There’s always an audience; give them something

Hey there, Gators. Hey there, Baby Gators. I’m kidding, of course; the Baby Gators can’t read. Was that commentary on our shoddy American education system and its effect on our freshmen, or was that an obvious statement because the toddlers of the Baby Gator nursery most likely can’t read?

Art is all about interpretation.

So, how was your Spring Break? Or, if you were here at UF, how was your Spring Break? Y’all should really take a peek at the Alligator Stylebook, which deals with a bunch of these grammatical, syntactical quirks. Did you know syntactical was a word? I didn’t know until I typed it out.

So, hey there. I write columns about comedy. I’m going to keep doing that. Let’s talk about comedy. Have you ever heard of Andy Kaufman? Let’s talk about Andy Kaufman. He never considered himself a comedian, and most of his later work never involved traditional jokes. Rather, he spent his career pranking his contemporary audience and maintaining a number of facades, personas and false beliefs. I won’t go into detail; watch his material yourself if you’d like. Calling him a prankster would be undermining his genius, but in essence that’s who he was: He spent his career lying to and tricking his audience.

Comedy is a series of puzzles. To solve a puzzle, you use logic to connect bits of information together to create a solution. A good joke provides all the information, and it’s up to the audience to find the joke’s central irony. Kaufman, however, never revealed to his contemporary audience a key bit of information: He never revealed his antics were hoaxes. His anti-woman wrestling career, his rude and obnoxious lounge lizard persona and the purposeful hiccups in his TV show were all portrayed as very real by Kaufman and his cohorts. Again, look all of this up. It’ll be good for you.

Kaufman’s life was so full of hoaxes and staged accidents that when he died in 1984, many folks thought his death was a lie. And while his close friend Bob Zmuda has essentially confirmed his death, a handful of people refuse to fall for another one of Kaufman’s pranks.

If you think about it, Kaufman is one of the only comedians to have an exclusively posthumous audience. The folks for whom he performed weren’t the audience members of “Saturday Night Live” or “Taxi.” He performed for us. Let me explain.

Comedy is a puzzle, right? And the major piece missing for his audience was the fact that it was a joke. If you were to take Kaufman’s performances seriously, you’d most likely be disgusted or made otherwise uncomfortable. But now that we’ve looked back at Kaufman, conducted interviews with friends and family and linked together his antics, we can look at Kaufman as one of the grandest comedians of all time. His jokes spanned years, and the payoff now is incredibly satisfying for us as audience members. What’s more, his comedy was always self-deprecating. Not self-deprecating in the sense that he beat himself up, but in the sense that he put himself in scenarios in which his audience beat him up — literally, in some cases. If you’re interested in how artists handle the public eye or media attention, look to Andy Kaufman.

So, what’s the opinion here? I have a knack for talking about comedy and then shoehorning in a moral or two. So, I’ll do that again here. Firstly, comedy is an art. Obviously. Secondly, consider for whom you’re performing, Baby Gators. You perform when you meet people, when you speak up in class and when you interview at showcases and places of employment. Your audience doesn’t necessarily know what they want until you give it to them. Experiment. Subvert their expectations. Be funny.

Michael Smith is a mechanically engineered junior. His column is merely a mirage. It also appears on Tuesdays.