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In the early 1980s the actor and comedian Andy Kaufman reached out to wrestling promoter Jerry Jarrett with an unusual offer. Kaufman wanted to wrestle for Jarrett. More specifically, he wanted to wrestle women. Only women. And he was willing to put up his own money as a prize for any woman who could beat him.
Jarrett, by this point a seasoned promoter in one of the most successful of all the pro wrestling territories, had a few questions.
One was why Kaufman had decided, via an introduction from photographer Bill Apter, to bring this to him. Why not some other promoter, like Vince McMahon Sr. in New York, or Verne Gagne in Minnesota? As Jarrett would learn, Kaufman had brought it to them. They wanted no part of it. Some scrawny actor? A nerdy-looking guy known for his silly voices and his role on the hit TV show “Taxi”? This was not kind of talent the professional wrestling business was looking for in those days.
But the more Jarrett talked to him, the more he started to think that there might be something worth exploring with Kaufman. What surprised him the most was that Kaufman seemed to not only genuinely love wrestling, but also understand it.
“I talked to literally hundreds of wrestlers a month that wanted to come to Memphis,” Jarrett said decades later on the Booking Memphis Wrestling podcast. “People who had never been in a ring and people who had headlined in other promotions. I got to where I could get a feel in a conversation if the guy or lady was serious or wasn’t serious or if they had a passion for the business. Andy scored high in every category.”
Jarrett’s eventual decision to bring Kaufman in was a deeply unpopular one with his fellow promoters. As he recalled later in his memoir, “The Best Of Times,” he got angry phone calls from all sides telling him that he was “killing the business” by letting Kaufman work this “intergender” wrestling angle on his shows. While it’s remembered now with a certain nostalgic glee, at the time Kaufman’s work in Memphis was deeply controversial within the wrestling business.
The potential for damage to the sport and the industry is still a persistent worry among the pro wrestling faithful when actors try to make the leap into their business. To this day, there are wrestling fans who will tell you that the true death knell for WCW was when actor David Arquette won the heavyweight title in 2000.
It’s one thing for an actor to show up for a one-off appearance, even when they play it purely for laughs, like Drew Carey in the 2001 WWE Royal Rumble. But an actor who actually wants to stick around and really make a go of it in wrestling? Fans typically hate it.
It’s a little counterintuitive, when you think about it. An actor who wants to dabble without really learning the craft of wrestling gets a (temporary) pass. But one who commits the sin of believing himself to be a wrestler — or even just trying in earnest to become one — is damned forever. So why is that?
Andy Kaufman wheeled out on a stretcher after his infamous wrestling angle with Jerry "The King" Lawler in 1982.
USA TODAY Sports / Reuters
Paul Walter Hauser has asked himself this same question. The award-winning actor has been a wrestling fan since he was a child, but it wasn’t until he’d made a name for himself in Hollywood that he got opportunities to step in the ring himself. To begin with, those opportunities included things like the chance to get hit in the head with a guitar after showing off his Golden Globe award on an AEW broadcast.
But Hauser wasn’t the type to be content with the typical celebrity cameo treatment. He wanted to actually wrestle — and he has. After signing with Major League Wrestling, Hauser has gotten the chance to work ongoing angles and wrestle multiple matches, even if he knew a portion of the fan base would predictably resist it.
“I’m aiming to do the best I can and have fun and be safe,” Hauser told Uncrowned. “At the end of the day, I know acting is my first job. But I’m diving through tables and doing butterfly suplexes off the top rope and I’m bleeding all over the place in the 2300 Arena. So if that isn't good enough for some wrestling fan who lives with their parents and their keyboard is stained in sweat and chocolate and urine, too bad for them. I don't care. Deal with it, would be my real sentiment.
“You know, there are actors who I don't love them, don’t love their work, but they star in movies,” Hauser continued. “Do I go around complaining about them on the internet 24 hours a day? No, I have a wife and kids and a job. So that's just the reality. I respect the fan's opinion to a certain degree with boundaries, but I think some fans are smarter than others.”
One of the core issues seems to be a question of motives. Whether or not it’s a conversation they ever have out in the open, many pro wrestling fans seem to look an incursions by actors and wonder: What are they doing here, and what do they want out of this? As with any sport that’s ever been maligned by those who simply don’t get it, there’s a certain inferiority complex simmering in the background for many wrestling fans. They are sensitive — at times overly so — to any hint of mockery.
