Jerry The King Lawler vs. Andy Kaufman (Oct 1981 – Nov 1983)

Background

Andy Kaufman was a comedian first and a wrestler second, and by 1981 he was famous enough for it to matter: he'd been on the cast of Taxi since 1978 and had built a national reputation on bits designed to make audiences genuinely unsure whether they were watching a joke or a meltdown.[3] One of those bits started on Saturday Night Live in 1979, when Kaufman announced he wouldn't wrestle men, who might actually beat him, but would wrestle any woman in the audience for cash, and crowned himself the World's Intergender Wrestling Champion.[7]

He spent the next two years touring that act to comedy clubs and arenas around the country, and in 1981 he tried to take it to a real wrestling promotion. He pitched it to the WWF's Vince McMahon Sr., who turned him down flat as a traditionalist with no interest in a novelty act.[2] Wrestling journalist Bill Apter, who'd gotten to know Kaufman, steered him instead toward Memphis and Jerry Lawler, the CWA's top star and, by then, essentially the promotion's whole business model.[2] Apter later said plans were moving within days: "A few days later, Andy called me from Lawler's house. Plans were underway to make Andy Kaufman the most hated man in wrestling."[2]

Lawler had built that position over most of a decade. A former Memphis radio DJ who'd talked his way into free wrestling training in exchange for on-air promotion, he beat his own mentor Jackie Fargo in 1974 to win his first NWA Southern Heavyweight Championship and started calling himself "the King" on the spot.[27] By 1977 he was frustrated enough with Nick Gulas's NWA Mid-America promotion that he and Jerry Jarrett broke away to found the CWA themselves, with Lawler installed as its top star from day one.[27]

Kaufman debuted in the territory at the Mid-South Coliseum on October 12, 1981, beating three women from the crowd and drawing with a fourth in defense of his self-invented title.[13] Lance Russell, the longtime voice of Memphis wrestling, later put the business case plainly: "Andy Kaufman was the biggest thing we had in terms of crowds in Memphis," and remembered Kaufman as someone who took the bit seriously enough backstage to ask for a private locker room where he could meditate before matches.[7] What started as a one-off booking, by Lawler's own later account, was never supposed to become a two-year program.[14]

Build-up

Kaufman escalated fast. On WMC-TV's weekly wrestling show, he cut interview segments openly insulting the region, once explaining, at length, what soap was and how Memphis residents should try using it, and doing a similar bit about toilet paper.[7] Dave Brown, the show's co-host, remembered it as calculated: "he was talking about the people of Memphis and putting them down and how they were backwoods. In one interview, he explained soap and how it should be used regularly to clean their bodies."[7] The station reportedly took enough angry calls that management asked for the segments to stop airing.[7]

Jim Cornette, watching from inside the wrestling business at the time, has described the same run of promos as something Memphis had never dealt with before: "Andy Kaufman was making wrestling a joke on TV," sending in tapes "where he was trying to teach the wrestling fans in Memphis how to brush their teeth."[24] For a territory that depended entirely on its audience believing what it saw, a national celebrity openly mocking that audience on their own local station was a genuinely new kind of heel work, built on real condescension rather than a costume.[24]

The turn from comedy act to real feud came at a house show early in 1982, when Kaufman beat a local woman wrestling under the name Foxy Brown and kept going, grinding her face into the mat well after the match had ended. Lawler broke his own on-screen role to physically pull Kaufman off her and throw him down, an intervention nobody, by most accounts, had scripted.[1] Kaufman grabbed a microphone and threatened to sue, cutting a genuinely furious-sounding promo, and Memphis had its challenge: a man was finally going to wrestle Andy Kaufman.[1]

Lawler took the bait publicly and personally, going on local news to argue that an outsider mocking the sport on television couldn't just be laughed off, that wrestling's dignity required an answer in the ring rather than another interview.[24] Kaufman spent the weeks after mailing videotapes back to the Memphis station mocking the fans further, building the match as a grudge rather than a novelty booking.[7] By the time the date was set for April 5, 1982, Lawler had made clear on television exactly what he thought of an inactive comedian demanding to be treated like a contender, daring him, on air, to either wrestle or "act like an ass."[8]

