You’re in a comedy club, and the guy onstage has gone quiet. He looks down at his feet, fidgets with the microphone, smiles a queasy, tight-lipped smile and, after nearly a minute of this, looks as if he might be about to cry.
His name is Andy Kaufman, and it’s 1977. Maybe you’re unfamiliar with him, or maybe you’ve heard he’s an up-and-coming comedian with a gift for prankish anti-bits. He has performed on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and “Saturday Night Live,” and he killed on those shows. But tonight, taping his part in an HBO “Young Comedians Special,” he has told one stinker after another, and the people who have laughed have laughed in the wrong places: at him, not with him. Other people have started to groan and boo, and Kaufman seems to be breaking down. “I don’t understand one thing,” he finally says. People laugh again, sure it’s a put-on, or hoping it is, because the alternative would be too embarrassing. He goes on: “No, seriously, why everyone is going booo, on, like, when I told some of the jokes, and then when I don’t want you to laugh, you’re laughing? Like right now.”
He continues to stammer, and then he’s sobbing outright, scolding the crowd through tears. “You really showed me where I’m at tonight,” he says, emitting a raw, ugly sound, like the honk of a sick goose: Heegh-heegh. “I was just trying to do my best heegh-heegh.” He keeps scolding and honking, but as he does, the honks form a rhythm. With one hand, then both hands, he begins to play bongos in time with the honks, shaping it all into a ridiculous song. The crowd laughs harder at this twist than they’ve laughed all night, and their delight seems mixed with gratitude — for this reassurance that Kaufman wasn’t really upset, for this slippery return to terra firma.
In the history of comedy, no one has shown a fuller commitment to cultivating silence, awkwardness, concern, bewilderment and vitriol than Andy Kaufman. Any comedian trades in misdirection on the way to the surprise of a punchline. But Kaufman, as much of a performance artist as he was a stand-up, saw misdirection as the main event. “I’ve never told a joke in my life,” he once said. Laughter was one among many responses he sought to engineer. “He just behaved strangely, in order to get a reaction of any kind,” Jay Leno, who worked the same clubs as Kaufman in the ’70s, has recalled. “Even hostile.”
Trading against his air of childlike sweetness, Kaufman scrambled the line between entertainment, tedium, self-indulgence and combativeness. For years, he assumed the persona of a snarling misogynist and wrestled women in clubs and on TV. Some of the women were plants, some were volunteers. Kaufman beat them all. This routine, along with his belligerent lounge-act alter ego, Tony Clifton, proved so unpopular that Kaufman’s manager feared it was ruining his career. But Kaufman, more interested in provocation than adulation, only dug in more.
Today, Kaufman is best remembered for his refusal to admit any distinction between performance and reality. Driving around with his girlfriend and fellow prankster, Lynne Margulies, he liked to pretend-strangle her at red lights, alarming onlookers before speeding off. He devised increasingly outlandish and confrontational stunts with his close creative collaborator, a former guerrilla-street-theater performer named Bob Zmuda. After Kaufman was cast on the hit sitcom “Taxi,” as the lovable, unidentifiably accented mechanic Latka Gravas, he took a part-time job as a busboy at a Hollywood cafe and, during one shift, spilled coffee perilously close to an unamused Richard Gere.
Three years after the HBO taping, an unshaven and sweaty Kaufman appeared on “The David Letterman Show,” snot shellacked to his nostrils, no bongos in sight, coughing horribly instead of honking as he told a tale of abject personal and professional failure. Again, the crowd laughed uneasily, and again he told them not to: “I’m not trying to be funny right now.” This time there was no daffy denouement. He asked the audience for pocket change, collected a meager handout, and then security escorted him from the studio.
This, too, was a bit, but it reflected Kaufman’s desire to set up camp on ever-advancing frontiers of unpleasantness, all the better to mystify crowds about where the joke, if there was one, ended. At a certain point, this distinction might have eluded even Kaufman’s grasp: The snot on Letterman was fake, but the cough persisted, and in December 1983, he received a diagnosis of lung cancer. Friends and strangers alike assumed this was a gag like the others, but it wasn’t.
