Actor, singer, performance artist & comic Andy Kaufman was #BornOnThisDay, Jan. 17, 1949.

[Beastly Boy]

8. Andy was a brave man.

He wasn't as much interested in making you laugh as he was in making himself laugh. He could have played the Latka Gravas and his schizophrenic alter ego Elvis Presley character for the rest of his short life, but he got tired of telling the same joke so many times. And, to hell with the audiences, he moved on to the more unconventional and absurdist subjects: televangelism, intergender professional wrestling, performance art, etc., erasing boundaries between staging and reality.

He kept pushing the envelope. The one thing he wasn't was mainstream. That's why he is most admired, so many years after his death, by professional comedians and people on the edge of society.