The advance interest reflected how far outside wrestling's usual audience the angle had already traveled. Kaufman wasn't a novelty act by that point so much as a touring one: he'd wrestled somewhere north of 400 women across his run of the gimmick nationwide, enough volume that the Memphis date read, to the wider press, less like a wrestling curiosity and more like the next chapter of an ongoing national story.[25]

By the time the piledriver match was set, "I'm from Hollywood" had become Kaufman's standing dismissal of the entire territory, a line he repeated often enough on Memphis television that it later gave a documentary about the whole saga its title.[31] It captured the character precisely: not a wrestling heel playing tough, but an outsider who genuinely didn't think the audience, the town, or the business itself was worth taking seriously, which was exactly the kind of contempt a Memphis crowd could be counted on to want to see punished in the ring.

The Matches

The match happened on April 5, 1982, at the Mid-South Coliseum in front of roughly 10,000 fans, a crowd built almost entirely by Kaufman's mainstream celebrity rather than the usual Memphis wrestling audience.[9] Kaufman came to the ring in a lavender onesie, working a heel Southern accent as he taunted Lawler and the crowd rather than the clipped, nasal delivery he used everywhere else in public.[25] He stalled through the opening minutes, running from Lawler and refusing real contact, before finally locking on a headlock that did nothing.[9] Lawler answered with a backdrop that put Kaufman on the mat clutching his neck.[9]

Then Lawler signaled for the piledriver, a move Memphis had banned from its rulebook.[9] He hit it anyway, and when Kaufman lay motionless afterward, hit a second one, more vicious than the first.[9] The referee called for the bell and disqualified Lawler on the spot.[9] Kaufman didn't get up. He was fitted with a neck brace at ringside and lay on the mat for the better part of fifteen minutes while the crowd, still convinced they'd watched a real assault, threw garbage into the ring, before finally being loaded onto a stretcher and out to a waiting ambulance.[25][29] The "match" that had drawn a comedy-club crowd into a wrestling arena ended with most of the building watching what looked, to nearly everyone there, like a man being taken to the hospital after a beating.[9]

He was, by the account both men later gave, taken directly to St. Francis Hospital and kept in traction for three days.[29]

He was, in fact, taken to the hospital, and the injury underneath the performance was real. Bob Zmuda, Kaufman's longtime writer and closest collaborator, said doctors X-rayed Kaufman's neck and found a serious sprain: "they had done X-rays and he had sprained his neck very badly. He was there for a number of days... they said just watch your neck because he had a terrible sprain and he could have had a broken neck."[10] Kaufman wore a real neck brace for the next six months.[10] Zmuda added a detail that captured how far the illusion had traveled even backstage: "I don't think Jerry Lawler would have cared, and I think that Jerry was shocked he didn't have a broken neck."[10]

Aftermath

Kaufman spent the following weeks selling the injury everywhere he could, including a national television appearance in the neck brace, and the story kept climbing past the wrestling press into general entertainment coverage.[5] Letterman's producers eventually reached out to both camps proposing a reconciliation segment: bring the two men on together, let them bury the hatchet on live television.[11] It didn't stay buried. On July 28, 1982, midway through the segment, Lawler stood up and slapped Kaufman out of his chair; Kaufman came back from the commercial break screaming obscenities, threw a cup of coffee, and stormed off, and NBC had to bleep the audio for the second half.[4][9] The photograph ran on the front page of the next day's New York Times.[9]

The feud didn't end there, and it didn't stay confined to the two of them. For a couple of weeks that winter, a figure sat ringside on Memphis television wrapped head to toe in bandages, posing as an injured Jimmy Hart. On January 10, 1983, during Lawler's AWA World Heavyweight Championship rematch against Nick Bockwinkel at the Mid-South Coliseum, the real Hart ran out in his regular clothes to distract the referee, Bockwinkel regained the title, and the bandaged man revealed himself as Kaufman, pulled straight back into Memphis's biggest storyline six months after Letterman.[12] On May 2, 1983, Kaufman brought his own masked partner, a monstrous hired gun billed as The Colossus of Death, into a handicap match against Lawler at the Mid-South Coliseum; Lawler eventually got his hands on Kaufman and finished the match himself after Colossus tangled himself trying a running attack.[15][16] Among the last documented meetings between them, on November 14, 1983, Kaufman, wearing boxing gloves, teamed with his manager Jimmy Hart for one more 2-on-1 handicap match against Lawler.[17]

