Nearly 40 years after outré comedian Andy Kaufman‘s death from cancer, there remain fans who are certain that a faked demise was Kaufman’s most ambitious and committed hoax.
Until proven otherwise, this is a ridiculous conviction. That said, it’s probably no more or less absurd than believing that Andy Kaufman is a figure who could be explained or even adequately summarized in a conventional documentary. There are some outsized personalities so cloaked in mythology that even the tallest tales about them seem believable, but Kaufman’s personality was so cloaked in subterfuge that any attempt to deconstruct that personality or his behavior is going to come across as a bit within a bit.
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Thank You Very Much
The Bottom Line Great footage, great stories, but not as illuminating as it tries to be.
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Venice Classics)
Director: Alex Braverman
1 hour 39 minutes
This is the problem that Alex Braverman’s new documentary Thank You Very Much runs into. The documentary is filled with fantastic footage from Kaufman’s fearless performances, mostly familiar but still wildly iconoclastic. It’s layered with stories about Kaufman’s process, some perfunctory and some delightful in their own right. But Thank You Very Much goes into the psychological dead-end of treating Kaufman as a solvable puzzle.
Fortunately, it’s easy to enjoy Thank You Very Much without being especially convinced by its reductive incursions into Andy Kaufman’s mind — without being convinced that any film, especially one this relatively conventional, might contribute meaningful answers.
The documentary starts with Kaufman discussing a movie he wants to make, one that begins with the climax, goes into the closing credits, repeats the climax and eventually, through small variations, tells its story. On one hand? Sounds annoying! On the other hand? Sounds potentially brilliant. Either way? Sounds nothing like how Thank You Very Much unfolds.
The documentary isn’t strictly linear. We meet Andy on the stage of New York’s Improvisation Comedy Club, giving a taste of what it might have been like to first be exposed to this strangely accented man delivering garbled punchlines, doing unintelligible impressions and then, at the moment of looming climactic disaster, breaking into an impressive Elvis impression. From there, it goes back to his origins and through his biography. This is mostly Andy Kaufman as recounted by the people who knew him best, rather than as presented by outside observers and pop culture enthusiasts.
But did anybody truly know Kaufman that well? Even folks like longtime collaborator Bob Zmuda and girlfriend Lynne Margulies, who have made a cottage industry out of explaining and defying explanations for him? At most, people seemed to be on Kaufman’s wavelength or to have participated gamely in his various shenanigans. The more personal the stories are, the less convincing Thank You Very Much becomes. Do I believe Andy Kaufman might have been shaped by his parents lying to him about his beloved grandfather’s death? Yes, but it’s such a textbook piece of analysis that it somehow makes him less fascinating. Do I believe that Andy’s stint as a misogynist heel, challenging women to wrestling matches, was mostly about getting laid? A mud wrestler nicknamed The Red Snapper says so, so it might be true, which isn’t the same as being interesting. And did Andy really dislike post-sex intimacy? Shrug.
Thank You Very Much is on steadiest footing when it’s clear that people are still entirely flummoxed by Kaufman and his real motivations and don’t pretend to understand. I could watch a full documentary of Danny DeVito and Marilu Henner telling stories about interactions with Kaufman and, in one notorious incident, Tony Clifton on the set of Taxi. Nobody quite knows how to connect Kaufman and his devotion to transcendental meditation, but it makes total sense when combined with footage of Kaufman earnestly asking Maharishi Mahesh Yogi a wonderfully convoluted question about the role of entertainment once everybody becomes enlightened. It’s better to hear details about Andy Kaufman’s process and surmise a deeper understanding than to listen to occasionally facile speculation on his motivations.
Really, Thank You Very Much is most enjoyable when it’s showing Kaufman at work and letting viewers try to connect process and performance on their own. The simple footage of Andy interviewing Howdy Doody tells me more about his childlike desire to blur fiction and reality than multiple people trying to explain the same phenomenon. You can read as much commentary regarding the performative violence systemic to American life onto Kaufman’s wrestling gambit as you choose to, without a talking head as otherwise engrossing as artist Laurie Anderson spelling it out. Whether it was reading The Great Gatsby to a perplexed and impatient audience or mixing it up with Jerry Lawler or the escalating conflict with Michael Richards on the set of Fridays, Kaufman’s antics may or may not have made sense, but none of them become funnier by trying to make sense of them.
At times here, as Zmuda is giving over-literal explanations for things, I tried paying extra-close attention to whether or not he was winking at the audience. And maybe some parts of Thank You Very Much really are just pranks, executed with a very straight face by Braverman.
Does it demystify Kaufman or is it making a mockery of viewers who demand demystification? Does anybody associated with Thank You Very Much think it’s actually the “definitive” Andy Kaufman documentary, as the official Venice Film Festival description claims? Or is that description making fun of the idea that any Kaufman documentary could actually be definitive? It’s good, but not definitive. We won’t know for sure until Andy weighs in.
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