When an actor shows up to take a few bumps and then disappear, fine. But if they think they can hang around as a recurring character, as if this craft doesn’t require as much diligent training and discipline as their own, there’s a resentment that builds into a nagging question. Is this person making fun of us?
David Arquette's stint in WCW to promote the film "Ready To Rumble" remains one of the most hated storylines in wrestling history.
Getty Images via Getty Images
This was one of the fatal flaws at the heart of Arquette’s infamous WCW angle. He appeared in the WCW back in 2000 in order to promote his wrestling-centered comedy film “Ready To Rumble.” Not unlike Kaufman, Arquette presented publicly as a skinny, twerpy dilettante who demanded special treatment due to his status as a star actor. It was meant to be a classic heel gimmick, but for many it went too far when Arquette won the WCW world heavyweight title and held it for just under two weeks.
Arquette later said that he learned only at the last minute that he’d become champ, and he at first resisted the idea. In his telling, it was Diamond Dallas Page who laid it out for him just prior to the event.
“I was like, 'That’s crazy, you can’t do that,'” Arquette later said in an interview with Chris Van Vliet. “I don’t recall him saying, ‘You don’t have to do it.’ But I think he said, ‘If you don’t do it, then it’s all over. 'Ready to Rumble' is all over. The promotion of it is over. But if you do it, then you stay [until] the pay-per-view.’”
For Arquette, that was the clincher. The chance to travel with and work alongside the wrestlers — to essentially become one of them, if only for a short time — convinced him.
“I was like, this is a dream come true for a wrestling fan,” Arquette said.
But when he won the title, adding his name to a list that included wrestling legends like Ric Flair, Sting and Bret Hart, fans instantly rebelled. Head writer Vince Russo would later say that, with this twist in the Arquette storyline, “I think I killed the business forever.”
Arquette would later try for redemption of a sort with his 2020 documentary “You Cannot Kill David Arquette.” It chronicles Arquette’s attempt to become a “real” wrestler while earning the respect of fans and clearing his name in the wrestling business.
Whether it achieved that goal is … arguable. Arquette earned some degree of begrudging respect just for what he was willing to endure at the hands of wrestlers. The film shows him bleeding in backyard matches and flipping to the pavement in Mexico in an impromptu stoplight luchador match that no one asked for.
Arquette would famously participate in a “deathmatch” with Nick Gage that got out of hand after Arquette was attacked with a pizza cutter and a light tube and suffered a potentially serious laceration to the neck.
Once again, the entire appeal of his appearance for wrestling fans seemed to be the promise of gratuitous punishment. Here was a man who had wronged them, someone they still despised for his unforgivable crimes against the business. His penance for this, even decades later, was pain and suffering and endless humiliation. He would have to pay in blood; even then, the best he could hope for was to get square with the house.
The question of motives was a vital one in Arquette’s cautionary tale. When he first appeared in WCW, it seemed to be purely for personal gain. He had a movie to promote. This, in itself, wasn’t so bad or even so unusual.
But to win the title for the sake of a bit meant to boost ticket sales to some dumb buddy comedy? It was a sacrilege. Fans felt he had taken something they loved and revered and then turned it into a cheap joke. He didn’t deserve to win that belt. This was supposed to be the entire point — the heel enrages the audience by reveling in undeserved honors — but the reaction skipped straight past heat and went directly to revulsion.
Kaufman’s storyline, by contrast, worked precisely because of the stakes involved. By the time he showed up in Memphis, he’d been wrestling women at his stand-up comedy shows for years. As his friend and writing partner Bob Zmuda wrote in his book, “Andy Kaufman Revealed: Best Friend Tells All,” it was as much about sexual fantasy fulfillment for Kaufman as it was about advancing his own brand of anti-comedy. Kaufman labeled himself the “world intergender wrestling champion,” and offered $500 to any woman from the crowd who could beat him. After soliciting volunteers, he let the audience choose his opponent.
“Nine times out of 10 they would select both the biggest and the sexiest, one as the winner and one as the runner-up,” Zmuda wrote. “At that point, Andy would enter the stage dressed in his ridiculous wrestling attire, which consisted of full-length thermal underwear beneath a baggy black swimsuit and his father’s robe. Sporting black socks and old gym shoes, he would taunt the audience and they would boo appropriately. If the winner of the audience selection was the big girl, Kaufman would decide to wrestle two women so he could get the beefy one out of the way, allowing him to focus on the runner-up, the sexy one.”
