Tucked inside a restored 1930s train station in Jamestown, NY, there’s a glass case with a wrestling title belt in it. It belongs to Andy Kaufman.
The National Comedy Center, the nonprofit museum built in Lucille Ball’s hometown, has a standing exhibit dedicated to Kaufman that wrestling fans could easily walk past without realizing what they’re looking at. Inside the window: a 1981 Polaroid of Kaufman wearing his self-declared “Women’s Wrestling Champion of the World” t-shirt and belt, the Elvis jacket he wore during his standup act, and a hand-written letter he once sent to Elvis Presley himself.
The Feud That Blurred the Line
Kaufman’s wrestling obsession wasn’t a bit that stayed contained to a stage. He wrestled women on television for real, declared himself Intergender Wrestling Champion of the World, and eventually found his way to Memphis, where he built a genuine, sustained feud with local wrestling legend Jerry Lawler.
That feud produced the single most famous crossover moment in comedy-meets-wrestling history: on July 28, 1982, Kaufman and Lawler appeared together on Late Night with David Letterman, and what started as trash talk ended with Lawler standing up and slapping Kaufman across the face on live national television. Kaufman fired back with a coffee cup and a profanity-laced tirade before storming off set. Letterman, for his part, looked completely blindsided.
Lawler later admitted the two had worked the whole thing out together, a shoot that was really a work, which is about as pro wrestling an answer as it gets. The National Comedy Center leans into that ambiguity: its late-night-talk-show exhibit, designed to look like a control room, lets visitors play the segment themselves, slap and all.
A Hall of Famer Twice Over, in a Way
Kaufman was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2023, more than three decades after his death in 1984, alongside Rey Mysterio and The Great Muta. The National Comedy Center’s exhibit is a reminder that Kaufman’s wrestling run wasn’t a novelty act he dabbled in. It was central enough to who he was that a museum built to honor the entire art form of comedy decided his title belt deserved its own case.
