While it was difficult for the world to discern at the time, and maybe even now, to the legendary, notorious absurdist comedian Andy Kaufman, comedy was an art, and the act of performance was an act worth living in beyond the stage. Infamous for his strange, bizarre comedic behavior and erratic and provocative, even goading, live appearances, Kaufman, the subject of the documentary “Thank You Very Much: Andy Kaufman,” was seemingly on a quest for truth. And his perverse commitment to the bit went beyond any conventional notions of what was funny and acceptable—and that was the point.
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Slippery and elusive, Kaufman has been the source of much fascination over the years while still remaining something of an unknowable enigma. And this new ‘Thank You Very Much’ doc, directed by Alex Braverman (“Waffles + Mochi”), is arguably the most transparent portrait of the comedian while still trying to perpetuate some of his mystery.
For the uninitiated, if that’s possible, Kaufman was the 1970s and 1980s comedian known for odd and peculiar appearances on “Saturday Night Live” and a five-season run on “Taxi” from 1978 until 1983. In some cases, for some generations, strangely enough, he might be best known as the subject of Miloš Forman’s 1999 “Man On The Moon b the biopic comedy where Jim Carrey played the inscrutable comedian.
Kaufman was also perhaps best known for being voted off “Saturday Night Live” in a controversial poll that one of the NBC execs might have rigged to get the problematic comedian off his show and got “fired” off “Taxi”—though that’s a fact still heavily debated in the doc. Seemingly inhibited and resentful of stardom and success while always wanting to push and provoke boundaries, Kaufman’s Late Night television appearances started becoming wilder and more inexplicable. Just as he was hitting the height of his status as a beloved TV star—everyone adored the character of Latka Gravas on “Taxi”— Kaufman decided to challenge the audience further while getting involved with the World Wrestling Federation and its is-it-real-or-is-it-fake antics (which he of course cherished). Kaufman passed away at age 35 from an aggressive cancer but then allegedly faked his death, a rumor that spiraled out of control for years and continues to this day.
Kaufman became more confrontational somewhere in the middle of all fame—or arguably during the height of it, which he seemingly wanted to destroy. Outrageous, Dada-ist, and patience-testing comedy (one bit was making carrot juice onstage) wasn’t good enough. The next boundary to explore was alienating humor and a deeply uncomfortable incitement to force the audience to question whether what they were watching was rude or just twistedly funny (to Kaufman, always the latter, no matter how ugly and cruel it got). Despite a spiritual kind side, Kaufman, in a bid to shatter boundaries, leaned into misogyny and created the obnoxiously vulgar lounge singer Tony Clifton character. Clifton may have been a split personality disorder, a total Daniel Day-Lewis-like commitment to the bit, or just a psychotic breakdown that allowed him to behave like a pure unadulterated asshole.
Featuring talking head friends and colleagues that help relate Kaufman’s story—Danny Devito and Marilu Henner from “Taxi,” along with its producer James L. Brooks, best friend, and Kaufman’s comedic writer Bob Zmuda, “Saturday Night Live” exec Lorne Michaels, and more—the doc’s defining trait is how undefinable the gonzo prankster was. Kaufman’s a ball of entangled contradictions, which is probably as fitting a tribute as there can be to the subject.
The doc’s maddening core element— that’s again appropriate—is how ‘Thank You’ does its best to convey how it understands Kaufman while still painting him as an indecipherable figure. To many of his closest confidantes, Kaufman was a mischievous, playful, but guileless trickster, but an unknown to many. He was innocent, a lovable child who never grew up, living in fantasy land, but he was also manipulative and cryptic, and no one seemed to know who he truly was. In a fine line between having your cake and eating it too while threading the riddle of Kaufman, the doc, for a good 90 minutes, seems to unpack much of the childhood trauma that created him, but still exasperatingly portraying him as impenetrable.