Andy Kaufman and Bob Zmuda (center) on the set of Saturday Night Live. October 20, 1979.
NBC via Getty Images
According to Zmuda, Kaufman routinely used the intimate setting of the wrestling matches to invite the “sexy one” back to his dressing room. And, Zmuda wrote, more often than not he’d see that same woman exiting Kaufman’s hotel room in the morning.
But Kaufman was also genuinely a lifelong pro wrestling fan. He used to tell friends he was taking them out to see the purest form of theater in existence, then take them straight to a local wrestling event. He was fascinated by the psychology of it all, the focus on meticulously manipulating the emotions of a crowd full of people — and getting instant feedback on it.
As Jarrett said later: “[Kaufman] explained that, in his role [on ‘Taxi’], he got a script, sometimes they’d shoot two or three takes, it took a while, and there was no interaction with the people. He really didn’t know if he was good or bad. His nightclub show, his comedy shows, he said he really enjoyed a lot more because there was more fan interaction, but nothing like the wrestling business. … He loved the theater that was wrestling, and he thought that it was the most real, most spontaneous theater that you could be in.”
His gimmick in Memphis involved wrestling women from the crowd with $1,000 of his own money up for grabs. The matches weren’t scripted and the results weren’t predetermined. Each woman was a real crowd member, not a plant, and they all did their best to win. This, according to Jarrett, was partially how he justified Kaufman’s involvement to other promoters.
“Andy was telling me that he would be in a shoot,” Jarrett said. “How can a shoot hurt a business that’s theater?”
Kaufman always won these matches, but when he ran up against a particularly stout opponent one night, Memphis wrestling mainstay Jerry Lawler saw an opportunity to get involved. Kaufman’s match with a woman billed simply as “Foxy” hit the full three-minute time limit, so Lawler offered to train her for a rematch. This angle sold out the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis, and when Kaufman went over the top in his post-match celebration after defeating “Foxy,” it gave Lawler the chance to intervene in a way that would set up his own storyline with Kaufman.
“This is where the ad lib part started,” Lawler wrote in “It’s Good To Be The King … Sometimes,” his autobiography. “I went into the ring and reached out and grabbed Andy in a working kind of way. I basically reached down and pulled Andy up off of Foxy, but when I did, Andy flew halfway across the ring as if he’d been shot out of a cannon. I went to console Foxy and looked over at Andy. He took the microphone. ‘You can’t put your hands on me,’ he said. ‘You’re a wrestler. I’m a movie star. A TV star. I’ll sue you for everything you’re worth.’ … People were booing like crazy.”
Kaufman’s routine worked in part because it never asked the audience to accept anything that wasn’t entirely believable. When he played the role of the entitled TV star who expected deferential treatment and thought himself superior to the dumb Tennessee hicks in attendance, that was plausible (though for someone like Kaufman, who deplored the very concept of celebrity itself, entirely untrue). When he beat women in wrestling matches, that was also believable (and in a very real sense, true). His feud with Lawler centered on an accusation that Kaufman was disrespecting the wrestling business by continuing to show up and call himself a champion.
It worked because it played on what the audience already felt about him, and Kaufman knew exactly how to waffle between delusions of public grandeur and insincere victimhood in a way that worked them into a sellout froth.
The Kaufman-Lawler angle concluded with an infamous appearance on David Letterman’s late-night show. After Kaufman showed up in a completely unnecessary neck brace that he’d been wearing for weeks following a Lawler piledriver, the two argued in front of a visibly uncomfortable Letterman until Lawler slapped Kaufman out of his chair on live television.
More than 40 years later, it still makes for gripping television. It supposedly enraged Letterman, who felt himself an unwitting ploy in a pro wrestling bit, and for years afterward he resisted having wrestlers as guests. But for wrestling as a whole — and Memphis wrestling in particular — it was a huge storyline. It’s still looked upon as one of the best and most successful wrestling gimmicks of the territory era in pro wrestling, though many now conveniently forget how controversial it really was among insiders at the time.
What even fewer people seem to realize is the extent to which Kaufman become almost addicted to his own pro wrestling narrative. According to both Jarrett and Lawler, he continued suggesting his own storylines as a way to stay involved. He was heartbroken when Jarrett finally told him that he thought they’d taken the Andy Kaufman story as far as they could. After Kaufman died of lung cancer in 1984 at the age of 35, Jarrett learned that he’d never cashed any of the checks he’d written him. He was doing it purely because he loved wrestling and wanted to be a part of it.
