Rando! Tony Clifton's Stormy Justice Failed Pilot

As longtime readers of this website are perhaps aware, I am low-key obsessed with Bob Zmuda. Zmuda is of course the repellent human being who made his name writing for Andy Kaufman during the golden years, only to disgrace that name by dry-humping the poor man’s corpse for fame and money for over three and a half decades now, most recently and appallingly by releasing another tell-all memoir about his best friend and partner where he posthumously outted the comedy icon just for giggles and pretended that Kaufman faked his death and was still alive solely for the purpose of having something to write about. 

I spent several memorable hours interviewing Bob Zmuda in costume and character as abrasive lounge lizard Tony Clifton in Chicago’s legendary Pump Room for the A.V Club back in the day before seeing him perform a boozy, whiskey-fueled three and a half hour set a few days later. 

Yet until today I did not know that Zmuda, as Clifton, filmed a pilot called Stormy Justice that gave the People’s Court/Judge Joe Brown courtroom show the anti-comedy treatment. It pains me to admit this because Zmuda is objectively a terrible person and possible/probable sex criminal but the result is genuinely hilarious, a master class in the comedy of awkwardness.

Perhaps the craziest, most unexpected element of Stormy Justice is how uncharacteristically normal the whole thing feels. Other than the fictional “judge” in padding, make-up and costume, every element of the show is played one hundred percent straight, beginning with plaintiffs and defendants who signed onto what they clearly thought was a legitimate courtroom show, or at least as real as any courtroom show can be, and are flummoxed to find themselves being berated, insulted and peppered with rude questions by the crass vulgarian on the bench.  

The combination of real people and a fictitious prankster impishly pushing their buttons anticipates Sacha Baron Cohen’s fearless brand of confrontational comedy, lending the proceedings a wonderful tension. The graphics, music, announcer and court reporter all look and feel like they belong in a genuine, non-satirical The People’s Court knock-off. Even Zmuda is uncharacteristically restrained. 

Zmuda throws himself into the fiction that he’s a television judge specializing in the kind of low-level squabbles and disagreements that generally get hashed out in small claims court with total conviction. Zmuda as Clifton never acknowledges the true nature of his fame or infamy as a performer and core component of the Andy Kaufman myth.

The format of the courtroom show affords Zmuda an opportunity to perform two staples of his Clifton’s live act—insult comedy and crowd work—in a fascinating new setting. Only instead of insulting the palookas who paid twenty bucks and a two drink minimum to see him work his magic, Zmuda takes aims at the poignantly average people cursed with trying to argue real cases in front of a fake judge more interested in nervous laughter and intimidation than meting out justice. 

Whether he’s dressing down an overalls-clad plaintiff wanting recompense for his fish dying while under the care of a negligent fish-sitter for coming to court looking like he just finished ploughing fields or asking for an apology from a bewildered French immigrant for the way her countrymen treat Americans, Zmuda’s Judge Tony Clifton is as funny as he is mean, and he is very mean. 

The cases mostly come down to who Clifton likes more, or, considering his persona, who he hates less or feels sorry for. A sad sack 63 year old brought into this kangaroo court over non-payment for martial arts instruction inspires a combination of pity and contempt from the misanthrope in charge.   

Luxuriating in his own outsized obnoxiousness, Clifton barks at the poor man, “I do not mean to humiliate you, sir, but you are pathetic” before really wriggling in the knife by asking the man to cosign this assessment, imploring, “Do you agree with me that you’re pathetic?” 

The first case before Judge Tony Clifton involves two middle-aged men arguing over a chess bet. Zmuda being Zmuda, he does a fair amount of ethnic humor that traffics extensively in racist stereotypes but he never pushes quite as far as you think he will. Zmuda’s Clifton really commits to the judge role in a way that makes everything funnier. At one point he yells at a defendant “I’ve been doing this for a very long time!” and the notion of this bizarro world version of Clifton spending years, if not decades, resolving the minor conflicts of ordinary people on television is unexpectedly hilarious. 

The knock on anti-comedy in general, and Andy Kaufman more specifically, is that it’s only funny in a conceptual, academic manner, that it’s the kind of cerebral fare you appreciate on an intellectual level without actually engendering even the meekest of chuckles. 

I laughed a whole lot during Stormy Justice. I laughed deeply and often the way you do during those blessed, all too rare instances when anti-comedy also qualifies as actual comedy.

Stormy Justice is even unexpectedly philosophical when the gentleman with the dead fish discourses at length to a mortified Judge Clifton about how it’s okay to feed “feeder” fish to larger fish because feeder fish are inbred, and consequently do not have hearts or souls in the man’s estimation. Do fish have souls? I have no idea, but I find the question intriguing, if nothing else.

The election of a man notorious for using phrases like “grab ‘em by the pussy” and “I moved on her like a bitch” has lent a new resonance to Clifton’s old school Vegas gone evil shtick. The idea that a crude, vulgar man with a hair-trigger temper, a deep-seated, oft-expressed hatred of women, minorities, immigrants and foreigners would be put in a position of power over ordinary human beings doesn’t seem quite so far-fetched or outrageous anymore. 

That’s not anti-comedy; that’s a reality it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find funny in anything but the darkest, most bitter fashion. 

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