passing through this middle ground the “subject of passage ritual is, in the liminal period, structurally, if not physically, “invisible (Turner 1964: 5).” The ambiguity of the liminal subject is mirrored by the label given to such an individual. As such, their symbolic representation through language connotes the process of transition in itself, “rather than on the particular states between which it is taking place (Turner 1964: 2)”. The subject is at once beyond categorization and awaiting it; it “may perhaps be regarded as the Nay to all positive structural assertions, but as in some sense the source of them all (Turner 1964: 2).” Turner's definition of the liminal subject is often contradictory, as he suggests that the liminal subject is divorced from, but anticipates structure: therefore, I assert that logically, the transitional state must indicate this later, absorbed form. The liminal entity can then not be completely invisible but is treated as such.

“The unclear,” ambiguous and uninitiated individual is also “the unclean (Turner 1964: 7).” Turner emphasises the importance of variability to the construction the polluting liminal figure. The liminal is dangerous, not just because of any frightening stable shape it may inhabit at one particular moment, but, because it lacks a terminal shape at all. I would like to suggest that such a labeling of the liminal subject functions as a socially sanctioned pretense. The liminal subject is always bound by its eventual resolution into a normal subject, and thus framing the uninducted subject in terms of its uncleanness is a method for reasoning a denial of it, fencing it off it from normative society, by contructing it in oppositional terms.

The social construction of the liminal subject as a dangerous, unstable entity, can be linked to the rhetorical strategies utilized in the television broadcast to frame

15 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement and construct its subject. We can observe this, notably, through the television signal's invocation of a live rhetorical strategy, a topic which has been of continuing theoretic interest to Philip Auslander. The rhetoric of liveness inscribed in the aesthetics the television broadcast gives the impression of the liminal subject's dangerous volatility. The constant flow of the television image constructs the television image in terms of “disappearance,” instead of a stable presence; “the television image is always simultaneously coming into being and vanishing; there is no point at which it is fully present (Auslander 1997: 52)”. Thus, the image, the subject of the broadcast is superficially neither here nor there, it is always moving. While the audience possesses a reinforced prescient knowledge, of the stultifying processes the television uses against subversive images, the aesthetic quality of the broadcast continues to connote possibility and surprise. This contradictory knowledge interacts with but does not cease an audience's interest, or intrigue, resulting in a strange ambivalence. The television broadcast, akin to the liminal subject appears to be in a “lively, and forever unresolved process (Auslander 1997: 52)” its undeniable future resolution disguised in its aesthetic mystification.

Having provided a clear extrapolation of the liminal ritual and how it has been remediated, I wish now to proceed to an examination of the liminoid, and its implications for the liminal, before finally suggesting its relevance to the performance work of Andy Kaufman.

THE LIMINOID

In his essay “Frame, Flow and Reflection: Ritual and Drama as Public Liminality (Turner 1979, 465-479)” Turner discusses the notion of the liminoid. He

16 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement poses that the notion of the “liminoid,” offers recourse to the “clumsy” critical functioning of the liminal ritual. He defines the liminoid as being historically linked with liminal rituals, and possessing similar characteristics, such as "subjectivity," and symbolic reversals of social distinctions but argues that these act to displace the liminal, to expose and depart from their reinforcement of dominant ideas (Turner 1979: 491).

Turner suggests that the liminoid is a phenomenon which occurs in complex societies, defined by freedom of association (Turner 1979: 492-4). He posits that they first appear in late feudal societies, but that these are most prominent in Western Europe, in capitalist societies where industrialization has brought about the realization of individuated socio-economic classes (Turner 1979: 492-4). Hence, the liminal ritual occurs in the newly moderate leisure sphere dominated by the new bourgeoisie, as opposed to inhabiting and being sanctioned and mandated by central political, religious and economic structures. Turner continually frames the liminoid as being opposite to the liminoid, asserting, that rather than inverting and abstracting prestigious symbols in order to reinforce their intrinsic values as the liminal ritual does, liminoid practice serves to subvert and destabilize these (Turner 1979: 492-4). The social, and the cultural, is not merely a datum, or vocabulary for the liminoid performance, but are termed as problematic, and are rigorously disavowed to subvert its underlying assumptions (Turner 1979: 492-4).

I wish to extend upon his suggestion that the liminoid is intrinsically linked to liminal ritual. I suggest that the liminal and liminoid operate in continuous logic, and that forms of expression, particularly performance, can shift in styles between and within this framework, oscillating or relentlessly occupying spaces between these

17 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement extremes, in a less overt although undetectable method for resisting participation and categorisation within dominant cultural constructs. While the overt liminoid form can only occur briefly in liminal cultural processes before it attracts censorship, or self- censorship as it is shaped back into a normative culture, or is Othered. Expressive forms which interpolate between an overt validation and critique of dominant ideas can most effectively evade censorship, by working in the gaps of strict rules and value systems, exhibiting traits of the liminal but deferring internment within its strategy.

I wish to take his determination of the liminal-liminoid paradigm as the basis for my own, which I will apply to performances of Andy Kaufman.

KAUFMAN AND THE LIMINOID

Kaufman exploits the liminal ritual, extending it beyond its logical bounds, defying its culturally sanctioned structure. He infinitely defers a stable, normative identity, and by refusing to cease play in order to allow himself, as a liminal subject, to be made sense of and to be absorbed within the discourses he critiques.

He appropriates the conventions of the night-club comedy act, of the wrestling match abstracting their vital assumptions in order to defy their liminal purpose. Through vocalising the unspoken assumptions of these forms, and through refusing to allow these forms to be resolved or assimilated in any socially acceptable manner he thus takes the logic of these initiation rituals beyond their limits, exploiting gaps and contradictions in their discursive frames to infiltrate and resist dominant tropes of socialization, a hypothesis I will examine in finer detail through a close analysis of Kaufman's performances in the next chapter. 18 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement CHAPTER II:

ON KAUFMAN & THE LIMINOID

This chapter hinges upon a close analysis of key performances by Andy Kaufman. I will deal with performances presented in the 'live' arena of television, or those which appear live, shaped by the logic of the television transmission. I will further my argument that television replaces and hybridizes previously existing forms of liminal ritual through remediation; the integration of 'old' media aesthetic and contextual qualities into new media forms (conceptualised by Bolter and Grusin (1999). I will also consider Kaufman's other performances that use and subvert liminal texts such as those of comedy, and wrestling, synergising these with television codes, moving between apolitical and extremely subversive recordings of dominant value systems. I will structure my discussion of Kaufman's work in a fairly loose chronology, dealing with performances as they become temporally, or conceptually relevant. I wish suggest that as trajectory of Kaufman's performance oeuvre developed, it moved into a more explicitly liminoid territory, in a deliberate antagonism of the orthodoxy which operate through dominant American cultural forms.

