Man on the Moon, a biographical film on the life of Andy Kaufman, was released in 1999. Fifteen years later, I finally sat down and watched the film. Better late to the party than never. It is somewhat ironic that I waited so long to watch the film Man on the Moon. Growing up, the song Man on the Moon from REM’s 1992 album Automatic for the People was one of my favorite songs as was another REM single The Great Beyond, which was released specifically for the 1999 Man on the Moon film.
A few years after Man on the Moon’s theatrical run, I attended DePaul University as an undergrad. It was my junior year. I had an outstanding philosophy credit requirement, so I flipped through the online course catalog in attempt to find my missing credit requirement without signing up for a dull 101 course. Lo-and-behold, I located a course on the philosophy of comedy that fit the bill for my missing credit hour and met my personal requirement of avoiding a boring 101 survey course. Little did I know what I was signing up for.
The professor of the philosophy of comedy class was on the young side. He seemed to be in his mid-30s. I was surprised to learn that he was already tenured. I was also surprised to learn that he had an array of connections to famous comedians. On the first day of class, he discussed meeting and interviewing Jackie Gleason from Monty Python, which coincidentally led to Monty Python as the main lecture topic for the first half of the course.
Midway through the course, as the fall leaves began to turn shades of orange and pile up on the sidewalk next to the ground story picture frame window of our philosophy hall classroom, we had our first guest lecturer of the course. Carol Kaufman, Andy Kaufman’s sister, was the lecturer and she discussed her late brother’s fame. Her discourse conveyed that Andy’s most famous performances were in fact just jokes on his audience. Andy’s style humor is meant to be seen outside the outside/performer interaction. His humor was meta in nature, comedic after the fact.
Fast forward to the end of the course. We had completed our finals and it was the last class of the school quarter. Our professor started the class by thanking us profusely for attending and expressing that he hoped we learned something from his class. In the middle of the professor’s speech, a student sitting in the middle of the class yelled out, “Bullshit!.” The professor’s speech tapered off into a confused expression as the student proceeded to expound on the utter uselessness of philosophy as an academic subject. The professor attempted to cut off the student’s rant by sharply demanding that the student leave for disrupting the class. The ranting student insolently walked out of class. I sat at my desk and squirmed. Sure, I had wanted to tell off a professor or two over the course of my academic career, but I never imagined seeing such a public spectacle for a professor and class that was, in my opinion, actually interesting.
After the ranting student left, the professor attempted to regain control of the class and apologize for the unscheduled outburst. He proceeded to rebut some of the comments on the uselessness of philosophy in academia only to again face another interruption. The student who ranted at the professor was pounding at the classroom’s ground story window. He had acquired a boom box. He pressed the boom box speakers against the classroom window and started playing dance music. He then proceeded to rip off his shirt and twerked against the window.
At this point, the classroom door swung open and Santa Claus stomped into the classroom. Santa Ho-Ho-Hoed and declared it was Christmas. Santa and the professor urged us to get up out of our desks in order to go Christmas caroling. The twerking student outside of the classroom window switched the boom box to playing Christmas music. As we started to get up from our desks, Carol Kaufman then appeared at the door. She guided us on a walk around the Philosophy department building while we sang Jingle Bells to confused passersby. After finishing our Christmas caroling, we were led back to our classroom where milk, cookies, a small gift, and our professor’s teaching and course evaluations were laid out on our desks. I gave that professor the highest teacher/course evaluation ranking I ever gave during my college career.
Ultimately, Carol Kaufman and our professor re-enacted elements of Andy Kaufman’s famous Carnegie Hall show and our classroom experience ended with a first person perspective in meta-comedy. Over ten years later, I look back on this experience and wish that I had rushed to the theater to watch Man on the Moon when it first came out, so that I could have had an even deeper appreciation of my college experience with Kaufman style comedy.
I still thank that professor for many of the lessons I learned in that class I still find useful in my career today. Even at the time, I immediately appreciated that the professor’s presentation of his evaluation materials – presenting his evaluations to us at the high point in our classroom experience. He recognized the value of those evaluations in terms of proving his value to his employers, the value of being highly and tangibly evaluated likely helped him obtain tenure at a much younger than typical age and keeping high evaluations would allow him to more aggressively negotiate his pay based on his value as an employee.
I also appreciate the fact that, more than 10 years after taking his class, I still remember the professor and his class – seeing a movie like Man on the Moon, which covers a related subject matter, still takes me instantly back over the years to those late fall days. The professor provided his students with a unique, well timed experience and that experience is still in his student’s mind and still associated with the professor’s personal brand all of these years later. A lot of my current career in marketing is all about finding differentiation and being able to create a unique experience for customers (in this case, the professor’s students) as compared to competitors (in this case, other professors), and watching Man on the Moon brings back a perfect object lesson that I can carry forward today.