If you’re a comedy fan, you probably know the name Andy Kaufman. Maybe you know him from his work in the early days of "Saturday Night Live," where he performed bizarre sketches that challenged audience expectations.
For example, he’d come out on stage and struggle through a series of awkward jokes, and then start crying when the audience didn’t respond the way he wanted. Or maybe you remember him from "Taxi," where he played a zany but kind-hearted mechanic named Latka, who had appeared in America from an unknown country and often spoke in gibberish.
Once, during Kaufman’s time on "Taxi," a fight broke out on set when he insisted that his friend Tony Clifton, a hard-drinking lounge singer from Las Vegas, be given a role in the series. Clifton was so obnoxious during rehearsals that he had to be forcibly removed from the set by the cast, who were very confused, because Clifton appeared to be Kaufman himself in heavy makeup and prosthetics.
Later in his career, Kaufman reinvented himself as a pro wrestler, and went around the country challenging women to fight him. Many of his fans, who loved him for the sweet-natured character he played on "Taxi," were horrified by his transformation into a hateful misogynist, who provoked women in the audience by insulting their appearance and intelligence.
So, who was the real Andy Kaufman? The debate has raged for years, and the mystery has only deepened since his sudden death in 1984, when he was only 35 years old. A new documentary called “Thank You Very Much” explores Kaufman’s legacy and elusive personality. The film's director, Alex Braverman, joined The Show to talk about it.
Full conversation
ALEX BRAVERMAN: I think the fact that we can't tell, you know, if that's the real him or not is brilliant and why it never gets old.
SAM DINGMAN: Yes, he made a conscious decision it seems to be this permanent enigma. And one of the things that really resonates because of that in your film is this very early incident from his life regarding his grandfather.
BRAVERMAN: Yeah, his grandfather spent a lot of time with him when he was a young kid. They would play games and sing songs and when he died, I think Andy was 4 or 5, and his parents made the decision to postpone this conversation that explains the concept of death and basically just say, “Oh, he's you know, he's just he's gone away for a little bit. He's traveling.” And rather than that settling the question for Andy, I think it just raised more questions of, you know, well, why didn't he say goodbye? Why doesn't he write me a letter? Why didn't he take me with him?
And he was very sad about this. And his, his way of dealing with it was to basically be alone in his room performing for an imaginary camera in the wall. And so this idea that he's someone who wants to play with reality or make us think one thing when something else is really happening, you could suggest that this seed of an idea comes from this early childhood experience. That's what his collaborator and friend Bob Zmuda suggests, anyway, that this is sort of the magic ingredient where all this started for him.
DINGMAN: Yes, absolutely, absolutely. And I had the thought as I was watching it, that a wound like that, that says, you know, you've been deprived of the understanding of what's real and what's not. I could see him going to a place where he decides, like, I'm going to be in charge of that from now on.
BRAVERMAN: I think you're right. It's like what's unique about him is A, he is controlling his reality and how we get to see it. But then he's also strong enough to never break that illusion and also strong enough to be comfortable with whatever reaction that creates in us, whether it's anger towards him or confusion or, you know, discomfort or annoyance or whatever it may be.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, and it felt like it really unlocked something because people for years have speculated, and this happens a little bit in the film as well, that there must have been some dramatic rupture in his childhood, some really serious, traumatic thing that took place to have prompted him to want to live such a bizarre life.
But it was actually this very simple, relatable thing that many people experience. And for me, there's sort of a connection there to the fact that even though the things he did were so strange and extreme, people ultimately found him relatable.
BRAVERMAN: Yeah, it's really not a very significant trauma. It's just life. And in his case, it was comforting to him in his sadness at his grandfather's absence to like, return to the things that they did together. Whether that's playing games or singing songs or roleplaying or things like that.
And I heard a story from Bob, similar to, his friend and writer, that basically like he met this girl at college once who said, “oh, there's this talent show that we're doing tonight, you should come.” And because he had a crush on this girl and didn't want to disappoint her, he decided to sign up for the talent show and didn't really have anything to do. And he just did his act that he did as a kid singing kid songs. And when he did it for adults, they, like, lost their minds because they thought it was the funniest thing ever. And he basically thinks to himself like, “oh my God, I have an act, like this could work.”
DINGMAN: Well, and then there's also the fact that he, from a very young age, not only had this close relationship with his grandfather, but he also had a close relationship with his grandmother, who used to take him to see pro wrestling. And the movie really draws a frame around that. Tell us why that part of his relationship with his grandmother was interesting to you.
BRAVERMAN: Back then, it wasn't just a well known fact that these matches were fixed, or that the characters were fake. You know, people believed it. And essentially the framing is always good versus evil. And not only that, you know, it's not theater where like, the curtain is drawn at the end and, you know, like that was a show, like, you know, it's just you're showing up and every time it's just the perfect story of, like, there's the, the bad guy, which they called the heel, and the good guy, which they called the baby.
And so this was Kaufman's first exposure to theatrics. It's sort of how he approaches storytelling and characters in the world in general. And it's baked in from a really young age. And so on the one hand, he goes on to have an actual wrestling career later in his career, but you can also look at everything that he's doing. It's somewhere another has wrestling where, you know, he's presenting a good guy character that you feel sorry for that somewhat of an act, but that character can change and morph very quickly into something else. And so it's all that style of theatrics.
DINGMAN: Totally, totally. And the extremity of a character, like a heel in wrestling. It's not just like there's no nuance to the fact that they're a bad guy. They're like rotten to the core. Like, there's no world in which you could root for them. And we see that in the persona that he put on when he started wrestling, where he was just this virulent misogynist who made people furious. And I suppose you could say the same thing about Tony Clifton, his lounge singer persona, who was, you know, a drug addict, womanizer, just like monster.
There is this sense in watching his work, and it hadn't occurred to me until I watched the movie, where he is going so far with everything that he does, that it takes you out of your perception of what reality is, and then all of a sudden you're in this void, and you have to stop and really ask yourself, like, what am I looking at? And you're looking at this person who is trying to control reality the way that we all are.
BRAVERMAN: Laurie Anderson says he was a mirror, and people didn't like what they saw a lot of the time. That's the whole thing for me. He's making art that skewers our society, performing characters that sort of represent the worst of who we are. And he's doing it in a hypnotic and funny way that allows us to sort of take a step back and say, like, what? Who are we? Who have we become?
DINGMAN: Do you think there is any analog for Andy Kaufman in modern American life?
BRAVERMAN: I think that as far as, like Kaufman-esque figures in society these days, they're not entertainers. They're more politicians in the sense that, like, those are the real people who you can't tell who they are or what they believe or what they stand for. Like, I have no idea what Trump and Elon Musk truly believe. So in that sense, they have the same effect on us, where you're just kind of asking yourself like, is this for real? Like, that's the closest that we get. And I think that's why we like, can't take our eyes off them sometimes, even if we disagree with what's happening, that’s the very light way to put it.