I wish to expand upon the argument introduced in the previous chapter; that the oppositional structure Turner uses to distinguish the liminoid from the liminal limits our understanding of their complex relationship. I propose that a more nuanced approach is needed-one which allows a continuum of meaning, which moves within and outside of established semiological frameworks. Such an approach is more useful I wish to come to an understanding the often ambivalent and uneasy juxtapositions of these seeming opposites in Kaufman's work.

19 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement I will first look at recent scholarship which has attempted to locate Kaufman's work within media and cultural theory in order to ground the direction of my own thesis.

APPROACHING KAUFMAN: AN ASSESSMENT OF THE SCHOLARSHIP OF AUSLANDER AND KELLER

In his critical assessment of Kaufman, in Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance (1992) Auslander contends that Kaufman undertook to deconstruct presence and discover strategies of resistance within mass-cultural contexts (1992: 140). He highlights Kaufman's incessant preoccupation with mass-cultural texts and figures, and his trademark idiosyncratic “intentional infantilism (Auslander 1992: 141), but suggests that these possess a merely “private hermetic meaning (1992: 140).” He identifies Kaufman's performances as acts of resistant ambivalence, praising his silent juxtapositions and admiring his success as a “detached satirist (Auslander 1992: 148- 9) accepting the surface value, the apolitical appearance of Kaufman's work. He fails to define Kaufman's transgressive strategies in any sufficiently concrete terms or to apprehend their exact target, in any specific motive behind his resistance.

Keller's Andy Kaufman: Wrestling With the American Dream (2005) offers a deeper probe for meaning in Kaufman's performance style. Keller rejects the framing of Kaufman's work in traditionally transgressive, or resistant terms, or within the spectrum of avant-garde performance art. He proffers that it is through the guise of over-conformism (as he borrows this term from Zizek in The Plague of Fantasies, 1979) Kaufman's works constitute an implicit critique of the ideology of the

20 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement American Dream. According to Keller, the infantilism, and the bizarre texture of cultural signification which is the 'trademark' in Kaufman's performances can be attributed to his replication of ideology of the dream in order to expose its inherent contradictions.

While Kaufman's use of an over-conformist, or over-orthodox performance technique is a pertinent feature of his work, it is only this; a feature, a mere symptom of a larger-scale project of resistance. The appearance of elements of the dream ideology in Kaufman's work, is also a consequence of his reconfiguration of dominant liminal practices, in his work. Kaufman borrows from the symbolic frame of his geopolitical, temporal reality- the American late capitalist situation is symbolised through a pastiche of liminal cultural texts which disseminate aspects of its ideals. These values include but are not limited to the American Dream. I wish not to displace the framework of the Dream from Kaufman's work however, I wish to incorporate it within a broader theoretical paradigm, one which acknowledges cultural processes of socialization as universal phenomena, and which undertakes to situate Kaufman's performance within this larger scheme.

One of the key parts of Turner's theory of the liminal ritual which I believe is repeatedly exploited in Kaufman's performances, occurs in his adoption of magnified symbolic culture monsters.

ANDY KAUFMAN AND THE SYMBOLIC CULTURE MONSTER

I wish to suggest that Kaufman's performances realise the liminal paradigm of the symbolic culture monster which I have extrapolated previously. Kaufman does this through appropriating symbols of American mass-media culture into his work. 21 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement He mimics liminal cultural Texts, presenting them so that he neither directly promotes or rejects their encoded assumptions, nor mounts or impedes a conventionally discursive strategy of resistance. His performances are neither purely iconoclastic nor textually authorized. He is relentlessly ambivalent, manifesting an interpolation of liminal and liminoid structures, problematising the inert polarities of privileging either of textuality and authorship; play or normative behaviour. By representing these abstracted symbols without explanation, clear goal or context he destabilizes the formal goal of the liminal monster to reinforce dominant values, placing the responsibility for interpretation and its implications with his audience.

One his first performances on television, was on the first episode of on October 15, 1975. In the performance Kaufman appears on stage, in a solitary spotlight, puts on a record, and stands, uncomfortably, fumbling with his hands. He mimes only the refrain "Here I come to save the day!" with a strong arm gesture, before returning to silence in the verses. He continues in this fashion, pausing in one section to drink a glass of water. The record finishes, he closes the set, and bows profusely before existing the stage. He disappears.

It is of note that one of his first live performances on television is so thoroughly mediatized. Kaufman's role in the performance is minimal as he serves as a mute, generic place-holder. The action Kaufman performs could be done by anyone. The record, as cultural text, is presented without decoration, overt satire or validation; it speaks for itself, or rather, it speaks for Kaufman, filtered through his blank expressionless face, and scant gestures. The minimalism with which he presents the text does not direct the audience's interpretation in any way. He represents the text, and its liminal pedagogic elements (as the Mighty Mouse theme touts proto- 22 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement American ideals such as heroism, and bravery through the crackling recording), allowing it to elicit equal measures of nostalgia and ironic disdain, reactions which are not shown to preclude one another. He juxtaposes the infantile text into continuity with the adult setting, allowing it to seep into the logic of the performance without needing to be contextualized or explained. When asked in interviews about his choices of songs in his performances, Kaufman offered explanations which offered no deeper explanation than the flat, superficial presentations themselves. Interviewer Hecht asked him to explain why he began a concert by singing the theme song from Oklahoma, and he stated simply “I just thought that 'Oklahoma' would be a good opening song. I don't know why it's funny (Hecht 2001: 9).” Kaufman adopts the non-hierarchical, juxtapositional language of the television transmission in his self-evident style. He appears, and disappears, a mere blip in the flow of the television programming. While he does not actively impede its progress, he avoids the comforting affirmative closure prescribed by the structure. His performance offers surface-manifestation of the aesthetics of the liminal stage, stripped of its inherent purpose.

I have already elaborated on Auslander's thesis which suggests that the live image resists a stable presence through always changing. The aesthetic of the broadcast mirrors the aesthetics of ideology, as a shifting apparatus which evolves ideas into social reality. This process can be seen as parallel to the social construction of the civilizing process of the liminal ritual. In this performance, Kaufman mimics the veneer of this apparatus, ignoring its covert aim which aims of stultify the transitory liminal stage into a normative form. He leaves it as a self-evident construct, an amorphous and uninterminable blur.

23 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement While I will approach the juxtapositional quality of his performances is more detail later, I will first examine Kaufman's utilization of the stand-up paradigm in order to subvert its cultural purpose.

