The Great Ruse: The Comedic Genius Who Rocked Wrestling

Long before comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat hit the screen, there was Kaufman, the comedic genius with wiry hair and bulging eyes who pushed the envelope of performance art on a real-time stage. And the whole wrestling episode -- inside the ring and out -- was performance art at its peak. For Kaufman, the fact that so few people caught on made it all the better.

"The reason he's still remembered is he took that idea of being a despicable bad guy and he took it to a whole new level," says Bob Thompson, a professor of pop culture at Syracuse University.

"His badness came not from wanting to take over the world; his badness came from being just so irritating. This was a character, probably more than any I can think of in American popular culture history, that within seconds of hearing him open his mouth, you really wanted to hit him in the face."

Kaufman's wrestling antics would later be immortalized in his infamous expletive-laced tirade on "Late Night with David Letterman," in the R.E.M. song "Man on the Moon" and in the Jim Carrey movie by the same name...More?

source: cnn.com