Kaufman's health declined less than a year later. He was diagnosed with large-cell lung carcinoma, a disease more associated with heavy smokers than a 34-year-old comedian, and died of kidney failure caused by the cancer's spread on May 16, 1984, at 35.[6] The feud that had made national news two years earlier ended not with a resolution on camera, but with an obituary.

Behind the Scenes

Nobody outside Kaufman's and Lawler's closest circles knew, for years, that any of it had been arranged. The public didn't learn otherwise until March 1995, when the Emmy-nominated NBC tribute special A Comedy Salute to Andy Kaufman, hosted by Marilu Henner and Bob Saget, revealed on the air that the feud had been a work between two men who were genuinely friends.[30] That was more than a decade after Kaufman's own death; he never got to make the confession himself.[30]

Lawler filled in the details years later, in his 2002 memoir, It's Good to Be the King... Sometimes, writing that he and Kaufman had planned the Letterman confrontation between themselves, that neither David Letterman nor his producers had any idea what was coming, and that he genuinely worried afterward he might be arrested for assault.[4]

Bob Zmuda's account complicates the tidy version of how deliberate the Letterman slap really was. By his telling, the segment was pitched by Letterman's people as a peacemaking appearance, "Letterman had shown the clip from Memphis and everything was kind of going nice," and it was only mid-segment, after Lawler made an insinuation about Kaufman's sexuality, that "one thing led to another" and the slap happened.[11] Whether that means the slap itself was spontaneous inside a scripted setup, or whether Zmuda is simply describing the performance from the outside, is something even people close to it have never fully reconciled in public.

What both accounts agree on is that the physical toll was real even though the enmity wasn't. Kaufman's neck injury from the April 1982 piledrivers was a genuine, X-ray-confirmed sprain, not a selling job, and he wore a brace for half a year afterward, all while playing a man locked in blood feud with the one who'd caused it.[10] Lawler, decades later, was unapologetic about the physicality even in retrospect, saying flatly of the Letterman slap: "I slapped the taste out of his mouth. I slapped him as hard as I could."[8] He's also described the appeal of the work in blunter terms than most wrestlers offer about their own psychology: "To be a great villain, you've gotta get personal."[8]

The two men's actual relationship, by every account that surfaced after the fact, was close rather than hostile. Kaufman had specifically sought Memphis out, over the wrestling establishment's rejection, because he wanted a promotion and a partner willing to commit fully to the bit, and Lawler gave him exactly that for two years running.[2] Jimmy Hart, who managed Kaufman through the 1983 matches, has spoken about the arrangement in later interviews as a piece of collaborative theater rather than a real grudge, consistent with Lawler's and Zmuda's accounts.[18]

The blur between performance and reality followed the story even into its 1999 film adaptation. Jim Carrey played Kaufman in Man on the Moon and stayed in character off camera through the shoot, at one point spitting on Lawler exactly as Kaufman had in 1982; Lawler grabbed him by the hair in response and sent him, by his own account, to the hospital.[19] When they later reshot the Letterman slap scene, Lawler has said he hit Carrey harder than he'd ever actually hit Kaufman, as payback.[19] Carrey later mailed Lawler a letter calling the experience "an honor and an odyssey."[19]

Legacy

The feud is now widely credited as one of the first, and most complete, examples of a "worked shoot" in American wrestling: a storyline built to be mistaken for reality by virtually everyone watching it, including much of the wrestling business itself.[9] It also did something few Memphis angles ever managed, pulling wrestling coverage into mainstream newspapers and network television on the strength of Kaufman's own fame rather than the sport's.[9]

