“If you believed they put a man on the moon (man on the moon)

If you believed there’s nothing up his sleeve

Then nothing is cool.” 

-R.E.M. (“Man on the Moon”)

R.E.M.’s 1992 song “Man on the Moon” – a tribute to late comedian Andy Kaufman– is also a celebration of the weird. As the song alludes, Kaufman always had “something up his sleeve”; he was making a game of the human experience, and the lyrics start with references to a number of popular games such as Twister, Risk, checkers, and pro wrestling, which Kaufman dabbled in during his unorthodox life. With Kaufman, there was always something beyond the surface. 

Similarly, whatever current connotation the term “conspiracy theorist” has, the song suggests that to disbelieve in, say, the moon landing, is to have fun with traditional narratives told to us by the authorities that be. And in comedy, the same way a “punchline” violates the convention established by the “setup”, so too did Andy Kaufman and moon landing skeptics violate the conventional. Indeed, Kaufman’s own death in 1984 aroused conspiracy theories suggesting it was faked, that he perpetrated yet another ruse in a life dedicated to ruses. 

“Man on the Moon”  makes other references to distrusting the status quo. One lyric states that “Mister Charles Darwin had the gall to ask”. Ask what? Well, questions that challenged the prevailing Judeo-Christian worldview of the time. Again, turning the conventional upside down.

As the late British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott once said, “we are poor indeed if we are only sane”. I would also add that we are poor indeed if we are only normal. Being too attached to what is conventional, the banal “truths” handed down to us by our culture, family, and society we live within, often serves as a defense against our most honest thoughts and creative instincts. The cost is a life without a sense of real fun, just a sterile, overly-literal world where, in the words of R.E.M., “nothing is cool.”