If you know Andy Kaufman’s offbeat stand-up work from seeing it—perhaps on Saturday Night Live, in which he featured in the series’s first episode in 1975—you’ve got a lot to learn from Alex Braverman’s new documentary, Thank You Very Much, in theaters today. If you’ve never seen Kaufman’s work, or know about it only from watching Jim Carrey play him in the 1999 film Man on the Moon, even better: You’re in for a revelation.
Kaufman’s comedy wasn’t just groundbreaking (and maybe it wasn’t even comedy, but more on that in a bit)—it pushed both the medium he worked in and the audiences who witnessed it into strange, sometimes uncomfortable places. It also seemed to emerge from a strange and sometimes uncomfortable place, a notion Braverman’s film explores via long-lost footage, some of which found its way to the director in ways so coincidental as to seem almost fated. But let’s let Braverman tell the story.
Vogue: How would you describe Andy Kaufman to someone who hasn’t seen his work?
Alex Braverman: As I was making this film, I was looking at him as more of a performance artist. Of course, he played in comedy clubs and theaters like Carnegie Hall, but the performance continued after the show. He was trying to do things to get himself written about in magazines.
We see this in the film, but what kind of things do you mean?
A good example would be when he’s playing a character he invented called Tony Clifton. He’s getting thrown off Taxi [the network series he starred in], and he’s doing that because he is playing this character of Tony, and Tony is a very angry guy. But he also knows that journalists are going to be in the crowd that day. I think of him as a performance artist whose act is a 24/7, living, breathing thing, and he’s pulling all the levers of the media at all times, which somehow feels very of this moment.
When did you first become aware of his work?
Just before I was born, my parents worked together filming a lot of really interesting performers—Willie Nelson playing live in Lake Tahoe, or Tom Waits, or Dolly Parton—and one of the specials that they did together in 1979, for Showtime, was Andy Kaufman playing Carnegie Hall, and they became friendly with Andy and with Bob Zmuda [Andy’s best friend and collaborator], who’s in the film as well.
I grew up in a house that had a lot of bizarre Beta tapes on the shelf—some of which were appropriate for a kid to watch and some of which weren’t—but when I was maybe four or five, they showed the tape of Andy to me. If you think about it, he was sort of just doing a children’s act for adults a lot of the time—it was just something that, as a kid, I inherently understood. And then, when you get to the end of his performance, he invites the entire audience outside and into waiting buses—he’s going to treat them all to milk and cookies. The thing that blew my mind is what we were talking about a moment ago: that the performance continued outside of the four walls of the venue.
And just in talking to my parents, the lore of Andy continued: I’d ask about him and I’d learn things like how, when he was at the height of his fame, he worked at a deli as a busboy. I just thought: This guy is cool, this guy’s weird; he’s interesting, he’s pushing boundaries. And as time went on, and it occurred to me that even though people were aware of Man on the Moon, there wasn’t a definitive documentary that brought together all of his performances and all of these elements of his life and career and distilled them.
So much of the success of a documentary seems to revolve around source material. Did you have trouble finding existing footage of things, or did much of the footage come from this motherlode of video material that Zmuda had?
I started making the film before I knew what Bob had, because he was a little—what’s the word? He was being playfully coy about giving us access to a lot of the material. I knew that we could make it with what was already out there, but I also knew that if he would cooperate, we would be in for a surprise and a treat. Bob had boxes and boxes of material that we didn’t even know existed. He had interviewed actors and comedians and musicians about their impressions and memories of Andy, and their opinions about his influence—and that’s also how we have a really powerful interview with Andy’s father.
Which is just amazing—I was wondering how you got that.
Oh, my gosh—we were already in the editing process, and every day we were bouncing from the editing room, where we’re putting the film together, to these other viewing rooms where we’re just watching tapes that are incoming. And I remember coming across that tape—and when Andy’s father told the story of reading On the Road, which was Andy’s favorite book at the time, just to try to connect with him, and how he felt like he was understanding his son for the first time in this new way, it just stopped me in my tracks. It was so powerful.
I had heard, over the years, that they had a very challenging relationship, but I didn’t really know how that resolved in any way. I was really glad, and relieved, and moved to hear that there was also this level of understanding and generosity. It was really beautiful.
I wouldn’t say that Andy’s father was portrayed as a villain early in the film, but there is this sort of origin story about Andy’s weirdness that we learn about—an incident where Andy’s parents deceived him about something very important: Andy’s grandfather died when he was four or five, and his parents thought he was too young to handle it. And so they told him that he didn t die. And when Andy eventually found out—I’m sorry, spoiler alert—it seems to have really disrupted his world.
Everyone, of course, experiences loss—it’s not a unique experience to have one of your grandparents die. But the way his parents handled communicating that to him and the way that it affected him felt significant and unique. In no way do I blame them for the choice that they made, but it did feel important to highlight the chain of events that set off in him—particularly because his body of work as an artist became about twisting realities and making us ask the question: What am I watching right now?
