Sources of the complex, off-putting, briliant and cruel comedy of Andy Kaufman, who died at 35 but remains a legend

A Hollywood Reporter review by Daniel Feinman says it "errs on the side of over-explanation." Variety's review simply says the film not only "chronicles" Andy Kaufman but "understands" him. A convetional talking heads + clips monograph, Thank You Very Much is highy informative, but a bit disappointing for an entertainer who was so unusual and mold-breaking. It does, however, adequately lay out the basics of his iunique life and work as the most provocative conceptual artist of our time, who posed as a comedian and was a mystery to everyone. Andy Kaufman was a unique figure, and this documentary is a valuable introduction to his life and work.

Danny DeVito, Steve Martin, Marilu Henner, Bob Zmuda, Lynne Margulies, James L. Brooks, and Laurie Anderson are among the talking heads who recall their association with Kaufman. But they all acknowledge that they did not know who the "real" Andy Kaufman was.

Thank You Very Much - the phrase, explained here, was a trademark of his comic persona - is a film that traces the life and career of the legendary artist. It seeks a nuanced understanding of what drove this mercurial performer, whose gonzo, boundary-shattering comedy provoked and often outraged audiences. It includes rare, never before seen footage and audio recordings that sheds some new light on his creative process. It includes newly uncovered archival footage as well as some intimate recollections of friends, colleagues, and family members. There are interviews with Kaufman’s closest collaborators. It's worth seeing this film to get a broad introduction to the brief life and memorable career of a comedy iconoclast whose impact is felt all the more today with the blurring of lines between artifice and reality that more and more marks our present age.

If comedy comes out of pain, Andy Kaufman's, it emerges here, was the sudden unexplained disappearance of his beloved grandfather, the dearest person in his life as a little boy who died, but they were afraid to tell him and said he was away traveling, leaving him feeling forefver hurt and dangling. His parehts traumatized him. But he still had a grandmother whom he loved and brought and danced with on a talk show. His grandmother had taken him to professional wrestling that people back then throught was real: his first experience of show business as a masking of reality.

It is a revelation to hear Bijan Kimiachi, an Iranian immigrant who was Andy's roommate at the now defunct Grahm Junior College in Boston, who was, like him, studying television production (though he says here Andy was studying television performance). Kimiachi speaks with a marked accent - he says he had trouble speaking to people then, and also that he was probably Andy's only friend at that time. By the roommate's common consent, Andy adopted Bijan's accent (and perhaps his voice as well), as an essential element in a unique comic persona.

On the popular TV show Taxi (1978-1983), Andy became a lovable hit as the forigner guy, Latka Gravas, who talked in a made-up language, using a voice based on his former roommate's.

After he had been on Taxi amd Saturday Night Live, for a while Andy took a regular job as a bus boy in a fast food restaurant in Hollywood. To work. To observe people. The doc makes clear that Andy was always experimenting with reality, testing it: he was never "off," always "on." Friends once found him on the street panhandling. He staged fights in a car with his girlfriend to scare other drivers, played a rude buyer in a supermarket. Life was theater for him.

He persuaded Robin Williams (seen speaking about this in an archival clip) to play his "grandmother" in a mask on the side of the stage throughout his 1979 Carnegie Hall performance. (While he "abused people," as Robin Williams describes it, obviously revealing a mixture of admiration and disapproval.) For everyone, there seems to have been an element in Andy that they did not understand: his humor had an edge like no one else's, crossed boundaries. It disconcerted, it disoriented people. This was the seventies and early eighties: he was ahead of his time, a trail-blazer.

He was also a lifelong meditator and even a teacher of Transcendal Meditation, and meditated three hours a day, but made fun of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, TM's founder and guiding sprit. Eventually his involvement with wrestling, which they found embarassing, led the TM community to disassociate from him. (A friend here questions what that could possibly mean - i.e, how does meditation, which happens silently in a room, "disassociate" from anyone?)

He disliked the limitation of one character - his dominant association with Latka in Taxi in particular. He wanted to range out and freely explore many other, totally divergent characters. Notably this included Tony Clifton, a made-up "star" at Harrah's Club who was a Yin and Yang opposite to the sweet foreigner he had first created with Latka. Tony was, in contrast, a rude, macho sort of American (Italian American?) lounge entertainer who was a total asshole. And he insisted on having that character appear on Taxi, and in doing so he disrupted the show and caused the cast to threaten to bring their lawyers.

Multimedia performance pioneer Laurie Anderson, another talking head here, became friends with Andy around 1978 and played his "straight man" (her terrm) on acts. She would challenge him and then he would wrestle her. This brings up the recurrant subject here of his misogyny. Was it a put-on, or was it real? This was never quite clear. He found various means of provocation. He loved involving himself in wrestling with women, and became known and notorious for that (not as a comedy act but a thing in itself), and notorious also for that apparent misogyny - the more dramatically, since this came at the time when the women's movement was surging.

Sadly, Andy developed a rapacious form of lung cancer, and was taken from us rather suddenly at thirty-five. But as we all know, short-lived artists who are famous can often become legends. And so, as we learn here, Andy Kaufman now is one of the legendary comic artists of late twentieth-century America. This premature demise became an integral part of his whole life being theater; he made it so. Toward the end of his life, Andy explicitly stated that he wanted his life to be remembered as being one long performance. It is a grotesque variation on the Italian notion of "la vita come opera d'arte," one's own life considered as a work of art.

Not surprisingly, in his active period there were those who strongly disliked Kaufman; I was one of them. His humor seemed too arch, dialed up to too high a pitch, and thus, not really funny. But what does that matter? He did not want to be liked. He actively sought to make people think his comedy was terrible. He was, it becomes clear from this important and overdo documentary, always more a performance artist than a comedian. He sought to provoke, to shock, to stun, to confuse. And in doing these things, he made a lasting mark. And the way this strategy ultimately worked was that by the end of his life everything about him had come to seem a put-on. He had in fact discussed the idea of faking deaths over and over, as we hear clips to show. So when he died, the public thought it was faked to tease them. And so he won. This looks like one of the first must-see documentaries of the year, an essential piece of American show-biz and cultural history.

Thank You Very Much, 99 mins., debuted at Venice, Sept. 2023 and was chosen as Best Documentary there. It was incuded also at Telluride, Hot Springs, Indie Memphis, Sydney (Antenna), Santa Barbara, Boulder and Copenhagen (CPH SOX). The US theatrical release is Friday., March. 28, 2025. Produced by Josh Safdie.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.