ANDY KAUFMAN AND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF STAND-UP COMEDY

Kaufman's earlier public performances (c. 1972- 77) occurred in comedy clubs of New York, and subsequently in , where, after being discovered by Budd Friedman in 1972, he performed frequently at and Catch a Rising Star. His performances in 1972 included a variety of staples, including kind of failed-comedy trope in which he performed as an archetype, “Foreign Man,” singing the entire song of One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall, impersonating , and reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's aloud (Zehme, 1999). His performances in this period ranged between those which satirised the innate conventions of the stand-up form, or defied the coded assumptions of the venue altogether, in order to expose and manipulate audience expectations surrounding the form. However, some of these performances, while provocative, were to a large extent assimilable within their context. His reliance on the text of the stand-up form to create meaning, meant that in keeping with the structure of the liminal ritual, sections of his performances, and the personas in which he performed them, such as Foreign Man and a naïve form of 'Andy' persona, could be extracted and stripped of their resistant qualities to inhabit normative roles.

In order to discuss Kaufman's use of comedy, is at first necessary to explore theories of stand-up comedy in order to provide an informed analysis. I am not the first to suggest that comedy often mirrors a kind of cultural ritual, or to identify the

24 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement comedian with possessing a role of cultural mediator. This claim has been articulated explicitly in the work of several cultural theorists publishing contemporaneously within Kaufman's short career, including Douglas (1978), Koziki (1984), and Mintz (1985).

In his essay, “Jokes”, which appears in Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (1978), Douglas associates the joke within the logic of the rite, suggesting that the “joke rite (Douglas, 1978)” functions in a similar manner to a ritual rite, as a “set of symbols, “configured in such a way as to “express something about social forms (Douglas 1978: 95).” However, he constructs the joke as being always and only subversive of dominant ideas, in the formation of an “anti-rite (Douglas 1978: 95)”.

Koziki's essay, “The Standup Comedian as Anthropologist, (1984)” suggests the parallel roles of comedian and anthropologist as figures who expose the tacit elements of culture. She emphasises the necessity for the stand-up comic to explicitly, to verbally analyse these distilled, tacit elements of culture. I wish to question such a stubborn criteria is inadequate for performances such as Kaufman's, who poses a lasting critique to both culture, and its liminal forms despite often containing no explicit, or conventional, critical techniques. Mintz's “Stand-up Comedy as Social and Cultural Mediation (1985),” similarly identifies the comedian as a comic spokesperson, who is licensed to lead their audience in a public critique of culture.

I must extend on these generalities, to look at the stand-up performance as constituting a complete ideological circuit rather than focusing on its individual

25 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement subversive parts. The iconoclastic form of the stand-up act described by Douglas ignores the existence of a supplementary step, of resolution, which displaces this resistance. Such imperatives occur implicitly through framing devices which relieve tensions and anxieties stirred through the comedian's cultural analysis.

The goal of eliciting laughter is elemental to stand-up. This necessity manifests in its very structure; a repetitive cycle which moves from comfort, to tension, to relief, and thus laughter- before a final gesture which attempts to resolve all residual tension in the act. Thus the comedian must in some way be conventionally humorous; transacting unanimous laughter from the audience. This laughter may at moments stem from discomfort, from shock at the abstractness, or strangeness, with which the comedian treats their native culture, however this laughter must work in a cumulative ease the same anxieties raised in the performance. This functions as a realisation of the contradictory semiotic construction which dictate the movement of the liminal form- its trajectory as aesthetically abject quality bound for normative social function.

Stand-up is structured as a culturally sanctioned, self-contained form of play (or ludus as theorised by Caillios, 1962: 29) shaped by a central principle of temporal and ideological containment. The stand-up comedian, in order to work within a culturally sanctioned leisure space, must always signal and announce where 'play,' or jest begins and end in their performance. The comedian's examination of cultural assumptions is often enacted in a taboo manner, but in the Communitas of the nightclub venue, it becomes acceptable to act and speak in a socially unconventional register, as the comedian functions dually as liminal elder and subject, exposing and speaking out against the inherent hypocrisies which guide the dominant social codes

26 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement of their society. While “deeply held beliefs about... underpinnings of their culture- are brought to an audience's level of conscious awareness (Koziki 1984: 57),” this awareness is usually not provocative enough to move the audience toward any specific action, as to do so would constitute an illegal continuation of the liminal form outside of these boundaries. The broader symbolic frame of the stand-up stage thus functions as a safe, discrete space, a Communitas, where the stand-up comic and the audience can together release tension, honestly engaging in feelings about their reality , which must return to at the end of the show.

The potentiality for social change enacted by the presence of non-conformist ideas in the routine is proven to be aesthetic only. The normative stand-up comedy routine is therefore structured so that it can contain both the image of the liminal body- as dangerous, and interminable, possessing the potential for prompting radical social change- and still achieve its final goal of reabsorbing this body within dominant codes. Kaufman pushes this structure to its logical limits, exploiting the intrinsic codes of the stand-up formula, and forcing these to fail, in order to parody their formal aspects and depart from a liminal pedagogic function. He infinitely defers the necessary resolution of tension by never returning to a natural persona or performance state deliberately alienating his audience.

One of his most popular performance formulas, which propelled him into popular consciousness through its co-option into the role of which he played in the sitcom Taxi from 1978-1983, manifests through his adoption of the persona of Foreign Man. This performance utilized a recognizable and highly commercial performance trope of the likeable, Other character akin to the 'Mork,' character played by in the sitcom, Mork and Mindy (1978-82). This

27 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement character could be associated within this culturally sanctioned model, as an expression of innocuous “ludus, (Caillios 1962: 29).”

Despite being effectively bought by Taxi, this performance continued to be a recurring staple throughout his career. As such, I will now address one incarnation of it, which occurs after Kaufman's opening monologue (the chronologically second skit) in his special, Andy's Funhouse, filmed on July 17, 1977 and aired on ABC on August 28, 1979. In this performance Kaufman adopts one of his most commonly utilized and repeated tropes, whereby he begins in the guise of foreign man, his naïve, though likeable persona, who struggles clumsily through a stand-up routine, before, in an ironic turn, this identity and the performance in itself is revealed as a manipulative ploy.

Kaufman waddles onto stage, eyes wide, smiling, bowing excessively as his hands flail idly by his sides.“Thank you veddy much,” he says, glancing nervously back and forth, beaming widely He proceeds to deliver a mangled chain of familiar, family-friendly jokes, in an ambiguous accent. He uses generic and over-used comedic clichés, and simple puns which he fails to properly deliver, in an extremely naïve manner so as to elicit pathos:

“One thing I do not like about Los Angeles is too much traffic,” he says... “I had to come from Santa Monica on the, you know the freeway, and it took me an hour and a half to get here... but talking about the terrible things, take my wife, please take her.”

