Jim Carrey Resurrects Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon
Still photograph of Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman on the set of Man on the Moon (from Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond).
I remember when I first encountered Andy Kaufman. It was Summer of 2022, and I had somehow wound up living in Roanoke, Virginia, a long way from home in Minnesota. I only had one, very tenuous connection in the city, plus three roommates whose staunch Christian values left us very little to connect over. Desperate to devote my attention elsewhere, I went to Barnes & Noble and picked up a copy of Live from New York, a nearly six-hundred-page oral history of Saturday Night Live.
After I got past the preamble of the show’s beginnings, what marked each cast member’s account of the very first episode was one performance: Andy Kaufman.
Andy Kaufman - SNL
Kaufman was a comedian, although he would have characterized himself as a “song and dance man,” who rose to prominence during the 70s. I had never heard about his Mighty Mouse theme song lip-sync, and my first impressions reading about it left me confused as to exactly what was so funny. After googling the performance, however, I began to understand why Kaufman was meant to shake up television. For those like me and decades removed from this cultural moment, an awkward Kaufman stands alone onstage, moving the needle onto the record player when prompted. When he does so, the Mighty Mouse theme song, an animated television show about a superhero mouse that ran from the 50s into the 60s, plays. Moments when he’s not fidgeting with his hands, which are few and far between, Kaufman gains an uncharacteristic confidence as he gestures out towards the audience and impersonates Mighty Mouse’s bellow: “here I come to save the day!” It was understated in a way that was unlike any comedic act I’d seen before. Just before I grew embarrassed for him, there he was belting out Mighty Mouse’s cry yet again.
I was eager to learn more about how a perplexing figure like Andy Kaufman comes to be. His comedy hinged on the elaborate gags and pranks that he would stage, one such example being his stint in professional wrestling where he famously staged a fight with professional wrestler Jerry “The King” Lawler on Late Night with David Letterman. My personal journey with Kaufman culminated in Man on the Moon (1999), a Hollywood biopic of his life that the film’s screenwriters, Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski, were initially skeptical to create simply because “so many of the moments in his life were bogus.”
In Man on the Moon, we follow Andy Kaufman (who could only be brought to life by Jim Carrey’s mastery of impressions) from his childhood through his untimely death. Despite professing that he has no gauge for what is funny and Carnegie Hall dreams, he’s nevertheless swept up by successful talent manager George Shapiro (Danny DeVito) when he’s scouted at an improv open mic. What ensues feels like a fragmented series of performances facilitated by Kaufman and his writing partner, Bob Zmuda (Paul Giamatti). Shapiro realizes he has taken on the Sisiphysian task of cleaning up after Kaufman’s eclectic performance choices, namely reading the entirety of The Great Gatsby during a college performance, founding “intergender wrestling” where he exclusively wrestled women and denounced southerners in the Memphis circuit, and insisting that Tony Clifton, Kaufman’s lounge singer, alter ego, make periodic appearances. His stunts generate initial praise in their sheer originality and shock value, but ultimately cause him to fall out of popularity with audiences. Still, Kaufman continues to one-up his performances and gags, so much so that when he tells Shapiro that he has lung cancer, he does not believe him. Ths fall from grace, reckoning with mortality, and the rare moments of sincerity that we witness between Kaufman and his love interest, Lynne Margulies (Courtney Love), peel back moments where the audience almost believes they are seeing the real Andy Kaufman. Even at his own funeral, though, Andy could not help but have pre-recorded a cheery singalong, complete with subtitles, where he sings “This Friendly World” in a projection over his open casket.
Funeral scene in Man on the Moon.
The film ends on a Tony Clifton performance, a year after Andy Kaufman’s death. The audience assumes that it is Zmuda impersonating Kaufman as Clifton, but the camera pans back across the audience to reveal Zmuda watching Clifton in the back to the sweet menagerie of cultural references in R.E.M.’s Man on the Moon. Could this be yet another one of Kaufman’s elaborate hoaxes or just one last Tony performance, aptly a cover of Gloria Gayner’s “I Will Survive,” to commemorate his legacy? Tasked with the incongruous task of writing a biopic on a man whose biography is largely hearsay, screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karazewski take a leap of faith by diverging from the biopic form and leaving the film partly unresolved.