How did you learn about Andy s work with Laurie Anderson? And it certainly gives a lot of support to the notion of Andy as performance artist rather than mere comedian.
We were putting together a Spotify playlist of music that was intended to be both used in the documentary, but also just sort of inspiration for people working on the film. One day, one of the producers just said, “Oh—what about this Laurie Anderson song?” And we listened to it, and she’s just telling the story that ended up in the film—the story of their collaboration together. And all of us just kind of stopped in our tracks and looked at each other; we’re like, “Is this real?”
And so we reached out to her. As it turns out, they didn’t have a long friendship—just this kind of kinship. But the whole thing just blew our minds: How could this have been just sort of hiding in plain sight all these years? Another example of that was finding Andy’s college roommate, who was the inspiration for Latka Gravas [Andy’s most famous character].
How so?
It’s just one of those things you would have never known if you weren’t in the process of making a film and putting your antennas up. We announced the film in Deadline or Variety or something like that. A couple weeks later, I got a message from this man in London, saying that he had just rented a flat from this Iranian guy there—and, casually, the guy had mentioned that he went to college with Andy Kaufman. And so I called the guy—his name’s Bijan—and from the moment he picked up the phone, it was as though I was talking to Andy playing Latke. I was like, I don’t even care if this is real or not, I have to interview him—we can figure it out later. It was just amazing. When you put the energy out into the world, you find out all sorts of interesting things.
I also had no idea about Andy’s very major involvement with Transcendental Meditation. I started doing TM a year or two ago through Bob Roth, the director of the David Lynch Foundation, who’s in your film talking about Andy. I know TM is supposed to be for everybody, but still, I somehow didn’t see Andy Kaufman as someone who devoted hours every day to yoga and meditation. You have this amazing footage in the film of Andy speaking with the Maharishi, and even then he seems to be pushing the fourth wall or something in his questions to him.
We traveled to Fairfield, Iowa, which is sort of the spiritual home of TM in America, because it’s where Maharishi International University is and where a lot of these people that were friends with Andy still live—teachers of TM and such. It was obviously such a huge part of his life, and I think there were a few different things going on. One, when Andy was in his teens and early 20s, he was clearly abusing substances and kind of going down a certain path, and I think when he traded that out for meditation, that’s when everything clicked in his life—when he was able to fulfill his vision of himself to himself and for himself. It was so clear this was a well for him, a way of getting his batteries recharged, and I think a lot of ideas came to him as a result of it.
But I also felt that I was never going to really be able to understand it unless I started doing TM myself, so in the middle of the editing process I went to one of the TM centers in LA and took the course and started meditating every day—and all of a sudden, ideas were coming to me… about how to put the film together as well as how to explain this element of his life. What I realized is that both his work and his meditation practice were about shutting out everything else other than what’s happening in you in the moment.
His work as a performance artist demands total concentration and your full attention, but once you’re on that journey with him—where one second he’s a bombing comedian, and then he’s crying, but then the crying becomes rhythmical, and then that rhythm turns into a song—at the end of it all, you realize that for three minutes or eight minutes or whatever it was, you had been focusing on nothing else other than that single flame burning in front of you. It’s a type of meditation, and you come out on the other side of it and everything’s the same, but everything’s changed a little bit.
What’s Andy’s legacy? Aside from whatever importance he has to the history of comedy or whatnot, his work and his life seem oddly relevant today—particularly as he played so much with the idea of authenticity. That s being challenged now in so many ways—in the realm of AI and the prevalence of misinformation as a weapon, whether on social media or in politics and elsewhere. Andy predates all of this.
I think he taught us to look at the world around us and question whether or not something, or someone, was real. At the same time, people are always asking how Andy stayed in character all the time, or how he could do what he did without ever showing his cards, and doing this film kind of led me to understand that we’re the ones that don’t like to break character. We all have so many pieces to our personality and our emotional lives that don’t come through in most of our lives, whereas Andy had all these characters at his fingertips that allowed him to be angry, or be childlike, or to be adversarial, or nonsensical, or whatever.
I think all of us have those emotions and those different personalities, so to speak, in us, and wish that they could come out, but there’s something about us that just sort of tells us, This is who I am, and I’m going to be the way that the world knows me. And whenever we act out in a way that’s separate from that, it’s kind of like, What’s going on with you? Are you okay?
And in doing what he did, Andy forced his audience to step outside of themselves to figure out, like, Why am I nervous? Is this funny? Or scary? Or both?
Yeah—it s very comfortable for us to play the role that we’re expected to play. And when something or someone comes along and throws that into question, it can make us feel challenged, or unsafe—and there s a thrill in that. What you remember is the thrill of surprise, or danger, or whatever it is, and I think those emotions are so powerful that that’s what makes that performer memorable. In a certain sense, even though Andy was playing characters, I think he was still being his authentic self and not caring how the world looked at him—he was just being who he wanted to be at all times, whether it was working or not.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