The 1995 special, and Lawler's own fuller account seven years after that, reframed two decades of a genuinely famous piece of American pop culture as an elaborate, sustained piece of theater that both men had protected for the rest of Kaufman's life. Kaufman died believing, publicly, in his own feud with Lawler, and the record only got corrected once he wasn't there to enjoy the reveal himself.[4][30]

The illusion was thorough enough that it reportedly reached Kaufman's own family, who by some retrospective accounts weren't sure themselves whether their son was really at war with a professional wrestler.[28] One retrospective ranking the feud among wrestling's very best argued the entire performance amounted to Kaufman's finest work in any medium: "For everything else Andy Kaufman did in his brief career... his turn as a territory wrestling heel was his best work."[28]

That absence didn't stop the wrestling industry from eventually recognizing what the two of them had built. Andy Kaufman was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2023, alongside Rey Mysterio and The Great Muta, with Lawler and Jimmy Hart handling the induction.[20] Lawler had been pushing for the honor for years and appeared on a video screen rather than in person, having suffered a stroke earlier that year and only recently returned home from intensive care.[21] The rivalry that once needed two decades of silence to be understood as fiction ended up enshrined, officially, as one of wrestling's own.

See Also

Sources & Further Listening

1. "Andy Kaufman's Feud Against Jerry 'The King' Lawler" — LiveAbout. https://www.liveabout.com/andy-kaufman-vs-jerry-lawler-2787147
2. "10 Things Fans Should Know About The Andy Kaufman Vs. Jerry Lawler Feud" — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/things-fans-should-know-andy-kaufman-jerry-lawler-feud/
3. Andy Kaufman — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Kaufman
4. "Wrestler Fesses Famous Feud A Sham" — CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wrestler-fesses-famous-feud-a-sham/
5. "10 Things Fans Should Know About The Andy Kaufman Vs. Jerry Lawler Feud" (SNL neck-brace appearance) — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/things-fans-should-know-andy-kaufman-jerry-lawler-feud/
6. "The Tragic Death Of Andy Kaufman" — Grunge. https://www.grunge.com/608329/the-tragic-death-of-andy-kaufman/
7. "Kaufman and 'The King': 30 years later" — WWE.com. https://www.wwe.com/classics/kaufman-and-the-king-30-years-later
8. "Kaufman and 'The King': 30 years later" (Lawler quotes) — WWE.com. https://www.wwe.com/classics/kaufman-and-the-king-30-years-later
9. "Andy Kaufman and Jerry Lawler - The Truth Behind Their Feud" — Pro Wrestling Stories. https://prowrestlingstories.com/pro-wrestling-stories/andy-kaufman-jerry-lawler/
10. "Bob Zumda on infamous Andy Kaufman-Jerry Lawler angle" — WrestleView. https://www.wrestleview.com/misc-news/54550-bob-zumda-on-infamous-andy-kaufman-jerry-lawler-angle/
11. "Bob Zumda on infamous Andy Kaufman-Jerry Lawler angle" (Letterman segment origin) — WrestleView. https://www.wrestleview.com/misc-news/54550-bob-zumda-on-infamous-andy-kaufman-jerry-lawler-angle/
12. "[1983-01-10-CWA] Nick Bockwinkel vs Jerry Lawler" — Pro Wrestling Only forums. https://forums.prowrestlingonly.com/topic/52967-1983-01-10-cwa-nick-bockwinkel-vs-jerry-lawler/
13. Timeline — Andy Kaufman official website. https://andykaufman.com/pages/timeline
14. "Jerry Lawler Says Andy Kaufman's Memphis Appearance Was Supposed To Be A One Time Deal" — Still Real to Us. https://stillrealtous.com/jerry-lawler-says-andy-kaufmans-memphis-appearance-supposed-one-time-deal/
15. "Jerry Lawler vs Andy Kaufman/Colossus of Death (CWA 5/2/83)" — GME Project forums. https://gweproject.freeforums.net/thread/1731/jerry-lawler-kaufman-colossus-death