By the time they had come around to writing a film about Andy Kaufman, the duo Alexander and Karazewski were already well known writers in the biopic genre, or rather the anti-biopic, “a movie about somebody who doesn’t deserve one.” Man on the Moon was their third anti-biopic sparked by the success of Ed Wood and The People vs. Larry Flynt, and this niche catapulted the two into being hot commodities for studios, many of which would afford them more creative control. Despite their associations within the industry for their particular brand of biopic, the genre of biopic as understood by the public was one of the chief contributors to the initial negative reception Man On the Moon. Movie critic Dan Sterritt calls it a contender for the “most misunderstood movies” of 1999. Looking at the promotional material preceding the film’s release, it is not hard to understand why expectations were not met.
The official trailer, for one, is structured in a way that promises to elucidate the humanity behind the complicated career of Andy Kaufman.
Man on the Moon (1999) Original Trailer [FHD]
It begins with a highlight reel of his infamous performances, where the cuts between the Brady Bunch-esque, compartmentalized shots speed up in conjunction with Carrey professing he will do it “again, and again, and again.” The trailer then transitions into a much more sentimental tone, implying that under his nebulous persona, Man on the Moon intends to uncover “the story of the man, the myth, the misunderstanding,” Andy Kaufman. The movie, however, proves to be largely unconcerned with this. Rather, Alexander and Karaszewski set out to “make the movie that Andy Kaufman would have made.” At the root of Kaufman’s style is interrogating the very nature of the audience. Instead of the “shared identity” that usually exists between comic and audience, he instead excludes them from the inside joke. Kaufman would never let the audience fully in on the movie, thus its creators found subtle moments to replicate this style in the film.
Despite the form-defying conventions of Kaufman’s comedy, it is important to note that Alexander, Karaszewski, and Miloš Forman, Academy Award-winning director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and director of Man on the Moon, had all been working in Hollywood for a sizable period beforehand. Because of this, Alexander and Karaszewski encountered problems as historically satirical writers representing figures such as the real-life George Shapiro, who they had befriended while conducting interviews for Man on the Moon. The two admit they enjoy working in Hollywood and play to what conventions studios look for in a screenplay, similar to that which Miloš Forman expressed despite his lingering auteur, Czech New Wave associations. It was Forman’s filmography that generated studio worries that Man on the Moon might be perceived as an art film and scare away Jim Carrey fans. This ultimately led Universal Pictures’ decision to not participate in the film’s launch in the film-festival circuit. Despite its extensive, albeit misguided, mainstream promotional campaign, the film ended up grossing just $47 million in comparison to the film’s $52 million budget. This was the worst of any of Carrey’s films following his rise to stardom following his triple-film release in 1994 (Ace Ventura, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber). Clearly, there was a gap in understanding as to which audience Man on the Moon served. No matter the intentions of Alexander and Karaszewski, studio pressures of a high-budget film forced it to be attentive to appealing to the widest possible audience, whereas Kaufman and Carrey’s performances prove that they would rather test their audience’s limits. The environment the film grew out of made it near impossible for it to function in the spirit of Andy Kaufman and reject the rigidity of the very institutions that promoted it.
The main critiques of the film, in turn, speak to the conventionality and predictability of a screenplay that winds up in the pitfalls of biopic clichés in its effort to condense an entire life into a little under two hours. Discussing their writing process, Alexander and Karaszewski continuously return to the question of how they adapted Kaufman’s life into the conventional three-act structure, a tenet of screenwriting. What tends to overshadow nearly every critique made, however, is how eerily Carrey inhabits the spirit and mannerisms of Andy Kaufman. In many ways, Carrey’s personal life and influences parallel that of Kaufman’s own. Not only do Kaufman and Carrey have the same birthday, but Carrey’s talent for impressions was born out of similar practices to Kaufman. While Carrey would practice faces in front of the mirror growing up, early on in the film, we similarly get an eccentric picture of a young Kaufman trying out voices in his room. It is clear in Carrey’s portrayal, and in conversation about Kaufman, that he has a deep admiration for the ways that Kaufman pushed the boundaries of what was funny, and his commitment to his bits. It is appropriate that the semi-recent documentary that explores Carrey’s experience on set, Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond, the trailer introduces a reflexivity akin to Man on the Moon (“So Jim[...]how would you start this movie?”).
Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix
Perhaps what Kaufman was best and initially known for when he broke into mainstream comedy was his “foreign man” character, Latka, which saw his debut on the 70s sitcom Taxi. Man on the Moon opens on a black and white Carrey as Kaufman as this foreign man. Against the popular criticism of the film, this choice of opening serves to confuse the audience and should prepare them for deception. Total control of the film and its trajectory is diegetically granted to Kaufman:
“I broke into Universal and cut out all de baloney. Now, it's much shorter. In fact – this is the end of the movie.”
Jim Carrey addressing the audience and rolling the credits in Man on the Moon.
After this moment, the credits begin to roll, and the screen snaps to black when Carrey shuts the record player. Quickly after, Carrey slowly emerges from the side of the screen, and no longer speaks with an accent, but the voice of what we believe is the real Andy Kaufman.
“Oh. You’re still here? Oookay! I hope you’re not upset. I did that to get rid of those folks that just wouldn’t understand me, and don’t even want to try.”
He then goes on to explain how the movie is filled with “colorful characters” like the one he just did, and the one he’s doing now. The genre of the biopic is founded upon a basis in reality. What this opening serves to do is turn this notion up on its head. Rather than let the film unfold into the recognition that the story being told is diegetically written by its actors, such as in Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation, Man on the Moon makes it clear from the getgo that it is relinquishing authorial control onto Andy Kaufman, though we still have no clue as to who that really is. Not only does this function as homage by Alexander and Karaszewski to Andy while working within the confines of the blockbuster format, but it simultaneously places the onus on Jim Carrey to function as a pseudo-authorial presence in the film. The movie also distinguishes its audience as an exclusive group. It becomes a catch-22 of the movie explicitly disparaging itself so as to whittle down its audience, but at the same time generating intrigue from an audience that is curious to see how the film will get back on course with their preconceived notions of what constitutes a film. Just as Andy takes advantage of audience expectations for a punchline by stringing them along, Man on the Moon does the same with movie conventions. When the story is put in the hands of Kaufman, whose ex-girlfriend Margulies contended that “there is no Andy Kaufman,” the movie similarly finds itself in a liminal space, accentuated by the black backdrop. This quote from Alexander and Karaszewski’s interviews was pivotal to the creation of the film, and how they can only present a life and pass off the dilemma of what is “real” to the viewer.
Of course, the movie can not end right when it begins, but the film will push the envelope as much as Universal will allow it to.
Behind the scenes was often where the production was pushed past this envelope. Preparing for the role, Carrey made the decision to method act as Kaufman on and offscreen. Everyone was required to refer to him as Andy, but when he wasn’t Andy he was causing a ruckus as Tony Clifton. I forgot to mention that along with being a lounge singer, Clifton was also a notorious asshole. Just as he sabotages the set of Taxi and cracks insensitive jokes at his performances in the film, offscreen Tony Clifton was being rude to the crew and breaking into Spielberg’s offices demanding to see the shark from Jaws. While Andy was childish and difficult to work with, Tony was abusive and filling Danny DeVito’s trailer with crickets and salami. At the height of his career following the success of the The Truman Show, distinguishing him as a serious actor along with a comic, Jim Carrey was a rare case in being able to get away with this behavior. Fact and fiction were distilled into one in the same offscreen and onscreen, though at the expense of many crew members’ sanity, not excluding Miloš Forman’s.
Jim Carrey as Tony Clifton getting kicked off the set of Taxi in Man on the Moon.
Although the humor that arose from Carrey’s, or rather Andy’s, antics likely did not outweigh the frustration, it undoubtedly played a critical role in forcibly inserting Carrey’s vision of Kaufman onto the production. This also situated the perspectives of the crew as peripheral to Andy, and Forman’s style cues us to join them.
The first moment that we are introduced to Kaufman’s onstage success comes when George Shapiro catches one of his performances. Just as audiences have unconscious preconceptions of movie form, we similarly go to stand up performances with an understanding of what it should look like, assuming the viewer has had some prior exposure. Usually, this comprises a subversion of expectations, but also a running gag that is reinterpreted and builds in absurdity.