Thus, mirroring the traditional manner of the comedian, he takes objects of the

28 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement presumed geographic and social audience culture (the traffic in Los Angeles, marital issues) and presents them to the audience without analysis, taking on what Koziki's terms is the “unreflective artist:-” the bad comedian. (Koziki, 1984: 65). He continues to tell a series of cumulative corny jokes. Rather than adopting a cool, detached demeanor, or the pessimistic outrage of the 'cynical insider' theorised by Koziki (1984), or the social mediator of Mintz (1985), he feigns to be earnestly oblivious to these conventions, and the appropriate demeanour and timing required to deem these effective.

Kaufman constructs this character as excessively and ambiguously separate from, but enamored with the surface meanings of American culture. Koziki's model of the typical stand-up routine is reversed in this performance (Koziki, 1984). She theorises the comedian as interior to the cultural structures which they signify and satirise as if they were alien (Koziki, 1984): 61). In this performance, Kaufman himself becomes the alien element, the alterior Other whose gesture becomes the subject of unnatural laughter throughout the performance. Through his overly explanatory expositions of 'joke,' Texts he causes their primary function, to provoke laughter, to fail. By using clichéd, worn jokes texts he reverses "humour (as) a vitally important social and cultural phenomenon... a... revealing index to its values, attitudes, dispositions and concerns (Mintz 1985: 71):" demystifying the joke's function in the stand-up routine as a shallow device for eliciting laughter, and that its implicit meanings and observations change nothing, and hence mean nothing.

The cyclic joke-laugh, joke-laugh structure of the routine is rendered immobile when the laugh-quotient disappears. The broken machine generates the opposite effect of its functioning counterpart. It magnifies discomfort. The audience

29 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement continues to laugh at Kaufman, and he, in turn, laughs at his own jokes, failing the presumed nature of the comic form. He pleads “so listen-listen-vait.... listen listen vait;” for the audience to align their response for the appropriate intermission for laughter- after the punch-line. He delivers the punch line and fails to elicit laughs, after which he continues to explain it until he elicits the response of laughter which the joke alone should elicit “they have the cannon, but they do not have no cannonball, so they cannot shoot.” The direct audience address “Do you understand?” acts as an over signification for the end of a successful punch-line.

He follows with a series of “imitations,” another stand-up cliché, however he fails to alter his accent at all to mimic the popular, generic television characters and stars, such as “the Archie Bunker,” and “the Ed Sullivan”. Through invoking their catchphrases (Tonight we have a really big show-) and gestures without altering his expression, or 'making' specific, insightful 'fun,' of their embedded messages, he reduces the routine to its most basic form, stripping it of its seductive warmth, making the structural aspects of the routine themselves seem alien. He invokes the shared cultural symbols of celebrity, without insight, revealing nothing except for their obvious exterior qualities. He falters, pleading with the audience “wait-wait until I give you the punch”: verbalizing the inherent cues in the comic script, highlighting the tacit strategies which manipulate and position laughter in the climactic structure of the script. He complains “now I have to start over,” and of course, does so literally, returning to the start of the act, quickly and mechanically reciting the memorised progression of jokes, denaturalizing the stand-up's social construction as an improvised series of observations which are tailored to fit each individual audience, rendering that the routine is often a homogenous and generic package, a relentless civilizing gesture repeated and repeated and repeated in the 30 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement stand-up context. Kaufman, then moves to his Elvis Presley impersonation, which, through its extreme technical precision and 'authenticity,' reveal the previous section as a fabrication, a hoax; and the audience experience the normative 'shock,' which is derived from the traditional stand-up performance, not at the tacit elements of their culture, but at a realization of the artificiality of the expressive form as a transmitter of this culture in itself.

This performance functions antithetically to the highly structured, traditional mode of stand-up comedy and its strategies for eliciting a tension-abating laughter. The audience is prevented from finding humour in the content of the jokes, as these ignore expected tropes, and operate in an extremely twee, inoffensive and thus jarring register which in its unexpectedness serves to shock the audience. The audience laughter occurs out of sync, they react individually to polysemic readings not derived from within the literal text. These arise out of manifold interpretations; out of pathos, or out of discomfort, or at an ironic level, or not at all. They cannot react, and be aligned unanimously to generic signs, and thus the shared Communitas of the ritual is broken, as the audience becomes increasingly individuated; alienated from the homogenizing imperative of performance structure.

Foreign Man is structured by Kaufman as a liminal, in-between figure. By framing him in these terms he manipulates the audience into Othering this incomplete American subject. The audience is positioned to feel superior toward this unsophisticated cultural critic and his failed performance, reversing the power- dynamic of the normative comedian-audience relationship. By revealing that Foreign Man is in fact a fabrication, Kaufman symbolically implicates the audience's role in Othering of the liminal figure, and exposes the tacit discourse of exclusion through

31 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement which the uninducted person operating in a culture is labeled as dangerous, or invisible.

By transforming instantaneously into his next persona, without articulating a stable identity, or giving signals of a true self, Kaufman violates the precept of the stand-up act as a form of play that must be self-contained, as it is suggested to be in Huizinga (1949) and Caillios' accounts of the nature of play. By allowing its configuration as a realm of suspended rules to continue without resolution, his performance at this point ceases to be contained by the semiological limits of the liminal paradigm.

The tension contained in the stand-up act, which is usually derived through skirting abjection (Limon 2001), is rendered into another kind altogether. This alterior discomfort occurs as the procedural imperative which defines the act, the eventual reinstatement of a stable comedic persona, which is taken for granted is removed. The notion of a stable self in itself exposed as a construction of the form. Kaufman slips into his trademark Elvis impersonation, interrupting the assumed flow of the stand-up comedy routine, forever deferring the resolution required to end and convey a finite meaning through the resolution of the liminal ritual.

The juxtaposition of the likeable through flailing persona of foreign man with a quintessentially charming Elvis means that the architecture of the routine avoids the normative resolution of stand-up but still operates to acceptable aesthetic standards. His use of the clichéd trope of the Elvis Presley impersonation which is performed to an adequately crafted skill level to be popularly sanctioned and, means that his performance appears superficially to conform to a viably entertaining, albeit

32 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement surreal, commercial style while still being ideologically ambiguous.

