This is what I saw yesterday.

It's a Youtube video, but I'm linking to it, because it is part one of a 34 part series highlighting the 80's wrestling feud between Andy Kaufman and Jerry Lawler. Not that any of you are going to watch any of these, because it's professional wrestling--but both Andy Kaufman and the whole idea of wrestling are endlessly fascinating to me. And I've never seen a comprehensive recap of the feud such as this.

Essentially, if any of you would like a summarization: Andy Kaufman--the "comedian" whose performances were more designed to be sort of a meta-commentary on performing itself rather than to elicit laughs--had a bit where he would simply wrestle women picked from the audience, claiming to be the "intergender champion". He then got the idea to actually perform a variation of this in the actual world of professional wrestling, and he ended up going down to the Memphis territory (back then, wrestling was divided up into regional territories. It's not that way now) in order to start a year long feud with Jerry Lawler, the main good guy in the territory.

And this is still back in the day where quite a few people thought that wrestling was still real, and the business in turn presented it much more legitimately (not that it's at all "legitimate" when there's people intentionally trying break each other's necks, fireballs, and bounties to injure people--all things that would land a person in jail... but you know. It's less of a spectacle than it is now and tries to be more "sport".) So basically, a TV star--one with a successful TV show, countless notable appearances on talk shows, and notoriety for being one of the most unconventional comedians of his time--travels down to a city in the South with the explicit purpose of getting people to hate him beyond belief.

Anyway, it's pretty great--as far as wrestling feuds go. Kaufman is pretty much the quintessential stuck-up heel, constantly ranting about the intellectual inferiority to the South compared with Hollywood--ducking physical contact whenever possible and threatening lawsuits as opposed to fighting in the ring--coming up with ingenious plots to get back at Jerry Lawler. It makes me wish that attaining this type of true vitriol was still possible--I mean, it is... but I'd have to either kill someone famous or star in a reality show. But I mean--being truly hated as performance art. I would kind of love doing that.