As another actor who’s sought out a place in the wrestling business, Hauser doesn’t have a hard time understanding what drove Kaufman from sound stages to the wrestling ring.
“There’s some stuff you don’t get from acting in a movie or a TV show,” Hauser said. “Wrestling is more like stand-up [comedy]. I did stand-up for like 10 or 12 years in L.A. and Chicago and Michigan, and you’re feeling it out as you. There are certain things that aren't going to work, and then you pivot. Or sometimes you call out your own issue and then you are self-deprecating and it works and you get bigger. There are those kind of wonderful, substantial moments when you are trying to be involved in the energy of the room. And that happens in standup and wrestling.”
But that question of motives and stakes is also ever-present for the wrestlers and not just the audience, Hauser pointed out. When you’re an actor appearing in a scene in front of a camera, “you’ve pretty much already got the job.” Wrestlers, on the other hand, are performing a nightly high-wire act that gets instant approval (or not) from a live audience that’s always evaluating on the fly.
“What I feel like with wrestling is every match you are auditioning for your next match, you're auditioning for your next job, and you're only as good as your last match in some regards,” Hauser said. “Because at the end of the day, [Ricky] Steamboat and [Randy] Savage could put on a barn-burner at WrestleMania, but if they're not performing five weeks later at that same level, it tends to depreciate in value.”
Wrestling might not pay nearly as well as acting, but for some that feeling is its own reward. Some who have tasted it keep chasing that high for years. Others, like Arquette, are willing to sacrifice almost anything just to prove they deserve it.
And maybe that’s part of the love-hate dynamic that wrestling fans have for actors who insist on a place in this world. No matter how big a deal someone might be in Hollywood, it does not immediately translate to approval from wrestling fans. That approval can only be earned in the ring. Withholding it is a way of exercising power, even over the powerful. If you want that approval, you have to come earn it in front of a live crowd. You have to be willing to suffer and hurt and fail. You have to be willing to be hated. And then maybe, eventually, if you’re lucky, they’ll admit that they love to hate you. And then you’ll know you belong.
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Jarrett, by this point a seasoned promoter in one of the most successful of all the pro wrestling territories, had a few questions.
One was why Kaufman had decided, via an introduction from photographer Bill Apter, to bring this to him. Why not some other promoter, like Vince McMahon Sr. in New York, or Verne Gagne in Minnesota? As Jarrett would learn, Kaufman had brought it to them. They wanted no part of it. Some scrawny actor? A nerdy-looking guy known for his silly voices and his role on the hit TV show “Taxi”? This was not kind of talent the professional wrestling business was looking for in those days.
But the more Jarrett talked to him, the more he started to think that there might be something worth exploring with Kaufman. What surprised him the most was that Kaufman seemed to not only genuinely love wrestling, but also understand it.
“I talked to literally hundreds of wrestlers a month that wanted to come to Memphis,” Jarrett said decades later on the Booking Memphis Wrestling podcast. “People who had never been in a ring and people who had headlined in other promotions. I got to where I could get a feel in a conversation if the guy or lady was serious or wasn’t serious or if they had a passion for the business. Andy scored high in every category.”
Jarrett’s eventual decision to bring Kaufman in was a deeply unpopular one with his fellow promoters. As he recalled later in his memoir, “The Best Of Times,” he got angry phone calls from all sides telling him that he was “killing the business” by letting Kaufman work this “intergender” wrestling angle on his shows. While it’s remembered now with a certain nostalgic glee, at the time Kaufman’s work in Memphis was deeply controversial within the wrestling business.
The potential for damage to the sport and the industry is still a persistent worry among the pro wrestling faithful when actors try to make the leap into their business. To this day, there are wrestling fans who will tell you that the true death knell for WCW was when actor David Arquette won the heavyweight title in 2000.
It’s one thing for an actor to show up for a one-off appearance, even when they play it purely for laughs, like Drew Carey in the 2001 WWE Royal Rumble. But an actor who actually wants to stick around and really make a go of it in wrestling? Fans typically hate it.