Kaufman's Elvis Presley routine was also a staple of Kaufman's performance vocabulary from the beginning of his career and constitutes another of his liminal culture monsters. He draws attention to the abstract, mythic discourse which allows the fetishisation of celebrity- to slip unquestioned into the television style- the veritable, abstracted lion's head on the man's body, in Turner's terms. By placing this impersonation directly after a performance which unveils the manipulative strategies in the stand-up formula, he alienates the audience from having a purely instinctive reaction to it, as the audience is made wary that this reaction is in itself unnaturally contrived through coercion. We are made to ponder why we take Elvis impersonation at face-value, as a piece of cultural currency. The seductive quality of the television signal and its invocation of mass-cultural symbols, is implicated as hollow, artificial and manipulative, however Kaufman never explicitly terms it is such.The attractiveness of the image is essential to the viability to the television transmission in capitalist societies as “its tradition of commercialist values revises art, ultimately contextualizing it within an iconography of consumerism (Roberts 2000: 154).” Kaufman's mediatized performances draw attention to the tacit formal and ideological movements which operate beneath the surface of the television image. He demystifies its self-evident framing as an end-product, divorced from the origins and politics of its productions, in a method which nearly mirrors a Marxist deconstruction of the capitalist mystique of the table (Marx, 1867) depite being bound by these same production methods.

After his mimesis of Elvis, Kaufman moves, without signal, to the next. The swift juxtapositions of characters in his performances mimics the shifts which shape 33 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement the television broadcast, as it slips smoothly and surreptitiously from programming, to commercial break, in an ongoing, repetitive movement. The shifts and sharp contrasts in Kaufman's characters in this and other performances draw attention to the artificiality of television flow and the supposedly natural programming which makes up its content.

Through so thoroughly engaging in and replicating the aesthetic principles of the medium, the subversive elements in his performance are allowed to slip unnoticed beneath its facade. His validation through an achievement and continual self- identification with a celebrity status (which he abuses in his wrestler persona) allows him to infiltrate more far-reaching and influential arenas for public expression. Through first introducing and establishing himself through a pleasing persona, he can then shift into more explicitly subversive modes. He exploits the self-evident authority encoded in the construction of the 'celebrity,' splitting his public personality into increasingly unpredictable forms, which contradict one another, serving individual cultural tropes and politics without directly signalling these, and who, even more confusingly, usually appear under the moniker Andy Kaufman.

Kaufman's portrayal of the caricatured lounge lizard represents a departure in persona from the construction of Kaufman as character, but ironically serves to dually implicate him, as the audience blames him both for creating Clifton and for deflecting guilt for his creation. His treatment of the cultural iconography of celebrity takes on an extreme, abject quality in his portrayal of Tony Clifton. He serves as another of Kaufman's culture monsters; the antipathy to his naïve foreign man, and simulation of the quintessential celebrity and icon of Elvis- he is the totem of the bitter, rejected rubbish of the show-business machine. Clifton was irrevocably

34 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement linked with Kaufman as Kaufman fostered his career as he did his own, including him as he stipulated that Clifton make a guest star appearance in his negotiation of his Taxi contract, and booked him for separate live shows. This meant that the persona followed in and became exposed through his success. If someone wanted to book Kaufman, they would often also get Clifton, and vice versa.

Tony Clifton is structured using the conventions of the sleaziest form of Las Vegas night-club act. He sings tacky songs in a hammy style, dressed in loud, tasteless cloths, wearing sunglasses and a toupee. He is codified with the traits of the role of "negative exemplar," which are traditionally enacted by the self-deprecating comedian "to be ridiculed, laughed at, repudiated, and finally, symbolically punished (Mintz 1985: 75)." Kaufman's character of Tony Clifton epitomises the "dishonesty, selfishness, disruptive and aggressive behaviour," of the negative exemplar as it is described in Mintz's exploration of the social role of the comic. However, rather than Clifton being symbolically punished by the audience, in Kaufman's act roles are reversed as the audience becomes the attacked and punished party, the inward trajectory of the negative exemplar propelled into an outward gesture of aggression that the audience cannot stomach let alone laugh at it, sanction or applaud, as they are required to in Mintz's model (1985:77). He would often follow, or open for Kaufman at various comedy clubs, berating audience members, telling racist and sexist jokes, brawling with audience members, or actors on stage, before often being ejected from the venue. Be reversing the “pleasure,” usually derived from this “sanctioned deviance (Mintz, 1985: 77) he modifies the liminal culture monster into an abject entity. The abject Clifton is a permanent Other, a liminoid construct who cannot be assimilated within the indoctrination goal of the liminal ritual form. The implied outcome of the liminal project is denied as Clifton's audience is pushed into 35 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement a feeling of alienation and discomfort so extreme that audience members often would chose to leave the venue when he performed.

His appearances on television were similarly notorious. Part of Kaufman's contract to appear on the television show, Taxi, was the condition that Clifton have his own dressing room, and be hired for four guest appearances on the program (Zehme 1997). Clifton (Kaufman) behaved unprofessionally on set, and had to be fired after arriving for rehearsal drunk, and belligerent, accompanied by two prostitutes. While Kaufman agreed that they needed to fire Clifton, the corporeal persona needed to be forcefully ejected from the studio lot, in an event which attracted media attention (Zehme 1997). A similar, although more public incident occurred when he appeared live on the Dinah! Show in 1979 after Kaufman had appeared some time earlier. Clifton appeared drunk on the show, forcing Dinah to sing along with him, unrehearsed In the segment which followed Clifton made an omelet together with the host in what was meant to be piece of lighthearted daytime television fodder. In the footage, which has now been destroyed, Clifton poured eggs all over the host, which was an act of extreme violence in terms of the day-time television architecture, shocking the producers and the audience.

Kaufman's interventions into television were characterized by an erratic unpredictability, as his shifts in his personas became increasingly smooth and more extreme, and the personas in themselves more aesthetically similar but ideologically more individuated and abject, capable of more overt and thus dangerous subversive behavior, aided and abetted by the live construction of the television medium.

36 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement ANDY KAUFMAN, LIVENESS AND THE LIMINAL TELEVISION SCREEN

An examination of Kaufman's work invariably leads to more centred discussion of television. The essential logic of the television transmission permeates the architecture of his performances in the late 1970s and early as he becomes featured on the medium more frequently, in more authoritative, creative roles. I have already discussed in the previous chapter how the television broadcast constitutes a liminal ritual structure, where dominant ideas are portrayed in the abstract or are suspended before being re-instituted through both subliminal and overt framing devices.

A variety of theoretic discourses work on the presumption that the television operates as a social-shaping device (see Fiske 1987; Miller, 2007; McBride and Toburen 1996). I have already elaborated on several of these perspectives, and suggested that a consensus exists about the television's major role in disseminating dominant cultural values. I am not interested in mounting a challenge to this assumption, for to do so would be to focus primarily on an evaluation of the effects of television. Whether or not the television is effective in achieving its influential goal is irrelevant to my case study. I wish instead to argue the televisual medium uses the aesthetic of the pastiche in order to present a supposed summation of cultural values to its viewers, while instead instilling a homogenous response to dominant values of their culture. I wish to suggest that through adopting these same techniques, for a counter-intuitive aim, Kaufman destabilizes the liminal project of the television transmission.