Margulies went from Kaufman’s co-conspirator to a caregiver. When his hair began falling out from radiation therapy, he had it styled into a mohawk, which Margulies shaved off before she joined him on a Hail Mary trip to a healer in the Philippines. She was present when Kaufman died, age 35, at Cedars-Sinai.
Margulies moved on with her life but remained a devoted steward of Kaufman’s legacy. She oversaw an archive of his personal effects and memorabilia; she sold DVDs of his work; she wrote a book about him with Zmuda and together they built an enormous trove of audio and video footage of Kaufman.
For decades, this trove sat largely untapped, until the documentarian Alex Braverman persuaded Margulies and Zmuda to let him rummage through it. The result is the first feature documentary ever made about Kaufman’s life. Titled “Thank You Very Much,” it won the best documentary prize at the 2023 Venice Film Festival and comes out this month. Braverman spent years raising money for the film, hunting down interview subjects and mining the archive for gems, many of them never seen before.
Throughout this process, Braverman delighted in, and agonized over, the vexing task of trying to tell a satisfying story about Kaufman — a man who rigged trap doors beneath everyone’s understanding of who he “really” was. Braverman told me that the documentary’s working title was “Was That For Real?” “It’s the root of what he’s exploring,” he said. “And it’s the question that doesn’t get old.”
Forty years after Kaufman’s death, he remains deeply relevant. His great subject was the malleability of our shared sense of truth, and these days it seems as if we’re witnessing the obliteration of consensus reality altogether. We don’t trust the news, we aren’t sure if the images and videos we see are A.I., we don’t know if people we encounter online are trolling or “being performative.” Many of us sense that we ourselves are engaged in performances that, thanks to the omnipresent creep of social media, never really end.
In other words, things have never felt more Kaufmanesque. He seemed to intuit and chart the weird physics that would grow to dictate so much of our screen-mediated lives. “There’s this constant suspicion now of whether something is real or fake,” says the director Josh Safdie, an executive producer on the documentary. “Andy kind of invented that.”
Kaufman first began poking holes between performance and reality as a kid, and he was drawn to entertainment that did the same. Raised in Great Neck, an affluent Long Island suburb, the son of a costume-jewelry wholesaler, he spent hours every day performing his own variety show for a TV camera that he became convinced was hidden in his bedroom wall, much to his parents’ alarm. He loved watching professional wrestling, with its outsize, campy vision of Good versus Evil. And he never forgot Elia Kazan’s 1957 satire “A Face in the Crowd,” in which a power-mad Andy Griffith pretends to be a fourth-wall-breaking truth-teller on television — “the greatest instrument for mass persuasion in the history of the world,” as one character describes it.
At 8, Kaufman became a children’s-party entertainer, singing songs and developing what would later become some of his best-known bits. Using his grandfather’s reel-to-reel recorder, he liked to capture audio of partygoers and play it back, showing a prescient understanding of a crowd’s desire to behold itself. He performed intentionally inept magic too, showing an equally keen grasp of a crowd’s desire to watch an act go off the rails.
These intuitions of Kaufman’s, and the career he spent exploring them, were what gripped Braverman when he set out to make his documentary. On a recent afternoon, I traveled with him to the Oregon Coast to visit Margulies, whom he first met in 2017. Returning to see her now that the film was finished, he said, felt like “closing the circle” on a project that had consumed almost a decade of his life.
As we pulled into Margulies’s driveway, she stepped onto her back porch and waved brightly. Now 68, she wore her white hair long, and was dressed in a merino-wool hoodie, easy pants and calf-high knit slipper boots. “Do you want some tea?” she asked, inviting us inside. “CBD bubbly drink?”
Margulies and her husband, Lonnie Osgood, live in a charmingly ramshackle house with 14 rescue cats. The cats were all hiding, spooked by our arrival. But plates of wet food lay everywhere, and notes in Sharpie were stuck to the walls with electrical tape, about who was owed how much food and when. A rug was slung over a curtain rod to block the sun’s glare off the ocean. Seeing me take all this in, Margulies — whom Courtney Love portrayed opposite Jim Carrey in “Man on the Moon,” the 1999 biopic of Kaufman — laughed and said, “Andy was as big of a slob as I am.”