Man on the Moon (1/9) Movie CLIP - The Elvis Presley (1999) HD
The beginning of the scene proves hard to watch, even with the stage presence of Jim Carrey. The most impressive part of Carrey’s performance is arguably how far he removes himself from recognition. While watching the film, despite his immediately recognizable face, you never find yourself actualizing the actor beneath the performance. Especially when the movie positions itself to make you think that Kaufman is going to bomb in this performance, you wonder how he could possibly dig himself out. Even while negating every rule of comedic form, there is a curiosity to see where the performance will go that overshadows this glaring error.
Various audience members’ reactions during Carrey’s first performance in Man on the Moon.
Part of the viewer’s reaction in film is dictated how the characters that we are meant to affiliate with react. Rather than have Kaufman’s performance play out in a long take onscreen, instead clips of his routine are interspersed with audience reactions in the club and the camera focuses on their development. A few times these shots include George Shapiro, but are largely unknowns whose faces could be our own. After comments about his wife’s cooking, one shot of a woman reads with offense and confusion, when he talks about traffic in L.A. one man stares intently, waiting for a punchline. The audience only seems to become acquainted with Kaufman, speaking in his foreign man voice, when he does his impression of Jimmy Carter without changing a thing about his inflection. The gag seems to have become apparent, and reactions in the audience demonstrate a greater comfort with the material and accompanying laughter. When Kaufman announces that he will then “imitate the Elvis Presley,” the audience laughs even harder with the expectation that it will be another iteration of the Jimmy Carter joke, but then Kaufman turns around.
He presses a button on his speaker that plays the theme music from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and savors ripping off parts of his clothes one by one to reveal his distinguishably Elvis suit. Even if heavy-handedly, the choice in music nods to what is the culmination of Kaufman’s radical form of comedy that he is debuting before the audience. At this point, they are officially enamored and willing to suspend their attempts to narratively comprehend Kaufman’s performance. Shapiro looks around the room, as if his interest in Kaufman is more closely linked to the audience reaction rather than the performance himself, which is an electric and uncanny cover of Blue Suede Shoes that has every member of the audience on their feet. Finally, the performance mellows and ends with Andy returning to his foreign man character. The significance of the “tank you veddy much” is transformed against the backdrop of the Elvis gimmick. The phrase provides a return to some familiarity, albeit never to Kaufman himself.
Similar to narratively disjointed films like Mulholland Drive, Kaufman’s style of comedy brings us to a tipping point where we must decide to relinquish control in order to enjoy the performance. In Mulholland Drive, this involves neglecting the importance of narrative comprehension and enjoying the visceral feelings awoken in Club Silencio. Kaufman asks us to reconsider the importance of our identity as an audience, and what changes when the audience realizes they can never be in on his joke. Unless a comic lets them in, they are ultimately making fools of them. This framework explains precisely why Kaufman hated working on Taxi as much as he did. The sitcom is the antithesis of Kaufman’s style, where the joke was on his character Latka, and the humor came from their understanding in the space of Latka’s lack of understanding. How could Tony Clifton, the king of turning the audience into fools, not be expected to make an appearance?
Despite the similar narrative structures between Kaufman’s comedy and the case of Mulholland Drive, the structure of Man on the Moon could not be more different. The only overt anomaly in the film is its beginning when Kaufman’s authorship is implied, and the film plays with its form. As subtle as the ambiguity is at the end of the film as to whether Kaufman is Tony Clifton or not, Universal was reluctant to include it. Alexander and Karaszewski express frustration regarding the process of assembling all the many parts and accounts of Andy into a screenplay, but they never address what is, to me, a key question: to what degree does the satirical nature of the opening permeate through the rest of a largely conventional film?
As Carrey sees it, it is impossible to cover the career of Andy Kaufman without addressing how he broke the “importance” of the medium of television. On set of live studio productions, Andy could break through the highly procedural production by fighting with the head writer onstage, while a studio exec, Maynard Smith (Vincent Schiavelli), brushes it off by explaining it to the audience as a “happening.” In this particular instance, Kaufman goes back in front of the camera to call the staging explanation a “cover up.”
Jim Carrey addressing the television audience on Fridays in Man on the Moon.
“I don’t understand why you’re laughing. I’m not being funny now. What you saw was real! These types of things happen all the time at the networks, only they cut away.”