37 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement I wish now to return a discussion of Andy's Funhouse (1977). A discussion of his special and its anecdotal history is key to understanding the way in which Kaufman destabilised the traditional project of the television broadcast. Another condition of Kaufman's contract to appear in the television program, Taxi, was that he would be commissioned to produce a special for the network. The special was filmed in 1977, but was not aired until 1979, because ABC network executives believed that it was not commercially viable (Zehme 1997). They objected to aspects of it, including an overly long introduction where he pretended, as foreign-man, to not have actually filmed the special, with extended periods of 'dead air' (Zehme 1997). Another extremely long scene where naïve -eyed Kaufman engaged with the puppet as though he was a real person, was thought to be edited poorly as it occurred in real-time, and overly sentimental, ill-suited to an adult audience (Zehme 1997). What the producers were most concerned about, was a section where the vertical hold of the television image was made to jump, making it appear broken, for an extended period of time. The notion of playing with, and thus drawing attention to the technological inscriptions, the material aspects of the television which are naturalized through normal programming threatened the producers as they feared that it would alienate viewers (Zehme 1997). The producers, then, functioning in a liminal elder role, were worried as they believed this would interrupt the flow of the programming, in a Czikszentimihalyian sense, inhibiting the medium's ability to assuage the viewing public and to fulfill the wishes of their commercial sponsors. The co-option of the variety show by an inconstant and seemingly incoherent host with an instable identity meant that the show was commercially unviable, and was aired relunctantly, without the hope of ever returning as a series.

38 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement By inhibiting the commercial interests of the broadcast Kaufman puts the guiding assumptions which codify the television broadcast radically at risk. As his career progressed, Kaufman's work became coded less through adherence to palatable models interpretable within established tropes (such as through the nostalgic text of the Elvis imitation) and moved toward a more dominant tone of explicit subversion.

A particularly potent example of such subversion occurred when Kaufman performed a skit on the show, Fridays on February 20, 1981. This event occurred when he defied the vital understanding of the improvised skit, and caused chaos. He invalidated the contract of the performance, that the actors perform agreed parts in the service of a controlled, naturalized although discursively 'improvised' situation. In the skit, set in a restaurant, a group of actors where supposed to pretend to individually 'get high,' off a marijuana joint in the bathroom, before returning to the table for conventionally humorous depictions of 'stoned' behaviour, the abject illegality of this trope contained within the safe, ritualized television realm. By refusing to partake in the skit as planned, feigning moral reasons “I’m sorry, I can't play stoned,” during the skit he interrupts the internal logic and the progress of the program. “I feel stupid,” he says. Another actress, follows his lead, also breaks character, complaining “How do you think we feel?” The two main conditions of improvised comedy are that there is no 'dead air,' and that the interactions continue without breaking the ‘fourth wall,’ and, through refusing to participate, or to act to ameliorate this situation, he perpetuates silence and forces the other actors into abnormal moves in order to correct the performance to fit its liminal goal. , sitting across from Kaufman, breaks the silence, grabbing the cue card

39 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement from an assistant and dropping it in Kaufman's lap. Thus, he is forced breaks another of the implicit laws which allows the performance to operate, acknowledging the covert control which underlies this discursively live context, thus exposing the contradictions in its structural logic.

Kaufman engages physically with Richards, which then turns to a brawl, where Kaufman grapples on stage with a producer before the spectacle is contained. The show breaks to commercial, as the producers attempt to defuse the dangerous liminoid nature of the spectacle and to reinstate the normative function of the show through the intervention of a conventional culture monster in the form of a commercial message. However, the flow of the program is already irreparably broken, and can only be resolved by Kaufman, the liminoid subject, admitting his fault, correcting himself in order to be re-aligned within the institutional logic of the show.

Kaufman's hoaxes broke the liminal function of the comedy sketch. His unwillingness to 'go along,' with, and his abuse of the live aesthetic of the broadcast, takes it to its logical conclusions, that 'anything can happen.' Producers recognized the unacceptable subversive nature of the performance, and forced Kaufman to apologize on the next show on February 27, an order which he again defied, abusing the liveness of the broadcast in order to revoke his apology before its message could be censored. His unwillingness to follow the established code of the skit and to be subsumed within and thus made sense of through its standard tropes caused an intolerable interruption in the continuity of the television image.

40 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement As his career progressed, Kaufman's subversive, liminoid responses to the television ritual became more extreme. The downward trajectory of his commercial viability as an entertainer was irrevocably linked to his abuse of the wrestling entertainment paradigm.

ANDY KAUFMAN AND THE WORLD OF WRESTLING

In order to approach Kaufman's use of the wrestling paradigm it is first necessary to look at the scholarship surrounding the function of wrestling in Western capitalist societies. The spectatorship of the spectacle is characterized by a peculiar friction. The embedded cultural assumption which guides the viewing of the wrestling match manifests from its structure, which contains two equally important and competing factors. Firstly, it is taken as a known hoax- a choreographed sequence of visual climaxes, with a pre-ordained conclusion. The second is that the audience takes it as an ontologically real, 'live' event, reacting appropriately to its cues; acting immersed in the devices and climaxes of its unfolding narrative before reacting adequately to its conclusion. The co-existence of these two factors should interrupt the conventional logic of the sporting spectacle. Somehow this outcome is avoided.

Barthes, in his formative essay on French professional wrestling characterises it. not “as a sport, it is a spectacle (Barthes 1972: 15).” If we take a Barthesian approach to wrestling, then, the internal contradictions which underpin its structure cease to be of consequence, and it becomes misguided to hold it to same principles

41 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement as the sporting match. Barthes' conception of the wrestling event as spectacle, as excess, dictates that its structure should dissolve normative sporting logic. If we take wrestling as a spectacle, not a sport, then we are interested in its cumulative, aesthetic value, as “a sum of spectacles (Barthes 1972: 16). Thus, the symbolic and aesthetic value of the wrestling match displaces that of the “crowning moment of a result (Barthes 1972: 16)” in the logic of the sporting spectacle and the interest of the sports fan. The fan's engagement with the wrestling match is not dependent on any logical outcome, or whether the contest is “ rigged or not (1972: 15)” but is based on the effectiveness of the wrestler's replication of established symbols or choreography. The mode of evaluation is closer to that of the dancer, than of the athlete, as the audience assesses the efficacy of the flow with which they “go through the motions which are expected of (them) (Barthes 1972: 16)”.

