The New York Comedy Festival is now on, and some courageous, original, boundary-breaking young comic will take home the Andy Kaufman award.

Some excerpts from the NYT story:

... As befits a city where Andy Kaufman got his start, it has a grown man acting like a hyperactive boy who thinks the audience members are guests at his birthday party, as well as a woman who, explaining that she is too sick to talk, lip-syncs her act to a recording of her own voice.

Those performers, Ryan Flynn and Charlyne Yi, are among the eight finalists competing tonight at Carolines on Broadway, one of the festival's producers (the City of New York is also involved), for the Andy Kaufman Award. First presented last year, the award is for the performer who best reflects Kaufman's "originality, humor and courage" and who most forcefully "breaks the barriers of conventional stand-up comedy." The competition is both an answer to the question "Where are the new weirdos coming from?" and a sign that Kaufman, once known as an iconoclast, has become an icon.

"I was a big fan of his from the first time I saw him perform as a stand-up," said Mr. Leary, the star and creator of the acclaimed FX series "Rescue Me" who returns to his comedy roots tomorrow night at Avery Fisher Hall. "He was just so off the wall. There was always an aspect of 'Where is this going?' He was one of those people who had what I call a secret evil plan - the guy's performing, but you don't know exactly how you're supposed to react. What he did is hard to do; it takes a lot of commitment."

It's also hard to define. Kaufman was the comedian who wrestled women. Who disguised himself as an oafish lounge singer and was his own opening act. Who first attracted attention in comedy clubs by pretending to be a meek, confused soul with a vague accent who couldn't tell a joke to save his life, before suddenly morphing into a formidable Elvis imitator. Who played a range of roles, onstage and off, but never, ever broke character. He was such a master of the put-on that although he died of lung cancer 21 years ago, some Kaufman devotees are still not convinced he's really dead.

Whether he was even a comedian remains debatable; he once said that he considered himself a song-and-dance man. (Oddly, Bob Dylan said the same thing about himself.) George Shapiro, Kaufman's manager and one of the forces behind the Andy Kaufman Award, recalled an argument he had with his client: "He wanted to do a 'bombing routine,' a routine so bad that everybody walks out. He wanted to do eight minutes of terrible jokes - jokes that weren't even jokes - that would have people booing, people walking out. I said, 'You can't do that.' We negotiated. I finally persuaded him to keep it to two minutes."

For a bit more on Andy Kaufman, you can see this web site.

Personally, I thought the guy was a genius. This Wikipedia entry tells a bit more about him.