When the Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon came out 26 years ago, I tried to learn as much as I could about the entertainer and his singular, unclassifiable brand of anti-comedy that nevertheless has always made me wheeze with laughter, at least in the small doses you get from watching clips. I can’t say how I would have felt about sitting in the audience as he read the entirety of The Great Gatsby to an increasingly perplexed and irritated crowd.
And so I had a pretty good handle on a lot of what we see in the new Kaufman documentary Thank You Very Much, at least as far as his performances go—the Mighty Mouse bit on Saturday Night Live, his Elvis impression, his obscene alter-ego Tony Clifton, his deep plunge into the professional wrestling world, and so on. But the movie does something incredibly important that I didn’t expect, which is to say, it doesn’t simply throw up its hands and declare Kaufman to be ultimately unknowable. Instead, it places his performances and the whiplash of his personality shifts into actual context, pointing to events in his life that likely informed and shaped much of what he did, and showing a person who was exceedingly complicated, but also very human.
Director Alex Braverman owes much of this to the interviews he conducts with the people who were closest to Kaufman, and who largely don’t play coy with their descriptions of the man. Yes, he was constantly surprising, but they did know him, and they loved him for who he was. Of course, they aren’t entirely straightforward about everything, because they do clearly still have massive respect for Kaufman as an enigma—when his longtime friend and writer Bob Zmuda describes the theory that Kaufman faked his own death from cancer at the age of 35, he says something like, “now I have to be very careful about what I say here,” as if he wants to maintain some possibility that Kaufman is still out there, somewhere.
Thank You Very Much is on VOD March 28th.
