If audiences became disgruntled by his failure to amuse, he might burst into tears, his cries and shrieks becoming increasingly incoherent and rhythmic until he suddenly started expertly accompanying his vocals on conga drums. He often seemed like a straight man with no partner. His ineffective jokes and weird stunts are seen as an offshoot of Conceptual art, performance art and the interactive strategies of relational aesthetics.
When we tackle the sitcom next week, we will talk about the difficulty of defining comedy. Certainly one way of looking at laughter is as response to dissonance, something that is out of tune with our expectations and at the same time benign, not sudden death but sudden silly. I thought of Kaufman as a comic who exaggerated the unexpected, who bent it so far that sometimes the tension and confusion were so deep we lacked the confidence to laugh - and then the laughter came when he dialed it back to more conventional comedy and we were relieved. And certainly part of my pleasure in him was the idea - when he was reading from Gatsby is an example - that I got him while others didn't even if I wasn't sure what it was I got. Oh Robertson you old hipster, so eager to laugh at others for not getting the joke, not getting that in fact it is a joke even if it's not exactly funny, i.e., laugh worthy.
Comedy sans laughter? Too deep for the kids? Too deep for me!
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