Thank You Very Much

Was Andy Kaufman funny?

Wrong question. “Funny” is too restrictive a word for Kaufman. No, restrictive is too confining a word. Kaufman wanted people to laugh, but not because he was funny. He wanted them to laugh because it’s the noise that emerges from the intersection of the primordial and the cerebral. He wanted to find joy in the unpredictable, in the audience not knowing where he would end up.

For those of you too young to know who Andy Kaufman was, or who only knew him from Man on the Moon, Milos Forman’s 1999 biopic of the artist, or Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond, Jim Carrey’s documentary about how playing Kaufman almost ate him alive, there is Thank You Very Much. For those of you who had your brain bent in real time by the ultimate superstar outsider of Eighties comedy, there’s still enough new here to make retreading his familiar career worthwhile.

Alex Braverman’s clips-and-talking-heads documentary blips through the life of Kaufman, a comedy pioneer and insufferable asshole. Or maybe he was a comedy pioneer because he was an insufferable asshole. Or maybe he was a comedy pioneer because he was so perfect at playing an insufferable asshole and knew how the audience would be forced to think about their complicity in his assholery. A season one regular (but not a cast member) on Saturday Night Live and the breakout star of blue-collar comedy sitcom smash Taxi, he was also a dangerous iconoclast whose performances didn’t stop at the edge of the stage. “He’s playing with the media,” as one gray-haired lady says while watching his now-legendary guerrilla raid on The Dating Game.

There’s an inherent tension between this being a very standard biopic (clip, reminiscence, formative childhood trauma, affairs, etc.) about a deeply unconventional figure. It’s not hard to imagine that Kaufman himself would approve a little more of Kaufmania!, Kevin Sean Michaels’ little-seen and purposefully formless sketch-based documentary, for at least trying the bust out of the conventions. Yet the biggest problem for Kaufmanologists is that Braverman depends so heavily on Bob Zmuda, Kaufman’s longtime writer/collaborator/sometime stand-in and self-appointed official historian. Where it gets most interesting is when Braverman looks past Zmuda and familiar Kaufman talking heads like his Taxi castmates Marilu Henner and Danny DeVito. Instead, it’s in conversations with less studied figures in his life like college roommate Bijan Kimiachi, long-suffering manager Howard West, and Kaufman’s family that give fresh insight into his confrontational art.

Confrontational. Maybe that’s a more fitting word than funny, when Braverman tackles him as a difficult, obnoxious, transgressive figure who was prepared to be hated to make his point. Maybe the most valuable interviewees are avant-garde musical pioneer Laurie Anderson and mudwrestling legend Robin “the Red Snapper” Kelly when they discuss how much he pushed the line between fake and real.

It’s still a miracle that a documentary can spend this much time talking about Kaufman and never mention the word Dadaism. Yet Braverman may be the first biographer to really look at how Kaufman was subverting the culture war in the same way that the groundbreaking French art movement took on the devastation of World War I. More importantly, Braverman hints at the saddest reality of Kaufman – that there may never have been a real Kaufman, or that he was so at war with his multiple selves that he could only end up as collateral damage to his campaign of chaos. Maybe, if he’d lived long enough, the only way for him to become truly transgressive again would be for him to have just been Andy Kaufman. Whoever that was.