Braverman came to know Margulies and Zmuda through his parents, who worked in various capacities in “the business,” as he put it. Back in the 1970s, they produced television specials, and one was the broadcast of Kaufman’s famous Carnegie Hall show — a 1979 song-and-dance extravaganza that ended with him taking the audience out for milk and cookies. Braverman’s parents still had an old Betamax copy, which he watched for the first time when he was about 6. “Kaufman was always kind of in my brain,” he said.
After college, Braverman worked as a director, producer and cameraman across unscripted television. His father kept in touch with Zmuda, and in 2017 Braverman called him up and asked him to meet. Zmuda invited Margulies.
At the end of two days of interviews, Zmuda led Braverman to a locked door. “He said, ‘I’ll open the door, but you can’t go in there,’” Braverman recalled. “And he opened it, and it was box after box with ‘K’ on the side.” Zmuda told him: “‘It’s everything he’s ever done. Plus a lot of [expletive] you don’t know about.’”
Braverman was hooked. Now he needed to hook others to get the movie made. He met with Josh and Benny Safdie, ardent Kaufman admirers, who came aboard as executive producers. The Oscar-winning documentarian Morgan Neville did, too, as did the music-production guru Rick Rubin, who was drawn to what he saw as Kaufman’s almost shamanic qualities — the way he “set up challenging situations,” as Rubin recently put it to me, “allowing us a glimpse of an alternate reality to expand beyond our own limitations.”
None wanted to make a conventional film given Kaufman’s profound unconventionality. At one point, as they plotted the shape the documentary would take, Braverman and his producers discussed shooting new footage that would masquerade as old Kaufman footage. “Any hole or story we didn’t have footage for,” Braverman explained, would be plugged with a surreptitious recreation.
This ruse struck Braverman as a way of asking his own audience: “Are you paying attention? Is it real?” But over time, he had second thoughts. “Once you find out something you watched is intentionally untrue, there’s a trust broken,” he said. After he assembled a preliminary cut, the fake footage was deemed unnecessary: “It was, I don’t know that we need to graft our version onto it anymore.”
Braverman’s ultimate goal with “Thank You Very Much,” he told me, was to create “the feeling in the viewer that Andy creates in me” — a feeling of borderline-hallucinatory “absolute attention.” To that end, his film honors Kaufman’s gleeful assaults on the knowable, rather than trying to somehow solve them. During accounts of Kaufman’s bits, Braverman allows for ambiguities (did that old woman really die onstage?), even when the record — embodied by Bill Zehme’s richly reported 1999 biography, “Lost in the Funhouse” — is clear.
“It’s not about wanting to mess with people or put out a falsehood,” Braverman said of such obfuscations. “It’s just, what’s a more fun way of getting across the gist of what’s happening here without having to spray footnotes across the screen? It mimics the experience an audience member was having in that moment.”
To sharpen the documentary’s focus, Braverman limited its scope to the years of Kaufman’s life, and decided to interview only people who knew him. He wove in rare archival interviews with Kaufman’s father, Lorne Michaels, Garry Shandling and Robin Williams, and conducted new ones with Zmuda and Margulies, Steve Martin and Danny DeVito, and artists like Laurie Simmons, a childhood pal, and Laurie Anderson, whom Kaufman befriended and enlisted as a plant in clubs.
In a coup for Kaufmanologists, the film also introduces an Iranian man named Bijan Kimiachi: Kaufman’s college roommate, and the heretofore unknown inspiration for the totemic “Foreign Man” character that became Latka Gravas. Kimiachi speaks in what sounds like an extremely good Latka impression, to the point that I wondered if Braverman invented this man and hired an actor to play him.
I wasn’t the only one. “When Bob Zmuda saw a cut, he told me, ‘That guy’s bullshit,’” Braverman said. But he assured me that Kimiachi was genuine, that he verified his identity in Kaufman’s yearbook. I 99.9 percent believe this, and the lingering spore of doubt only deepens the documentary’s spell.
