A documentary subject like the comic Andy Kaufman, who died in 1984, has got to be both a dream and a nightmare for a filmmaker. Archival footage is usually used to suggest a glimpse into who someone “really” was, but Kaufman’s public appearances almost always involved him playing some kind of character, like the sweetly hapless Foreign Man (who evolved into Latka Gravas on “Taxi”) or the abrasively awful nightclub singer Tony Clifton. Kaufman suggested — and friends concur in “Thank You Very Much” (available to rent or buy on most major platforms) — that he was always playing a character, even if that character was a guy named Andy Kaufman. Trying to get at the “real” guy in this case seems quixotic.
“Thank You Very Much,” directed by Alex Braverman, features several friends of Kaufman’s musing on who the real Andy was, and taps into elements of his childhood to explain some of his obsessions. But understanding the real Andy is not the ultimate point of this film. Instead, Braverman seems to be roving in search of the source of Kaufman’s appeal: Why did fans want to watch someone who was so often deliberately off-putting and exasperating? Kaufman’s act didn’t involve telling jokes (“I’ve never told a joke in my life, really,” he once said) and often seemed designed to push audiences as far as possible to see if and when they’d break.
When, beginning in 1979, he started performatively wrestling women and spouting misogynistic garbage, it was awfully hard to tell whether he was satirizing women, feminists, misogynists, wrestlers or all of the above. His is not the kind of comedy you just chuckle at and move on. Today we might call him a troll.
As “Thank You Very Much” shows, Kaufman was a comedian of the uncomfortable, the absurd, the confusing and at times the excruciatingly boring. Braverman wisely does not try to imitate Kaufman’s style in the film, instead opting to explore his career through old footage and conversations with people who knew him, like Lorne Michaels, Kaufman’s father (in archival interviews), the comedian Bob Zmuda and the musician Laurie Anderson (in new takes).
Most people seem to come to the same conclusion: To understand Kaufman, you need to think of him as a performance artist more than a comedian. His art blurred so completely with his life that even those who were close to him are not entirely sure whether he faked his own death.
But if he was an artist, then what was the subject of his art? After all, a work of art aims to unsettle us a little, to make us see our reality in a different way. Comedy was not really his subject. Laughter wasn’t either. Instead, a few interviewees suggest, it was time — a part of existence we normally take for granted. Kaufman had a preternatural ability to remain unperturbed by time passing, even when his audience became disgruntled, hostile or upset.
So even if you think you know what’s going on, he’s going to wait you out till you doubt yourself. Time is suspended, as if you’ve slipped briefly into an alternate dimension and are suddenly aware of your existence in a new, fraught way. You start to wonder whether anything occurring in that moment is real, or if it’s an act, or if it’s some combination of them both. You start to wonder if the rules of social interaction still apply here. It’s not your ordinary night at the comedy club, or on earth. To Zmuda, “This messing with reality is everything that Andy’s about.”