It’s a little counterintuitive, when you think about it. An actor who wants to dabble without really learning the craft of wrestling gets a (temporary) pass. But one who commits the sin of believing himself to be a wrestler — or even just trying in earnest to become one — is damned forever. So why is that?
You must be registered for see images attach
Andy Kaufman wheeled out on a stretcher after his infamous wrestling angle with Jerry "The King" Lawler in 1982.
USA TODAY Sports / Reuters
Paul Walter Hauser has asked himself this same question. The award-winning actor has been a wrestling fan since he was a child, but it wasn’t until he’d made a name for himself in Hollywood that he got opportunities to step in the ring himself. To begin with, those opportunities included things like the chance to get hit in the head with a guitar after showing off his Golden Globe award on an AEW broadcast.
But Hauser wasn’t the type to be content with the typical celebrity cameo treatment. He wanted to actually wrestle — and he has. After signing with Major League Wrestling, Hauser has gotten the chance to work ongoing angles and wrestle multiple matches, even if he knew a portion of the fan base would predictably resist it.
“I’m aiming to do the best I can and have fun and be safe,” Hauser told Uncrowned. “At the end of the day, I know acting is my first job. But I’m diving through tables and doing butterfly suplexes off the top rope and I’m bleeding all over the place in the 2300 Arena. So if that isn't good enough for some wrestling fan who lives with their parents and their keyboard is stained in sweat and chocolate and urine, too bad for them. I don't care. Deal with it, would be my real sentiment.
“You know, there are actors who I don't love them, don’t love their work, but they star in movies,” Hauser continued. “Do I go around complaining about them on the internet 24 hours a day? No, I have a wife and kids and a job. So that's just the reality. I respect the fan's opinion to a certain degree with boundaries, but I think some fans are smarter than others.”
One of the core issues seems to be a question of motives. Whether or not it’s a conversation they ever have out in the open, many pro wrestling fans seem to look an incursions by actors and wonder: What are they doing here, and what do they want out of this? As with any sport that’s ever been maligned by those who simply don’t get it, there’s a certain inferiority complex simmering in the background for many wrestling fans. They are sensitive — at times overly so — to any hint of mockery.
When an actor shows up to take a few bumps and then disappear, fine. But if they think they can hang around as a recurring character, as if this craft doesn’t require as much diligent training and discipline as their own, there’s a resentment that builds into a nagging question. Is this person making fun of us?
You must be registered for see images attach
David Arquette's stint in WCW to promote the film "Ready To Rumble" remains one of the most hated storylines in wrestling history.
Getty Images via Getty Images
This was one of the fatal flaws at the heart of Arquette’s infamous WCW angle. He appeared in the WCW back in 2000 in order to promote his wrestling-centered comedy film “Ready To Rumble.” Not unlike Kaufman, Arquette presented publicly as a skinny, twerpy dilettante who demanded special treatment due to his status as a star actor. It was meant to be a classic heel gimmick, but for many it went too far when Arquette won the WCW world heavyweight title and held it for just under two weeks.
Arquette later said that he learned only at the last minute that he’d become champ, and he at first resisted the idea. In his telling, it was Diamond Dallas Page who laid it out for him just prior to the event.
“I was like, 'That’s crazy, you can’t do that,'” Arquette later said in an interview with Chris Van Vliet. “I don’t recall him saying, ‘You don’t have to do it.’ But I think he said, ‘If you don’t do it, then it’s all over. 'Ready to Rumble' is all over. The promotion of it is over. But if you do it, then you stay [until] the pay-per-view.’”
For Arquette, that was the clincher. The chance to travel with and work alongside the wrestlers — to essentially become one of them, if only for a short time — convinced him.
“I was like, this is a dream come true for a wrestling fan,” Arquette said.
But when he won the title, adding his name to a list that included wrestling legends like Ric Flair, Sting and Bret Hart, fans instantly rebelled. Head writer Vince Russo would later say that, with this twist in the Arquette storyline, “I think I killed the business forever.”
Arquette would later try for redemption of a sort with his 2020 documentary “You Cannot Kill David Arquette.” It chronicles Arquette’s attempt to become a “real” wrestler while earning the respect of fans and clearing his name in the wrestling business.
Whether it achieved that goal is … arguable. Arquette earned some degree of begrudging respect just for what he was willing to endure at the hands of wrestlers. The film shows him bleeding in backyard matches and flipping to the pavement in Mexico in an impromptu stoplight luchador match that no one asked for.