Kaufman emerged like a parasite into the world of wrestling. He exploited its innate contradiction by borrowing from its performance dialectic, appropriating it into a real-world domain in which he drew attention its tacit cultural assumptions. He incensed his audience, forcing them either to vocalize against him or thus contradict their internal values to appear socially acceptable, or to elucidate the unspoken assumptions which guide the wrestling spectacle, acknowledging their acquiescence to a flawed systemic logic in order to defend its social function.

In 1979, Kaufman began performing as Inter-gender Wrestling Champion of the World. By inverting wrestling's inherent homosociality into male-female heterodoxy he highlights the embedded discriminatory logics which are symbolically inscribed in the male domain of competitive sports. By taking on a posture of an extremist phallocentricism and offensive misogynism he forces the audience to react 42 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement against, and disavow this behaviour, to avoid being associated with such a primitive caveman model of masculinity. He paraded about on stage, making inflammatory statements “I think [women']''re good for scrubbing the potatoes and washing the carrots ... putting it in the pot- Please. Uh, um, mopping the floors, raising the babies (Kaufman on SNL, October 20, 1979).” He would repeatedly make a gesture with a descending hand movement, denoting levels of hierarchy- “God, man, woman, dog...” (the gaps between god and man, and woman and dog being the smallest) in order to incense his audience, before inviting women to challenge him to a wrestling match, where the winner would win $1000, and often, a second, even more insulting and thus provocative prize, Kaufman's hand in marriage. The model of masculinity he enacts however, bears a striking resemblance to the stereotype of the all-American hero of the conventional wrestling paradigm. Instead of inflating the benevolent masculine attributes of the paternal hero as he is construed in wrestling consciousness- in terms of protectiveness and gallantry- Kaufman uses an opposite strategy, stripping this figure of euphemism, magnifying the implicitly conservative, sexist ideals which underpin these masculine traits. In his account of Kaufman' wrestling exploits, his writer and friend, contends that Kaufman's wrestling of women constituted nothing more than a quest for sexual gratification (Zmuda 2004: 165). This extreme and offensive aspect of the performance, as Kaufman presses his body against the women he wrestles, using it as a form of foreplay, could be said to mirror a similar technique in male-male professional wrestling, drawing attention its closeted homoeroticism. This poses a threat to the traditional model of machoism as heteronormative virility and paternal heroism in the wrestling paradigm. The audience is made subconsciously uneasy, and must ask: if these wrestlers are queer, then what does this mean for the nationalistic American identity? In the conservative political climate of wrestling spectatorship, such an 43 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement ambiguity is not acceptable. In defiance of wrestling's absolutist politics, Kaufman alludes to its unspoken, unclear, liminal qualities, as it is both sexually and thus politically ambiguous.

Kaufman's engagement with professional wrestler, Jerry “The King,” Lawler, serves as a second inversion, or turn, in his play with the wrestling paradigm as he transposes the male-female model, back into a male-male domain. He splinters the paradigm another level from its 'true' form, defusing the traditional liminal impetus of the wrestling paradigm. The political assumptions which structured the popular wrestling in the 1980s are elucidated by Mondak in "The Politics of Professional Wrestling (1989)." Mondak suggests that the politics of American wrestling, rather than fluctuating in tandem with the political climate, adhere to a rigidly nationalistic sentiment. Thus its popularity is dependent on shifting levels of identification with discourses of jingoism and xenophobia in American society. In the 1980s, wrestling was framed in binary terms, reflecting a Cold War discourse which operated at the time, posed through a series of simplistic dichotomies; of America vs. the Soviets and Iran; Us. vs. Them; Good vs. Evil, etc. These were signified through simplistic symbolic configurations of complicated political issues. This wrestling paradigm can be linked to a liminal project, as it homogenizes competing views into a dominant America-centric discourse on international political relations in order to indoctrinate viewers within these. This is achieved through overt strategies which teach and reinforce manufactured responses that place audiences on the 'right,' nationalistic side of a black-and-white morality, which abhors the beliefs and behaviour of the unambiguous and often foreign villain. The wrestling spectacle serves the same purpose of the liminal ritual, as a prescribed, limited space in which the laws of the society are suspended and treated symbolically to reinforce their real-world social 44 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement value. American morality is performed here in an exaggerated, monstrous form, and normal laws, such as those related to violence, appear suspended through the aesthetics of the form, so they can then be reinforced through the inevitable triumph of the American hero. Kaufman aligns himself on the wrong side of this moral compass.

Not only is Kaufman's villain character on the wrong side of the Good vs. Evil dichotomy of the wrestling paradigm, he is also the wrong kind of villain; he is not a foreign evil, but a domestic one. Kaufman thus inverts the violently outward trajectory of the American nationalist sentiment, reconfiguring the xenophobic politics of the American wrestling paradigm back into those of an internal civil war. Adopting the role of the over-privileged Yankee-cum-Hollywood star he baits his Southern audience into vilifying this forgotten enemy, the northern invader. He plays the character of the villain, and the spoil-sport, who is more dangerous to the sanctionable aspects of play than the cheat, according to Huizinga (1949) . He averts the necessary conclusion of the wrestling match, that of justice, and infinitely defers its realization through his relentless forays into the wrestling world.

Andy Kaufman planned to wrestle Jerry, “The King” Lawler at the Mid- South Coliseum in Memphis, Tennessee. In order to whip the audience into fervor about the match, he and Lawler filmed promotional ads to be played on television, in which the two wrestlers participated in a war of words. Clips of these appear in the 1989 documentary, I'm From Hollywood that details Kaufman's exploits into wrestling. One such video contains Andy “I'm From Hollywood,” Kaufman inciting Southern viewers with a condescending instructional video telling them how to use “sope,” not “sooahp,'' (imitating a Southern drawl). In this video, by directly 45 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement addressing the audience he plays with the television's interpellative strategy- the audience is incited into real rage at his image, enacting a dynamic which renders them as his subjects, while drawing our attention to the device as an illusion, a transparently artificial projection. In a subsequent video, Kaufman wrestles a 500 pound woman, to demonstrate his ability to beat the hero, Lawler, while repeatedly using fake legalistic jargon and incensing the audience through his invocation of symbols of privilege and celebrity, repeatedly snarling “I'll sue you!” In the clip, Zmuda, appearing as Kaufman's lawyer, stands by while Kaufman smashes the woman's face repeatedly into the ground. The woman appears genuinely hurt and the lawyer rushes to the woman, feeling her pulse. The recorded incident plays with the architecture of liveness in the television image; he depicts a sensational shocking scene which appears to run simultaneously with our own temporal reality, however, we can ironically engage with it at a level of detachment as we are aware of the inherent artificiality of his methods.