And on cue, Smith tells the production to cut to commercial. Seeing this succession of events play out, and the way that the film creates this causal chain that the studio audience does not see, generates a separation between the diegetic versus non-diegetic audience. We are no longer seeing Kaufman performing for the first time alongside them, but are seeing every performance as supplemented by what the film makes us believe are moments of intimacy, and which the diegetic audience could not bear witness to. The transition from audience member to someone who comes to know another side of Kaufman plays out in his relationship with Margulies.
After she volunteers to be the next lady to get in the ring and fight Andy Kaufman, she walks out humiliated and disgusted by his behavior. In a rare moment of earnestness, however, Kaufman goes up to her after the show to congratulate her and explain his behavior.
“I hope you don’t take everything I did in there seriously. What I was saying, well, it’s just part of the show.”
During his explanation, the soundtrack swells in a way that, albeit an example of the biopic clichés in the film, signals some truth in Kaufman’s admission. Although he will do anything for the sake of performance, even pretend to be an asshole because it is “what [he’s] good at,” this moment allows us as an audience to buy into Kaufman’s emotional journey, even if he tries to throw us along the way. At the same time, however, we are skeptical knowing that any moment where doing a character would be out of place becomes the perfect spot for Kaufman to insert a character.
In the scene on live television where he doesn’t understand why the audience is laughing, the non-diegetic audience begins to understand the methods behind Kaufman’s deception. Similar to his expressed hatred of the sitcom form on Taxi, he foils this live production for a reason. Man on the Moon lacks a singular antagonist, and rather has an understood antagonist in the form of the public audience and studio executives when he begins to fall out of favor with them. We see this struggle for control over performance play out between Kaufman and Smith, where Smith posits that he is in on Kaufman’s joke when the fight onset breaks out. Kaufman going on to contradict Smith proves a powerful statement on his fearlessness to step outside of the television box, literally and figuratively when he looks directly at his audience. There is an element of tragedy when the in-studio audience begins to laugh at him while he appears to plead with him. He has reached the point in his career where he has essentially built himself off of no one taking him seriously. Cutting between his parents’ reactions at home and the audience reactions show the divergent reactions of his split identity, where laughs meet censure.
Forman believed in portraying Andy Kaufman’s eclectic and ineffable comedy was only possible through a naturalistic approach. “If you are naturalistic and real about this guy who is so unreal, then that unrealness will be even more real and interesting and fascinating.” What is so particularly fascinating to me in Kaufman’s performances, no matter the theatrics that he pulls out through staging or gimmicks, he finds moments that manage to shrink the grandeur of whatever space he is performing in, even Carnegie Hall.
Right from Carrey’s first meeting with Shapiro, he makes it clear the level of stardom that he wants to achieve.
“I want to be the biggest star in the world.”
Part of this includes his lifelong dream to play at Carnegie Hall. In the script, it is not until his terminal diagnosis of lung cancer that this dream comes to fruition.
Man on the Moon (8/9) Movie CLIP - A Night at Carnegie Hall (1999) HD
For the sake of dramatic effect, Karaszewski and Alexander moved the timeline of when Kaufman really did perform at Carnegie Hall to after his diagnosis. Not unlike Bob Fosse’s All that Jazz, this grand performance is intrinsically linked to Kaufman’s numbered days, and revelatory of Kaufman’s specific relationship with death through the lack of attention he pays to his mortality. The original performance featured a puzzling blend of Tony Clifton, a rendition of Oklahoma!, and of course, wrestling women. What links the two larger-than-life performances is a projection of a scene from a 1931 short film of a group of dancing cowgirls on hobby horses. Carrey introduces the last surviving cowgirl from the film, Eleanor Cody Gould (Doris Eaton), to reprise her performance.
He then conducts an entire orchestra to accompany her as he pushes her to go faster and faster, up until she collapses onstage. It should come as no surprise to the non-diegetic audience who has witnessed prank after prank how this should turn out, but the diegetic audience is shocked. Suddenly the packed Carnegie Hall feels tiny and suffocating, as shots cut between medium close-ups of audience murmurs and the chest compressions taking place onstage. This gag is drawn out even after Gould is pronounced dead. Then, in a performance that would definitely not fly today, Kaufman emerges onstage as a quasi-witch doctor whose guttural chants bring Gould back to life.
