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Analysis Of Robert Kaufman 's ' The Crucible ' Essay

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“I’m not trying to be funny… I just want to play with their heads” (Kaufman). Beyond this confession and a few others, Andy Kaufman rarely talked about what he did on stage. In betraying artistic convention, rarely telling jokes at all, and chiding the audience itself when they failed to play along with his performances, Kaufman surprisingly succeeded in failing to avoid notoriety during his career. As exposed as his fame made him, Kaufman rarely showed himself as himself. His public image was a prodigious collage of identities, characters, and personas, all bizarre and all successful in their portrayal of eccentric, dopish morons: failures in the traditional sense. Kaufman’s career consisted of a sporadic array of localized failures whose manifestations, oddly, are remembered as successes. He presented his ironically bad humor in a manner that joyously resounded with the crowd. As often as he did admittedly “play with their heads”, his audience rarely failed to play along.
One of his most divisive performances premiered at the Los Angeles comedy club, “The Improv”. As Kaufman runs up to the stage, he is greeted warmly by both optimistic newcomers, and his hardcore fans who likely know what they’re in for. On stage, before performing the sketch, Kaufman informs the audience that he had 10 years prior performed that same routine in front of the same club, and was kicked out for it. The audience laughs. Finishing his introduction, he proceeds to a table set up on the side of

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