Dick Van Dyke, who just yesterday walked away from a burning Jaguar unscathed on a Los Angeles freeway, may not be one of the first people you’d think of as cherishing such a unique and anarchic talent as Andy Kaufman, but in fact he was responsible for giving Kaufman’s career a significant boost.
Van Dyke and Company was an eccentric yet strangely charming entry on NBC’s 1976 schedule, a sketch show that featured none other than the Los Angeles Mime Company. (Credit the NBC executives for instinctively understanding the inchoate yearning for mime among the American people.)
As Bill Zehme reported in his 1999 book Lost in the Funhouse: The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman:
[T]hey were in the process of creating an inventive variety series for Dick Van Dyke to be part of NBC’s fall telvision schedule. They decided without pause that Foreign Man had great possibilities and envisioned him in a running gag wherein he would interrupt and annoy Van Dyke week after week with eemetations and jokes and musical records and so they invited him to come perform his material for the star and writing staff and somehow he felt compelled to read aloud from The Great Gatsby at the outset of the meeting, which came at the end of a long day, which had the writers and Van Dyke shooting baleful daggers at the two producers throughout the recitation. … Foreign Man set aside the reading in order to weep and to play congas and to exude innocence and Van Dyke began to laugh—“Why I laughed I don’t know,” he would remember. “He was strangely psychological. He liked to lead you one way and then suddenly turn the tables around and make you angry. And then vice versa.”
—snip—
Van Dyke and Company … debuted September 20 and left the air due to low ratings on December 30 and won an Emmy award in the category of variety programming nonetheless. Tapings commenced in late summer and he was introduced in the first episode as pink-jacketed Mr. Andy, finalist in a Fonzie look-alike contest, placing second behind a strapping African-American fellow, about which he protested to Van Dyke—But he don’t even look like de Fonzie! I think you don’t like me you make fun of me because I am from another country! And to appease him Van Dyke grudgingly allowed him to do a song or joke so I can be on de television and every week thereafter he returned during moments most inopportune—but-but you said I could come back—to vex Van Dyke, who would angrily relent to each transgression, often humiliated in the presence of such guest stars as John Denver and Carl Reiner and Chevy Chase and Lucille Ball, who declared, “I know who this young man is—I’ve seen him on your show many times and I think he’s just sensational,” before she too stormed off in a mock huff.
So there you have it: Dick Van Dyke gave Andy Kaufman his first job as a performer on prime-time network television.
You can get a sense of the mime-y goings-on featured on the winsome and ill-fated Van Dyke and Company in this “Puppet Master” clip, which is a little raw but still well worth watching.
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Andy Kaufman’s Midnight Special, from 1981
Sifting through 82 hours of Andy Kaufman’s private anti-comedy field recordings