Arquette would famously participate in a “deathmatch” with Nick Gage that got out of hand after Arquette was attacked with a pizza cutter and a light tube and suffered a potentially serious laceration to the neck.
Once again, the entire appeal of his appearance for wrestling fans seemed to be the promise of gratuitous punishment. Here was a man who had wronged them, someone they still despised for his unforgivable crimes against the business. His penance for this, even decades later, was pain and suffering and endless humiliation. He would have to pay in blood; even then, the best he could hope for was to get square with the house.
The question of motives was a vital one in Arquette’s cautionary tale. When he first appeared in WCW, it seemed to be purely for personal gain. He had a movie to promote. This, in itself, wasn’t so bad or even so unusual.
But to win the title for the sake of a bit meant to boost ticket sales to some dumb buddy comedy? It was a sacrilege. Fans felt he had taken something they loved and revered and then turned it into a cheap joke. He didn’t deserve to win that belt. This was supposed to be the entire point — the heel enrages the audience by reveling in undeserved honors — but the reaction skipped straight past heat and went directly to revulsion.
Kaufman’s storyline, by contrast, worked precisely because of the stakes involved. By the time he showed up in Memphis, he’d been wrestling women at his stand-up comedy shows for years. As his friend and writing partner Bob Zmuda wrote in his book, “Andy Kaufman Revealed: Best Friend Tells All,” it was as much about sexual fantasy fulfillment for Kaufman as it was about advancing his own brand of anti-comedy. Kaufman labeled himself the “world intergender wrestling champion,” and offered $500 to any woman from the crowd who could beat him. After soliciting volunteers, he let the audience choose his opponent.
“Nine times out of 10 they would select both the biggest and the sexiest, one as the winner and one as the runner-up,” Zmuda wrote. “At that point, Andy would enter the stage dressed in his ridiculous wrestling attire, which consisted of full-length thermal underwear beneath a baggy black swimsuit and his father’s robe. Sporting black socks and old gym shoes, he would taunt the audience and they would boo appropriately. If the winner of the audience selection was the big girl, Kaufman would decide to wrestle two women so he could get the beefy one out of the way, allowing him to focus on the runner-up, the sexy one.”
You must be registered for see images attach
Andy Kaufman and Bob Zmuda (center) on the set of Saturday Night Live. October 20, 1979.
NBC via Getty Images
According to Zmuda, Kaufman routinely used the intimate setting of the wrestling matches to invite the “sexy one” back to his dressing room. And, Zmuda wrote, more often than not he’d see that same woman exiting Kaufman’s hotel room in the morning.
But Kaufman was also genuinely a lifelong pro wrestling fan. He used to tell friends he was taking them out to see the purest form of theater in existence, then take them straight to a local wrestling event. He was fascinated by the psychology of it all, the focus on meticulously manipulating the emotions of a crowd full of people — and getting instant feedback on it.
As Jarrett said later: “[Kaufman] explained that, in his role [on ‘Taxi’], he got a script, sometimes they’d shoot two or three takes, it took a while, and there was no interaction with the people. He really didn’t know if he was good or bad. His nightclub show, his comedy shows, he said he really enjoyed a lot more because there was more fan interaction, but nothing like the wrestling business. … He loved the theater that was wrestling, and he thought that it was the most real, most spontaneous theater that you could be in.”
His gimmick in Memphis involved wrestling women from the crowd with $1,000 of his own money up for grabs. The matches weren’t scripted and the results weren’t predetermined. Each woman was a real crowd member, not a plant, and they all did their best to win. This, according to Jarrett, was partially how he justified Kaufman’s involvement to other promoters.
“Andy was telling me that he would be in a shoot,” Jarrett said. “How can a shoot hurt a business that’s theater?”
Kaufman always won these matches, but when he ran up against a particularly stout opponent one night, Memphis wrestling mainstay Jerry Lawler saw an opportunity to get involved. Kaufman’s match with a woman billed simply as “Foxy” hit the full three-minute time limit, so Lawler offered to train her for a rematch. This angle sold out the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis, and when Kaufman went over the top in his post-match celebration after defeating “Foxy,” it gave Lawler the chance to intervene in a way that would set up his own storyline with Kaufman.