Deep childhood injuries, rejection, sadness, and escaping that inescapable trauma are big motivators. Kaufman’s parents lied to him about his grandfather’s death and made up some excuse for his absence, which seemingly scarred him (but also perhaps gave him the critical idea to contemplate faking his own death, something he actively talked about before he actually died).
Characters also offered a mix of playtime, relief from reality, and personality roulette role-playing. “Foreign man,” the nascent version of Latka, allowed him to be a child, Elvis impersonations gave him a chance to be sexy, and Tony Clifton permitted him to be his worst self.
Still, for all the paradoxes, inconsistencies, and incongruities that summed up the multitudes of Andy Kaufman in the doc and in the comic’s life, “Thank You Very Much” (which takes its title from the delightful saying Latka would end every comment with), is pretty entertaining and does give insights into the man, the mystery and his murky motivations. Ultimately, it’s a complex portrait of a very complex individual who can’t be understood without a deep dive, which the doc provides.
Featuring rare, never-before-seen footage that even die-hard Kaufman disciples haven’t seen, the stories are still the most intriguing parts. In an uncharacteristically dour moment, Robin Williams described Kaufman as “abusive.” And multi-media artist Laurie Anderson reveals she was a dear friend coaxed into being an audience plant as a fake heckler he would argue with. Kaufman was “the angel of opportunity; Andy always chose the perfect moment to make people squirm,” she said with reverent glee.
To that end, awe and respect are indeed a pervasive tone. Friends, families, ex-lovers, and more all marvel at how dedicated and steadfast Kaufman was to any gag, character, mood, or presentation. One interesting revelation was that Kaufman was a proponent of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) practice that many thousands of people across the world use every day to deal with stress and be at peace (an exercise made more internationally famous by the Beatles when they met the Maharishi the 1960s). Kaufman was also a teetotaler, a vegetarian health nut, and a gentle and kind soul. But when Tony Clifton materialized, for example, Kaufman vanished, in his place, an incorrigible whiskey-slugging red-meat-eating jackass you wanted to throttle.
Juicy, shocking stories are aplenty, and it’s clear that at one point, Kaufman’s subversive clowning evolved into a more dangerously transgressive comedy. Kaufman once played a Carnegie Hall gig and then spent $40,000 dollars to take the entire audience outside and feed them milk and cookies out of a school bus he rented. Judd Hirsch of “Taxi” is notably absent, and there’s audio of the actor losing his sh*t backstage when Kaufman’s Tony Clifton antics would go off the rails (Kaufman somehow convinced NBC to write Clifton appearances into his contract in the later years).
Testing the waters of unlikability seemed to be one of Kaufman’s final frontiers, and in WWF wrestlers, he found much inspiration in hilarious doofuses that audiences loathed, which, of course, he found hysterical. Wrestling and its unhinged sense of overblown theatrics—which audiences still somehow took at face value at the time— was the perfect model, and he happily dove in (if anything, Kaufman’s film “My Breakfast with Blassie,” a brilliant riff on “My Dinner with Andre” starring wrestling manager Fred Blassie, gets a little short-changed, but that could arguably be its own spin-off story).
A visionary, nearly experimental anti-comedian near the end, not trying to elicit laughs but trespassing and messing with people and expectations, Kaufman upended comedy and, in the process, much of his own life.
“He played out his psychological issues and let the chips fall where they may,” said one ex-girlfriend. “The angrier people got, the funnier he found it,” another friend said. The immersive put-on that was Kaufman’s life and comedy—with that line totally blurred— was a warped and deviant tenacity of exploration, perhaps trying to unintentionally scrutinize Woody Allen’s bend/break comedy theory. Perhaps pushing things too far into kamikaze contempt near the end of his life, Kaufman ultimately had everyone on the backfoot of confusion just where he wanted them. Nearly four decades after his death, we’re still wondering if Kaufman and his antics were real or not, and that’s the transcendent ripple-effect magic of his act. [B+]
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