This intimate and traumatic moment is followed up by the praise sung by the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir for Gould’s resurrection. This flashy display is only further convoluted when the entire cast of the Rockettes burst onto stage, and if that wasn’t enough, Santa in his sleigh glides across the top of the audience to land onstage while glitter falls from above.
Santa flies over the audience at Andy Kafuman’s performance in Carnegie Hall in Man on the Moon.
As good as Kaufman was at playing the asshole, there was always a chaotic goodness that underscored his performances. Only Kaufman could create such a showy display at Carnegie Hall and modestly invite the “entire audience out for milk and cookies.” What came off as complete disregard for his scene partners onstage, the movie reveals as lifelong partnerships. The closer you look at the life and careers of Jim Carrey and Andy Kaufman, the more overlap that becomes apparent. As much as Kaufman broke out of the typical structures of comedy, he still sought approval from his dad, in particular. Carrey empathizes with this notion deeply in relation to his own dad, and points to Tony Clifton as one example of an erratic performance that revealed this underlying need for public and parental attention.
“If I’m never enough, I’ll be destroyed,” Carrey says.
Andy was a comedian’s comedian. His legacy recently pushed me to agree to take a spot at the Vermont Comedy Club and perform an original character. Faced with the realization that I would probably bomb, he gave me the confidence to neglect basic rules of comedy and be content with performing my own inside joke.
He must’ve been smiling down as I walked onstage in flippers and a wetsuit, pretending to be a man that just got back from Atlantis. I periodically interrupted my performance to stick my head in a bucket of water for slightly too long so that my character could “breathe,” trying to stretch the same limits of the audience.
Jim Carrey puts his own touches on, and arguably elevates, the ways that Andy Kaufman pushed the envelope of comedy. It may not be any respite for the film’s lack of opening success two decades later, but Kaufman’s comedy was always received better retroactively. As horrible as it probably was to have sat through his entire reading of The Great Gatsby, you cannot help chuckling at the idea of it in Man on the Moon. A misunderstood movie about a misunderstood man might be the most concrete proof that Alexander and Karaszewski succeeded in creating the movie that Andy Kaufman would have made. All the movie needs is the quality of retrospection.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Works Cited:
Alexander, Scott and Larry Karaszewski. The Shooting Script: Man on the Moon. Newmarket Press, 1999.
Adaptation. Directed by Spike Jonze, Columbia Pictures, 2002.
All That Jazz. Directed by Bob Fosse, 20th Century Studios, 1979.
Andy Kaufman Plays Carnegie Hall. Directed by Julian Goldberg, Performance recording, Carnegie Hall, New York City, 12 November 1979. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQr5EHQGAVw.
Bingham, Dennis. Whose Lives Are They Anyway?: The Biopic As Contemporary Film Genre. Rutgers University Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/middlebury/detail.action?docID=868530.
Cowie, Peter. “Miloš Forman: The Openhearted Nonconformist.” The Criterion Collection, 26 Jun. 2019. https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6442-milo-forman-the-openhearted-nonconformist.
Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond - Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton. Directed by Chris Smith, Vice Studios, 2017.
“Jim Carrey.” Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 29 May 2020, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jim-Carrey.
Man on the Moon. Directed by Miloš Forman, Universal Pictures, 1999.
Mulholland Drive. Directed by David Lynch, Universal Pictures, 2001.
Pandya, Gitesh. “Weekend Box Office (December 24 - 26, 1999).” Box Office Guru, 27 Dec. 1999. http://www.boxofficeguru.com/122799.htm.
Rottenberg, Josh. “Jim Carrey on losing himself inside Andy Kaufman and why he relived it for the documentary ‘Jim & Andy’.” Los Angeles Times, 18 Nov. 2017. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-jim-and-andy-20171118-htmlstory.html.
Steeves, H. Peter. “Quantum Andy: Andy Kaufman and the postmodern turn in comedy.” Angelaki, Vol. 21, No. 3 (2016), pp. 115-136. DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2016.1205266.
Sterritt, David. “Review: Man on the Moon.” Cinéaste, Vol. 25, No. 2 (2000), pp. 52-54. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41689237.