After this manipulative build-up to the event, on April 5, 1982, the Memphis audience gathered to see Kaufman, the villain, punished in a brutal though conventional manner. They were disappointed. Lawler performed an illegal move, on Kaufman, causing him a massive (although fake) neck injury. As Barthes suggests, even though "the forbidden move becomes dirty only when it destroys a quantitative equilibrium.... what is condemned by the audience is the lack of revenge, the absence of a punishment (Barthes 1972: 24).” Kaufman does receive retributive violence, however, it is bittersweet and hence anti-climatic, defying the logic of the wrestling spectacle, as Lawler, by engaging in illegal conduct, loses the match, and Kaufman can still claim to be the victor occupying the liminal realm of the wrestling world well beyond his prescribed temporal limits. While the injury was simulated, as was the 46 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement feud between Lawler and Kaufman, this artificiality similarly abused and exploited the inherent contrivance of the liminal model which they copied. Kaufman’s refusal to break character, and to discontinue commercially unsanctionable modes of performance led to his being rejected from the liminal realm, rendered terminally liminoid.

TERMINALLY LIMINOID: ANDY KAUFMAN GETS KICKED OFF TELEVISION

After appearing as a regular for several years on Saturday Night Live, on 20 November 1982, Kaufman, at his own request, was voted off the television program. A public telephone poll was used, wherein viewers voted whether or not Kaufman could continue to appear on the audience. Kaufman invited and goaded the viewers to reject him from the television screen. The audience, conditioned by the television's disseminated logic of ideology-as-entertainment-as-capital,rejected Kaufman , whose abject performance style subverted their intrinsic expectations of television. The liminoid Kaufman could not be resolved within the liminal project of the television screen, and thus had to be censored from it.

Kaufman's continued insistence upon maintaining his wrestler persona, and his unwillingness to conform to any distinct identity, meant that his popularity as a performer continued to wane until his death in 1984. After he was rejected from SNL it became increasingly difficult for him to appear on television, and, aside from appearances on the Show, his public appearances were few and far between. His late performances on the Letterman show constituted some of his most

47 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement overt, bizarre and volatile attacks on the televisual medium.

On July 28 1982, after their wrestling match, Kaufman and Lawler appeared as guests on Letterman's show, with Kaufman still wearing his neck brace. In the live skit, Lawler slaps Kaufman, Kaufman swears repeatedly at Lawler before storming off the lot.” Another skit involved Kaufman appearing disheveled on stage and begging the audience for change before being ejected from the set. In another appearance, in a bizarre recalibration of his use of the culture-monster, singing the Slim Whitman country song, Rosemarie, in an extremely skilled tenor, demonstrating his remarkable yodeling technique and juxtaposing these by wearing a random assortment of costume items; a turban, a moustache, and a diaper. His unwillingness to return to normative practices, and his increasing divergence into bizarre territory meant that he could not return from the brink.

Kaufman’s work encompassed an almost complete circuit of the trajectory of the liminal vindication to liminoid obscurity, a state from which he could not escape before his death.

48 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement CHAPTER III: CONCLUSION In the previous chapters, I have utilized the case study of the performances of Andy Kaufman to reflect on the theoretic construction of the luminal ritual, and its liminoid antipathy, in the work of Turner, assessing its suitability as a framework for assessing the politics of cultural resistance in performative expression.

In the first chapter, I outlined key aspects of the luminal ritual, the Communitas which constitutes its social arrangement, the tropes which are utilized in order to indoctrinate liminal subjects into dominant social hierarchies, and the social construction of the liminal subject which allows this ritual to function properly. I linked these key aspects to elements of the political economy and aesthetic construction of the television transmission, suggesting that the television used similar discursive strategies to advance a similar goal, to indoctrinate viewers into disciplined, and socially useful, logics of thought. I extrapolated his subsequent terming of culturally subversive expressive practice of the liminoid. I suggested that his construction of the liminoid as an adversarial binary to the “brainwashing” (Turner 1979: 479) practice of the liminal ritual ignored the possibility for a resistant technique between these extremes, which I suggested could be demonstrated through the performance tropes of Andy Kaufman.

In the second chapter, I analysed key works of Andy Kaufman, first looking at his appropriation of the symbolic culture monster paradigm through his ambivalent use of recorded mass-cultural texts, such as in the Mighty Mouse routine, the use of a clichéd trope of the Elvis impersonation, and his deliberately abject depiction of the Tony Clifton character, to differing effects, juxtaposing and shifting sharply between 49 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement traditional liminal and subversive liminoid performance forms in ambiguous political variants. I looked at this use of the conventions of the stand-up formula, his forays into television, and his subsequent fall from grace through his overtly offensive and subversive wrestling persona.

I have argued that his work sits between liminal and liminoid extremes. He first offers ambivalent representations of liminal texts which serve to equivocate these back into polysemous configurations, opposing the hegemonic project implicit in this ritual element. These evolve into subversive, liminoid responses which directly and aggressively abuse these texts, rendering them abject, alterior and thus alien to normative cultural function. It is from this point that his work departs from an uncanny mirroring of liminality, and is rendered as pronounced liminoid defiance mounted within the liminal gaps in the social fabric as it is encoded in mass media texts, before he can be banished infinitely through censorship, and the intrinsic irresolvable qualities of the liminoid form.

I wish to suggest that his surreptitious mimetic gestures, as he positions him as insidiously interior to, and thus encoded within the same symbolic frictions which constitute of the liminal signifies the most effective cultural resistance in his work. By exploiting the structural invisibility of the liminal form he can then subvert and thus dismantle the hegemonic project of mass entertainment from within the discursive gaps in its ideology.

Through an analysis of his work it becomes clear that a more nuanced theory for the culturally resistant performance is necessary. It must move, and adapt, as performance does, allowing for a continuum of cultural meanings, between extremes. 50 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement BIBLIOGRAPHY

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53 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement FILMOGRAPHY

Dinah! (1979), CBS, 19 September, Videorecording.

Fridays (1981) ABC, 20 February, Videorecording. Fridays (1981), ABC, 20 February, Videorecording.

I'm From Hollywood (1989) Margulies, Linda and Orr, Joe. Joe Lynn Productions Inc, United States of America, 60 mins

Late Night with David Letterman. (1982). 28 July, Videorecording.

NBCs Saturday Night (Saturday Night Live), (1975) NBC, 11 October Videorecording. Accessible Online: http://www.evtv1.com/player.aspx?itemnum=5341 Saturday Night Live! (1979), NBC, 20 October. Videorecording. Saturday Night Live! (1982) NBC, 20 November. Videorecording.

The Andy Kaufman Special aka Andy's Funhouse, (1979) ABC, 28 April Videorecording.

54 Eloise Grills 329175 English Honours Thesis Requirement