"It’s not the thing, it’s the story about the thing”: Andy Kaufman’s life was one long performance

There are few comedians who polarized audiences like Andy Kaufman. His style of deadpan humor was deliberately designed to make people uncomfortable—and he achieved that with long, pregnant silences or performance art sketches that bordered on anti-humor, such as inviting audience members on stage to touch his cyst.

But back in the late 1970s, Kaufman was unbelievably popular. His appearance on the first episode of “Saturday Night Live” lead to his being cast in the hit sitcom, “Taxi,” where he had a breakout role as the sweet and lovable immigrant, Latka Gravas. Kaufman also played the extremely unlovable Tony Clifton, a lounge lizard who performed an appalling act to shocked and bewildered audiences.

As director Alex Braverman’s illuminating documentary “Thank You Very Much” proves, for Kaufman, life was “one long, complicated, beautiful performance.” Everything the comedian did was an act. He was trolling audiences who always wondered, “Is this real?” or “Is this for real?” which only prompted the question: “Is it?” 

The magic of what Kaufman did was in creating a contrast between reality and performance art. He worked as a busboy in a deli while also starring in a hit TV series, much to the surprise of many customers. During his appearance at Carnegie Hall in 1979, he had a woman pretend to die from a heart attack on stage mid-performance, horrifying the audience, who were later taken out by buses for milk and cookies after the show. Kaufman was also the World Inter-gender Wrestling Champion. He competed only against women and would pay $1000 if they beat him. (They didn’t.) The film also considers the rumor that Kaufman faked his own death. 

“Thank You Very Much” features interviews and performance clips to recount these and other wild episodes from Kaufman’s life. The documentary shows the influences that informed some of Kaufman’s characters, such as his college roommate, Bijan Kimiachi, who became the inspiration for “Foreign Man,” his Latka character. Many of Kaufman’s co-conspirators, including his writer Bob Zmuda and Laurie Anderson, his heckler, as well as his TV costars — Danny DeVito, Marilu Henner, Steve Martin and Melanie Chartoff, among others — describe working with the comedian and provide insight into his life and career. 

Salon spoke with Alex Braverman about Kaufman and “Thank You Very Much.”

Thank you very much for making this film. But I’m curious, why did you want to make a doc about Kaufman, and why now? 

I am a legitimate fan of Kaufman, and I guess my experience in making anything in the documentary world is that these things take a long time. Documentaries are so involved that you better be really into the topic and ready to live in that world for many years. I started working on this eight and a half years ago, from idea to release. I looked around and understood there wasn’t a definitive Andy Kaufman documentary that tells the story of his life and career start to finish. There was “Man on the Moon,” which is a scripted biopic, and “Jim and Andy,” about Jim Carrey’s process getting through that film. I felt there was still an opportunity to tell his story in a non-fiction archival-based way. 

As for why now, the real answer is that now is when I had the idea to do this. But I think there are so many echoes of his work in the fabric of our culture today, whether you are talking about other entertainers or politicians. We have never been less trustful of the veracity of truth in certain mediums as we are today, and he was an early person to call that out and call attention to it.

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Which of Kaufman’s stunts is your favorite and why?

I have two favorites. For me, when anyone asks me which clip they should watch first, it is the 1977 “HBO Young Comics” special where he starts out as a bad comic and begins bombing, and the bombing turns to crying, then it becomes rhythmic [makes noise] and that turns into a conga routine. It encapsulates his entire act. You start out with a sense of embarrassment, and you think, “What is going on?” and then it explodes and completely transforms into something else. You get everything about him from that routine. 

Personally, where others may not, I have a deep appreciation for the wrestling. On the surface, what he is doing and what he is saying is not funny, but I feel it is so rich and such a perfect encapsulation of so many aspects of this country. It is the most American of his act — the way we gravitate towards liking good guys and bad guys. It’s walking this razor-thin line: Does he mean what he’s saying? Is he making fun of the people who would say the types of things he’s saying? For me, it’s as fresh today as it was then, and I think that’s backed up to some extent by how dramatic people’s reactions to it could be, how much they love it or hate it.

Is there a performance of Kaufman’s that you don’t like?

No. I don’t necessarily think of his performances as are they funny or are they not. There are some that I don’t know that I would have wanted to be there in person. I don’t know how long I could sit through “Gatsby.” [Kaufman read the Fitzgerald novel aloud to a restless audience.]

I love “Gatsby!” I would totally listen to him read the whole book. It’s not a long book. I would have done that!

I love it, too, but how long would you last? I like all of his bits. I really do. I didn’t set out to make a film just saying this guy is perfect, and I love everything he does. “Heartbeeps” [Kaufman’s 1981 film] can be a challenging film to get through in one sitting. It’s not a perfect film, but I like a lot of it. Nothing he does I don’t like. 

Kaufman seemed to enjoy his polarizing effect on people. Why do you think that is? The documentary suggests that he was almost happiest when his career was in freefall.

It does suggest that. I think he was someone — and this is just my theory, I don’t really know this because I wasn’t there — I don’t think he was as concerned if you were laughing, or liking or disliking what he was doing. It was about paying attention to what he was doing. It was about focus and attention and being fully immersed in his performance. This is where the connection to Transcendental Meditation (TM) comes in. Meditation, whether TM or other forms, is about limiting all distractions and outside stimulation and just focusing on mantra or your breath or an image on the wall and allowing that experience to wash over you. To a certain extent, his ‘act’ is not something you can take in passively or while multitasking. It’s about being there with him in the moment and feeling the passage of time he is creating with you. A lot of the time, it could be funny, or it could be less funny, but his goal is to have you asking, "What is going on?" Or, "Is that for real?" Or, "What are these guys doing?" Really grabbing the attention of the audience, so whether it was good or bad or failing or succeeding, as long as you were paying attention, it was working for him.