As Jeffrey, Omar, O’Toule, Gracie, Heishi, Gogo, Presley, Willow and six other cats whose names I didn’t catch emerged mewling at Margulies’s house, we gathered in the living room to watch a rare piece of Kaufman footage that had entranced Braverman.
It was shot in Los Angeles in the 1970s by the actor Richard Beymer, who played Tony in the film version of “West Side Story” and, later, Benjamin Horne in “Twin Peaks.” At the time, he was Kaufman’s housemate, and in the clip they’re hanging out. Kaufman’s face fills the screen as he extemporizes about a movie he wants to make: It will start with a climax, followed by false end credits, then another climax, then more false end credits, in a pattern that repeats itself eight — no, seven — no, five times.
When Kaufman finishes this circuitous, schlock-Borgesian pitch, a woman off screen replies with a single, dismissive, “No.” Kaufman looks delighted, even as he sounds dejected: “You don’t like it?”
In this clip, you can see a crystallized version of Kaufman’s comedic DNA. This DNA would go on to inform the work not only of individual heirs like Sacha Baron Cohen and Nathan Fielder (masters of weaving disruptive comic personae into real-world situations), but also of street-prank shows like “Jackass,” and entire comedic subgenres, like early-aughts cringe comedy, which mined the humorous potential of unease.
One interpretation of Kaufman’s own seemingly inhuman degree of comfort with disapproval is that he insulated himself within an almost pathological self-absorption, which allowed him to treat other people with a disregard that at times verged on malevolence. “It was his world, and we were all scenery,” his friend Gregg Sutton told Zehme. Joanna Frank, who owned the house Kaufman shared with Beymer, recalled, “He was always using people for his end result.” In a 1981 Rolling Stone profile, Kaufman’s sister, Carol, said, “With Andy, it all goes back to the self, the I.”
Braverman’s documentary allows for this reading. But it also lingers on the seemingly Rosetta Stone-like importance to Kaufman’s work of transcendental meditation, which he began practicing as a teenager. In one fascinating passage, we hear audio of an exchange between Kaufman and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the T.M. leader, about the value of entertainment. Kaufman asks, “What if a crazy man, a comedian who specializes, let’s say, in insulting people, and he’s a comedian because of that, ’cause people laugh at his oddness, but he likes it and everything, and if we were to tell him that if he meditated — ”
The Maharishi interrupts this rambling to deliver a cosmic riddle that doubles as a theory of comedy: “No, no. Oddness is just a means to create contrast. A big contrast on both sides, and a deeper silence is experienced.”
Seen in this light, Kaufman’s all-consuming commitment to bits was an attempt to become fully present to the moment — the way all good improvisers and transcendental meditators try to be — and then to mischievously twist the moment onto itself, pull the rug out from under it and expose something vibrant hiding there all along. This rankled some, but it delighted others in a way that wasn’t just entertaining but existential. “He saw that blurring of reality as a spiritual awakening,” Josh Safdie said. “For him, life and God existed in this kind of in-between, almost liminal space in the mind, where you’re, like, ‘Where am I?’”
Losing your bearings can be thrilling and terrifying at the same time. As the poet Anne Carson has written: “When we bring an action out of habit and into consciousness we stir up a new perception of it. Inside and outside change places. Time shifts.” You thought you lived in one world, but now its bedrock is melting. Kaufman’s métier was that melting — he identified a manipulativeness inherent to all entertainment and pushed it to weird, revelatory and destabilizing extremes.
For Margulies, Kaufman was motivated by nothing beyond his own undying sense of play, fundamentally unchanged from when he was a kid in his bedroom, putting on shows for his own imaginary panopticon. “It wasn’t hostility, it was fun,” she told me, scratching behind O’Toule’s ear. “It was wrestling. Everything he did was wrestling, when you think about it. Where you’re one thing, then you’re another.”
Source photograph for illustration above: Jim Britt/DGEC, via Getty Images.
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