The anti-comic

IN OCTOBER 1974, the young pianist and songwriter Barry Manilow played a weeklong engagement at the Bijou Club in Philadelphia. The soft-rocking Manilow, a diligent steward of his own career, was on the rise-his single ''Mandy" was building nicely and would go on to become his first No. 1. But there was a problem: By some quirk of '70s booking, his opening act for the entire week was the then little-known comedian Andy Kaufman. At the end of Kaufman's brief set, Manilow would take the stage to find it strewn with garbage, hurled there by a still-seething crowd. ''They just hated his guts," he would later say. ''My whole job that week was to bring them back from the edge of revolution."

The revolution fomented by Kaufman was not political. As Florian Keller notes in his new book, ''Andy Kaufman: Wrestling with the American Dream" (Minnesota), he was as apolitical a performer as can be imagined. ''In fact," writes Keller, ''one of the most irritating aspects about Andy Kaufman may have been his near-obsessive preoccupation with harmless, infantile gestures. He would invite his audience to sing along with his version of 'The Cow Goes Moo,' and he frequently ended his shows performing Fabian Forte's 'It's a Friendly World."' Kaufman was not Lenny Bruce, in other words, probing the boundaries of taboo with lidded gaze and a hipster's wit. He was neither hip nor witty: He was a disconnected, acne-studded nerd whose staring eyes, magnified as if by some warped private lens, seemed to contain little more than a colossal bemusement.

No punchlines, no ''material" as such, just a series of inhumanly sustained put-ons. His entire act was composed of the negative space around a joke. Kaufman would read aloud from ''The Great Gatsby," for example, to mounting protest from the audience, his single concession to ''comedy" being the fact that he would do it in a terrible British accent. He would do a ventriloquism act of horrifying ineptness, looking rather pleased at the discomfiture it produced.

Keller in his book goes at this ''anticomedy" with the tongs of academe; but where contemporary commentators registered their bafflement in woolly references to European avant-gardism (''...like Ionesco doing stand-up," ''comedy's stand-up Pirandello," ''the Dada of ha-ha," etc.) Keller is committed to Kaufman's Americanness-specifically his relationship to the American Dream. The moment in Kaufman's set when Foreign Man, who has been nodding placidly along to a recording of the theme from ''Mighty Mouse," suddenly raises his arm and lip-synchs the line ''Here I come to save the day!" is for Keller a ''primordial scene": It ''basically re-enacts," he writes, ''the most fundamental myth about America as the land of opportunities where immigrants can reinvent themselves."

The total laughlessness of Keller's approach is oddly charismatic, and appropriate, too. Of Kaufman's fondness for wrestling female challengers onstage (he proclaimed himself ''Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion of the World"), Keller writes ''Andy Kaufman's intergender wrestling routine constitutes an escape from the structural impossibility of sexual relations as captured by Lacan's famous dictum that 'il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel."' Kaufman, who died in 1984 at the age of 35, was no intellectual-his talent for categorical disorder seems to have been wholly intuitive-but as a genius of the noncomic, he would have been quite satisfied, one guesses, to have found himself on the receiving end of a sentence like that.

James Parker's column appears biweekly in Ideas. E-mail cultural.studies@globe.com.