What new understanding of Andy Kaufman can we have? As a comedic figure, Kaufman is well-studied and documented — his career spanned roughly only a decade in the public eye, from his premier on Saturday Night Live in 1975 to his conspiracy-shrouded “death” in 1984. While our collective time with Kaufman was all too brief, his comedy has stayed with us for good reason. All that’s really left to think about is our relationship to the comedian and his material. That’s the gist of Thank You Very Much, Alex Braverman’s new documentary, which presents some unseen footage and interviews on Kaufman’s life, but especially focuses on his relationship to the audience.
The way Andy Kaufman worked a crowd, the documentary suggests, comes from his interest in professional wrestling, as he adopts a “heel” like comedic figure and is more interested in showmanship than the authenticity of his own content. If it frustrates, bamboozles, flummoxes, and otherwise discombobulates the crowd, it was a successful show. The joke’s on us.
The title, Thank You Very Much, comes from a classic Kaufman bit. He would do Elvis impersonations and take to song. Convincing impressions of Elvis. Then he’d break back into his implacable voice, not of Elvis, not of Kaufman, not of anyone in reality, and say the Elvis catch-phrase. A punchline to a kitschy overly reverent showpiece, a bit of anti-comedy, Kaufman’s bread and butter, wherein the joke outplays the punchline and its simple brevity is the point: it’s about disruption.
The documentary covers the active periods of Kaufman’s career effectively. We see how he approached standup comedy, his Elvis character, his popular character from Taxi (1978), and a lot about his publicity stunt wrestling women. It’s possibly frustrating just how focused the documentary is on the wrestling arc, which may have been time-consuming but in the history of Kaufman’s relevance to comedy, feels like his smallest contribution.
There are still great moments of joy. Kaufman breaking down and sobbing on stage until his cries form the strange cadence of a song (Bo Burnham and other modern comics still eat off of this unpacking of vulnerable comedic presence and song). There’s the great bit where Kaufman comes out to perform and instead reads the entirety of The Great Gatsby (1925). The doc is told by those closest to the comedian and everyone has something curious to say — Kaufman did not allow for indifference.
As an iconoclastic figure in comedy, at once unknowable and more real than anyone, the great legacy of Kaufman’s work echoes through the comedy of the day. And by learning about our relationship to his work and how he played into this, and loved to cause chaotic confusion, a clear image of who Andy Kaufman was to us begins to appear. Whether we learn who he really was — if not entirely defined by his celebrity — may be the subject for another documentary.