Is This Guy For Real? by Box Brown

Non-fiction comics are a lot more common, this past decade or two, then they were earlier - usually book-format, roughly divided into memoirs (my life!) and biographies and histories (this other guy's life! or this other thing!). I tend to think they've taken over a few existing niches in the publishing ecosystem, especially the kind of  vaguely interesting book that was the basis for thousands of middle-grade book reports.

I don't think Box Brown entirely works in that mode; his books are pitched at a slightly older crowd. But I think his career has come along with that wave - maybe sometimes helping, maybe sometimes being tossed by a market moving in a slightly different direction.

Is This Guy for Real? was his new book in 2018, subtitled The Unbelievable Andy Kaufman and being a comics-format biography of the titular weirdo comedian. But, more centrally, it was Brown's second book about a pro-wrestling figure (after Andre the Giant) - he's most interested in Kaufman's touring show where he wrestled women, with his feud with Jerry Lawler, and, more generally, how being a wrestling fan and later a wrestling performer formed his style of comedy and performance.

As a book, it's sometimes a meditation on "kayfabe"  - about not breaking character, about the side of comedy that hates corpsing and needs everything to be real, every second, to sell the gag from beginning to end. Kayfabe, for those who don't know, is a wrestling term that comes from a Pig Latin-esque mangling of "be fake," and refers to always maintaining the cover story: that wrestling is real, that the stories are not made up, that the performers really do hate each other, that everything the fan sees is just as competitive and definitive as any other sport.

That is not true of pro wrestling, of course. And the secret of kayfabe is widely understood now - but it was still secret in the '60s and '70s, when a young Kaufman first watched wrestling as a spectator, and into the '80s, when he participated in that world and the first cracks in the public display of kayfabe started happening.

Brown tells this story in order, as usual - he's a thoughtful interesting cartoonist, but he always seems to tell his stories in a straightforward way, with crisp cartoony art and narrative consistency. He starts with a young Kaufman, and his love of wrestling and Elvis and cartoons - and then continues those themes, showing how Kaufman kept those things central in his early comedy act.

Taxi is mentioned, but Brown doesn't give us much about that work - and mostly skims over the rest of Kaufman's acting career. The focus is on wrestling - Lawler is the character who gets the second-most page time, given his own sections to show the growth of his career and presented explicitly as parallel with Kaufman.

It's a perfectly reasonable take for a Kaufman bio, but it did make me think: there could be multiple plausible takes on a Kaufman bio, which seems unusual for a guy who died of lung cancer at thirty-five. I could see other creators doing a Taxi-oriented book, or one centered on his talk-show appearances (especially Letterman), or his comedy act. Kaufman was weird and particular, and his deal was that he never broke character during a bit - and that can be brought out in various ways.

But that's exactly what kayfabe is, so Brown's choice is inspired. It explains Kaufman in a way that another direction wouldn't have, and shows him in the world where his style and madcap crazy act worked the best, the places where he could be the most purely Andy Kaufman.

I can wish Brown had more space to get into the rest of Kaufman's work, but I think I agree with Brown: this is most important. This is what you need to know to "get" Andy Kaufman. It's a great bio of a really weird, hard-to-understand figure, that provides not just insight, but understanding and sympathy for what he was trying to do and the ways he felt he had to do it.