Andy Kaufman as Elvis Presley (William Knoedelseder)You open the documentary with Kaufman describing how he would make a film about his life, with climax after climax, with some silence in between. What decisions did you make in how you approached telling his story?

This isn’t John Lennon or Steve Martin, or someone where you know everything about their career and start wherever you want. Kaufman may be familiar to some people, but I’m hoping the audience is coming to him encountering this for the first time or were familiar with him but have forgotten. I do think you need to be reacquainted with the way his material feels and be exposed to it in a way where it is given proper onscreen time and space to elicit the feeling an audience member had where you are really enduring the passage of time. In the film, when he reaches a certain level of success and fame in his career, that is when you want to go backwards and ask, "How did this person come about?"  

To get to your original point about how the movie starts, it is a very happy accident or coincidence that we found this tape that was recorded by his then-roommate, Richard Beymer, from “West Side Story” and “Twin Peaks.” They were living together because they were both into TM. We saw that clip [of Kaufman narrating the film of his life] and thought, this is actually true. His career is not following this very clear trajectory. It is a lot of explosive stuff that is just happening. He is loving where it lands. 

Should we have a moment of silence, where I don’t ask a question or you don’t give an answer, which might be how Andy would approach an interview?

As long as you want. [16 silent seconds pass] That was a topic of major discussion, by the way. How long to let black play in the beginning of the film. We ultimately landed on 11 seconds. I wanted to do a minute of black because that’s what he says [in a clip], and we tried it, and I was overruled by a number of people that I trust. Maybe it is the perfect amount of silence. 

Can you talk about assembling all the clips and interviews?

We had a wall of index cards before we started editing. We know the great milestones in his career and in his life. What information do we know we want to communicate regardless of what we find in archive boxes or what people say about him? We tried to make it so that each sequence, whether it was driven by a career or life milestone, we wanted something behind each sequence — what is this sequence actually about — that is separate from clips we are using. Some things we knew in advance, but some were surprises. 

What was the biggest surprise? 

We went through boxes at Bob Zmuda’s house and found interviews from folks we didn’t expect to hear from because they had already died. The greatest example of that, for me, was Andy’s father. I heard stories, and sometimes, when you hear a story from Bob Zmuda, you don’t really know if you should believe it or not. He is such a keeper of the legend of this stuff; he never lets the truth get in the way of a good story. He told me about Andy’s teenage years — running away and taking drugs and living under park benches. I thought there was some truth to this, but I wasn’t sure how much to believe. But then I found this interview with Andy’s father Stanley, where he is verifying how difficult it was to connect with his son, which lead to one of my favorite sequences in the whole film where he is telling this story of reading “On the Road” together, and crying, and reconnecting. That was the one day in the edit where I got chills watching raw footage. I was just moved by the generosity in that as a dad and taking the time to dig deeper into your very confusing child’s interests and sharing that experience. 

The most polarizing things Andy may have done were his character Tony Clifton and the wrestling. What did you think of these extended performance pieces? 

He is putting on these performances whether it is for one person on the street or for the cast of “Taxi” — or if it is Clifton, in Harrah’s. The “Taxi” blowup, for example, they called the Los Angeles Times and said, “You’re going to want to be on set tomorrow.” There is a whole other layer to the performance: How is this story going to be transmitted to the public? Is it going to be hearsay from the cast? They invited a journalist and photographer to set so they would write about it and become part of the legend. Even though he is never going to explain, “See what we did here was…” They are playing with the media. It’s not the thing, it’s the story about the thing. With Clifton at Harrah’s, it’s not about confusing the crowd, it’s getting local news to do a story about it. That is what will live on, more than just that single night. He’s savvy about how he communicates about his act.

The other thing your question brings up is that I want to believe that if I had been there at that time, I would have thought to myself, “This is so bad it’s funny.” But I think he was so original that it was possible to conceive of a world where it was one of the first times you imagine seeing this happen. His friend Bob says in the film, “People want to see who is the next Kaufman.” But his theory is that Andy created this thing, and he killed it. Once you know a performer is operating on a meta level and it’s about reacting to the performer, it’s over. 

Sasha Baron Cohen did that with Ali G and Borat.

It’s true, but we the viewer are in on that [Ali G] joke from the beginning. With Kaufman, there wasn’t a way to be in on it. I see echoes of Kaufman in Ali G, especially when Kaufman flat out infiltrates a TV show, like “The Dating Game.” There is a throughline. 

The film emphasizes that everything Andy did was real, but everything he did was also an act. How might you describe the real Kaufman? Can we know him?

I think we can know him as much as we can really know anyone. Most people put forward a version of themselves that on the surface seems more straightforward, or believable, or sincere, but we are all presenting ourselves as a character we have developed over the course of our lives. That doesn’t change as much as his various characters did over the course of his life. He had all of these different characters at his disposal to express the various parts of him. If you look at all those characters as a whole, it creates a composite of someone that we can know.

“Thank You Very Much” was released in theaters and on demand on March 28.