'Thank You Very Much' deconstructs Andy Kaufman's strange genius
Documentary goes deep on a brilliant, confounding comedy career
Making a documentary about Andy Kaufman is like making a documentary about a black hole. You can record observations, you can posit theories, you can even gather witness accounts from those who orbited close to it. But you’ll never really know if you got it right.
Alex Braverman turns that ambiguity into a strength in his documentary “Thank You Very Much,” which chronicles the brilliant and elusive comedian’s life and career. That black hole at the center of Kaufman – “Is this real or is it a put-on?” – exerts a gravitational pull on the audience then and the viewer now.
What largely survives of Kaufman’s work now is his scene-stealing performance as Latka Gravas on reruns of “Taxi” and the 1999 biopic “Man in the Moon” starring Jim Carrey. But Braverman goes much deeper with a mix of archival footage and talking-heads interviews with his contemporaries who still, 40 years after his untimely death from lung cancer at the age of 35, wonder what was going on there.
At a basic level, Kaufman was a pioneer of so-called “anti-comedy,” where it was never clear whether the joke was on Kaufman or the audience. He would fake a foreign accent and do bad imitations, then turn around mid-set and do a pitch-perfect Elvis. He’d eat ice cream on stage. He’d read from “The Great Gatsby.” He’d plant actors in the audience to heckle him (including, I learned from “Thank You Very Much,” performance artist Laurie Anderson).
There was a sweetness and seeming guilelessness to Kaufman on stage that seemed at odds to the sophisticated, abrasive nature of his performance art. (“He really relished taking us prisoner” said one friend of his bizarre comedy-club sets.) Reportedly a shy man who was into both transcendental meditation and “Howdy Doody,” his persona seemed like that of a fifth-grade boy at a talent show who was both uncomfortable and way too comfortable with being on stage.
And when fans seemed to start getting wise to his tricks, and started to expect the unexpected, he confounded them again with a prolonged career self-immolation, gleefully turning the audience against him.
Taking on the public persona of an arrogant Hollywood a-hole, he sabotaged an episode of the live late-night show “Fridays,” wrestled women before booing crowds, and took on the persona of angry comedy hack Alex Clifton, the tuxedo-clad embodiment of everything in comedy that Kaufman rejected.
His longtime collaborator Bob Zmuda insisted that he was loving every minute of his self-created downfall. But real or staged, it was ugly to watch. The irony was that, when Kaufman contracted an aggressive form of lung cancer, many assumed it was the next evolution of his act. (I was maybe 98 percent sure that “Thank You Very Much” wasn’t going to end with the reveal that Kaufman actually faked his own death in 1984. Okay, 97 percent.)
There’s a moment late in the film where a terminally ill Kaufman goes to the Philippines to consult with a faith healer. We see the healer waving his hands over Kaufman and hold up a bloody mass of tissue that he claims is “the sickness.”
But it’s a bit of sleight of hand – the “sickness’ is raw chicken guts that the healer had hidden. One last “Is this real or is it a put-on?” prank that even Andy Kaufman on his deathbed might have appreciated.
“Thank You Very Much” is now in theaters, and available to rent or own online.