Why is the Mighty Mouse bit supposedly so funny?

I'm with you on this.

Actually most of the film isn't very funny, but that Mighty Mouse bit is just another long line of very unfunny and sad attempts by Kaufman.

Having watched and enjoyed the episodes of Taxi with Andy Kaufman as Latka I was intrigued when Man on the Moon came out.

But the film, if one is to accept it as a kind of biography on Kaufman, basically revealed him to be a ginormous azz hole.

I didn't mind Kaufman's eccentric behavior or his bizzare comedy style. I think that was just the way he did his act. But the crap he would pull on his own family - pretending to be dying and whatnot, that was just too much. In the film his own family had gotten fed up with his antics and were leary of any new sob story Kaufman came up with. When told of his "death" or "illness" or whatever, you can see they were just so exhausted with him already.

This whole notion that tricking people can be funny only carries you so far. Sooner or later you're gonna piss people off. And you're gonna piss people off even more when your comedy routine is as lame as Kaufman's evidently was.

The more I watched the film the more I thought that Kaufman might have been suffering from some mental defect.

It seems that he had this idea of what he thought was "funny", and he was so totally convinced that it was "funny" that nobody (even his best friend DeVito) could get him to see just how unfunny he actually was. On practical application his comedy routines were mostly flacid. Original? I guess. Offbeat humor? Most definitely. But was it really funny..? I guess that depends on who you ask.

His ideas of staged antics during interviews could be very funny if executed well. But Kaufman didn't.

The idea of wrestling females by pretending (or not pretending) to be some chauvanist I can also see as being funny if executed well. And here again Kaufman didn't.

Someone also mentioned Kaufman's ability to command some influence with certain tv shows with incredulity. That I totally agree with. I don't see how it was even possible for someone like Kaufman to get away with some of the crap and cheap theatrics he did. But whatever...

The parts of the film I thought that were really moving was the close friendship between Danny DeVito and Kaufman. It comes through very clearly that these two were such good friends and colleagues. This film might have been a love letter to the late Kaufman by his friends. For that reason alone I would say the film does a nice job at providing some insight into Kaufman.

This film is for his friends. And that's it. Anybody else is basically outside looking in like someone on this message board already stated.

It's in the bizarreness of it. Sort of like his original bit we see, when he's doing to the terrible impressions and putting the audience off, then does a spot on Elvis out of nowhere. Same thing here - he literally just stands there while the song begins, doing nothing. Then, out of nowhere, lip syncs and really sells Might Mouse's part. It's really just making the audience feel ill at ease watching a performer bomb, and the laughter is more out of relief than actual comedy when he's able to do something actually noteworthy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItMJtA8vfpw

It was funny when the real Andy Kaufman did it on SNL. Okay, sure, humor is subjective: but I laughed at it; people talked about it at school afterward; it was generally considered humorous.

The "not making sense" is pretty much the joke.

This was the period when what you might call "meta comedy," and completely illogical absurdity, was new and cutting edge. See: Monty Python (made earlier, but it didn't come to the US until PBS stations showed it in 1974), Steve Martin, etc.

It's funny becaus his singing voice is so awesome!
You'd hardly expect that coming out of his slight frame.

You have to keep in mind that in the scene directly before that one, he asked "Is there a secret to being funny?" and received the reply "Yes, Silence."
He stood there and did nothing for a long time, he used his silence to comedic effect and did it brilliantly. He then put on a record without introducing it while continuing to say absolutely nothing. His silence is almost building suspense to the point that when he finally does something, it's automatically hilarious. It isn't the singing or lip-synching that is funny, it's the fact that he did absolutely nothing for over a minute beforehand.
After that he sticks with the silence, again creating a suspense but because we know it's building towards this time, his silence is even funnier. He has to however do something to keep that suspense up, the sip of water does that but even better is the little fake start he does.
You know when people say that comedy is all about timing? This is just about one of the best examples of that.

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Tommy Cooper was the most popular magician in the UK for many years.

Why? Because he always messed up his tricks. Check him out. He was around at the same time that Kaufman emerged.

The fumbling, the nervous laugher and the confusion.. until at the last moment he manages to pull off the trick.

It's in the performance and no, not anyone can pretend to be hopeless at something they are really good at. It takes a lot of work and talent.

Another example is the British comedian Les Dawson, mostly remembered as a fat bigoted middle aged stand up comic, but he had a routine where he played the piano really badly. It was far harder for him to rewrite the tunes with bum notes n and play them in time than to simply copy the original score. You knew he was going to screw it up, you just had to keep your ears on edge until it happened.