16. "The Kaufman Lawler Feud: Chapter 11 - A Handicap Piledriver Match" — YouTube (popculturestu), referenced for May 2, 1983 match date and stipulation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLa7FtPotvc
17. "Andy Kaufman & Jimmy Hart vs Jerry Lawler (11-14-83) Mid-South Coliseum" — Classic Memphis Wrestling. https://www.facebook.com/MemphisWrestling/videos/andy-kaufman-jimmy-hart-vs-jerry-lawler-11-14-83-mid-south-coliseum/356550175302365/
18. Jimmy Hart — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Hart
19. "Jerry Lawler Had A Contentious Relationship With Jim Carrey While Filming 'Man On The Moon'" — Wrestling Inc. https://www.wrestlinginc.com/1107511/jerry-lawler-had-a-contentious-relationship-with-jim-carrey-while-filming-man-on-the-moon/
20. "Andy Kaufman Named to 2023 WWE Hall of Fame Class Headlined by Rey Mysterio" — Bleacher Report. https://bleacherreport.com/articles/10069473-andy-kaufman-named-to-2023-wwe-hall-of-fame-class-headlined-by-rey-mysterio
21. "A Recovering Jerry Lawler Helps Jimmy Hart Induct Andy Kaufman Into The WWE Hall Of Fame" — Wrestling Inc. https://www.wrestlinginc.com/1245861/a-recovering-jerry-lawler-helps-jimmy-hart-induct-andy-kaufman-into-the-wwe-hall-of-fame/
22. "Jerry Lawler Slaps Andy Kaufman | Letterman" — YouTube (Letterman). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL9PGJslS6A
23. "FULL EPISODE: Jerry Lawler talks Andy Kaufman, Memphis Wrestling with Austin: Broken Skull Session.." — YouTube (WWE Vault). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Fw7lc4Up6s
24. "On the Timeless Beauty of Jerry Lawler Kicking Andy Kaufman's Ass" — Vice. https://www.vice.com/en/article/wrestlings-greatest-feud-andy-kaufman-vs-jerry-lawler/
25. "Andy Kaufman and the Unlikely Rise of Intergender Wrestling: 'I'm Not Choking Her!'" — The Daily Beast. https://www.thedailybeast.com/im-not-choking-her-andy-kaufman-and-the-unlikely-controversial-rise-of-intergender-wrestling/
26. "Jerry \"The King\" Lawler pays tribute to Andy Kaufman: WWE Hall of Fame 2023" — YouTube (WWE). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW2HlcR7Wdc
27. "10 Things Wrestling Fans Should Know About Jerry Lawler's Career In Memphis" — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/wrestling-jerry-lawler-career-memphis-facts-trivia-things-to-know/
28. "#1 on my list of pro wrestling's best feuds: Andy Kaufman vs. Jerry Lawler" — Augusta Free Press. https://augustafreepress.com/news/1-on-my-list-of-pro-wrestlings-best-feuds-andy-kaufman-vs-jerry-lawler/
29. "Andy Kaufman" (St. Francis Hospital, three days in traction) — Do You Remember?. https://www.doyouremember.co.uk/memory/andy-kaufman
30. Andy Kaufman — Wikipedia (on the 1995 NBC special _A Comedy Salute to Andy Kaufman_ revealing the feud was staged). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Kaufman
31. I'm from Hollywood — Wikipedia (on the phrase's origin as a line Kaufman used on Memphis wrestling audiences). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_from_Hollywood

Further Listening

• A Comedy Salute to Andy Kaufman (1995 NBC special) — the tribute broadcast that first told the public the Lawler feud had been staged
• It's Good to Be the King... Sometimes (Jerry Lawler's memoir) — Lawler's own account of the Letterman planning and the years of silence that followed
• I'm from Hollywood (1989 documentary, directed by Lynne Margulies) — Kaufman's own footage from the Memphis run, with interviews from Lawler, Jimmy Hart, and Bob Zmuda
• Steve Austin's Broken Skull Sessions with Jerry Lawler — Lawler's extended retrospective on building the angle with Kaufman
• Man on the Moon (1999 film) — the dramatized version, with Jim Carrey's method performance and Lawler's own account of what filming it was actually like