“This is where the ad lib part started,” Lawler wrote in “It’s Good To Be The King … Sometimes,” his autobiography. “I went into the ring and reached out and grabbed Andy in a working kind of way. I basically reached down and pulled Andy up off of Foxy, but when I did, Andy flew halfway across the ring as if he’d been shot out of a cannon. I went to console Foxy and looked over at Andy. He took the microphone. ‘You can’t put your hands on me,’ he said. ‘You’re a wrestler. I’m a movie star. A TV star. I’ll sue you for everything you’re worth.’ … People were booing like crazy.”
Kaufman’s routine worked in part because it never asked the audience to accept anything that wasn’t entirely believable. When he played the role of the entitled TV star who expected deferential treatment and thought himself superior to the dumb Tennessee hicks in attendance, that was plausible (though for someone like Kaufman, who deplored the very concept of celebrity itself, entirely untrue). When he beat women in wrestling matches, that was also believable (and in a very real sense, true). His feud with Lawler centered on an accusation that Kaufman was disrespecting the wrestling business by continuing to show up and call himself a champion.
It worked because it played on what the audience already felt about him, and Kaufman knew exactly how to waffle between delusions of public grandeur and insincere victimhood in a way that worked them into a sellout froth.
The Kaufman-Lawler angle concluded with an infamous appearance on David Letterman’s late-night show. After Kaufman showed up in a completely unnecessary neck brace that he’d been wearing for weeks following a Lawler piledriver, the two argued in front of a visibly uncomfortable Letterman until Lawler slapped Kaufman out of his chair on live television.
More than 40 years later, it still makes for gripping television. It supposedly enraged Letterman, who felt himself an unwitting ploy in a pro wrestling bit, and for years afterward he resisted having wrestlers as guests. But for wrestling as a whole — and Memphis wrestling in particular — it was a huge storyline. It’s still looked upon as one of the best and most successful wrestling gimmicks of the territory era in pro wrestling, though many now conveniently forget how controversial it really was among insiders at the time.
What even fewer people seem to realize is the extent to which Kaufman become almost addicted to his own pro wrestling narrative. According to both Jarrett and Lawler, he continued suggesting his own storylines as a way to stay involved. He was heartbroken when Jarrett finally told him that he thought they’d taken the Andy Kaufman story as far as they could. After Kaufman died of lung cancer in 1984 at the age of 35, Jarrett learned that he’d never cashed any of the checks he’d written him. He was doing it purely because he loved wrestling and wanted to be a part of it.
As another actor who’s sought out a place in the wrestling business, Hauser doesn’t have a hard time understanding what drove Kaufman from sound stages to the wrestling ring.
“There’s some stuff you don’t get from acting in a movie or a TV show,” Hauser said. “Wrestling is more like stand-up [comedy]. I did stand-up for like 10 or 12 years in L.A. and Chicago and Michigan, and you’re feeling it out as you. There are certain things that aren't going to work, and then you pivot. Or sometimes you call out your own issue and then you are self-deprecating and it works and you get bigger. There are those kind of wonderful, substantial moments when you are trying to be involved in the energy of the room. And that happens in standup and wrestling.”
But that question of motives and stakes is also ever-present for the wrestlers and not just the audience, Hauser pointed out. When you’re an actor appearing in a scene in front of a camera, “you’ve pretty much already got the job.” Wrestlers, on the other hand, are performing a nightly high-wire act that gets instant approval (or not) from a live audience that’s always evaluating on the fly.
“What I feel like with wrestling is every match you are auditioning for your next match, you're auditioning for your next job, and you're only as good as your last match in some regards,” Hauser said. “Because at the end of the day, [Ricky] Steamboat and [Randy] Savage could put on a barn-burner at WrestleMania, but if they're not performing five weeks later at that same level, it tends to depreciate in value.”
Wrestling might not pay nearly as well as acting, but for some that feeling is its own reward. Some who have tasted it keep chasing that high for years. Others, like Arquette, are willing to sacrifice almost anything just to prove they deserve it.
And maybe that’s part of the love-hate dynamic that wrestling fans have for actors who insist on a place in this world. No matter how big a deal someone might be in Hollywood, it does not immediately translate to approval from wrestling fans. That approval can only be earned in the ring. Withholding it is a way of exercising power, even over the powerful. If you want that approval, you have to come earn it in front of a live crowd. You have to be willing to suffer and hurt and fail. You have to be willing to be hated. And then maybe, eventually, if you’re lucky, they’ll admit that they love to hate you. And then you’ll know you belong.
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