Column: ‘Thank You Very Much' tries to understand comic Andy Kaufman

Chicago Tribune

15-04-2025

What to make of a man who admits that Howdy Doody was the first friend he ever had and who devoted some of his final years in professional wrestling, wrestling women for amusement?
The man was Andy Kaufman and those questions are but two of many that linger decades after his death, as people have spent much time and energy trying to explain what made this distinctive character tick.
The latest attempt is 'Thank You Very Much,' a 90-minute documentary that gathers some of Kaufman's contemporaries to share memories. It gives us much old footage that displays some of his classic characters and routines, such as Elvis and playing conga drums, and shows his legendary Carnegie Hall performance in 1979, which ended with him taking thousands of audience members out for milk and cookies.
It's a well-made movie, watchable but not particularly enlightening. Under the direction of Alex Braverman, we get some interesting opinions, witness some humor and, in the case of Kaufman's boorish and loud Tony Clifton, a glimpse one of the most grotesque characters in entertainment history.
You may laugh. You may not. You will hear that Kaufman's brand of comedy was odd indeed, or as he said, 'I have never told a joke in my life.'
The film, indeed the life it tries to distill, is shadowed by sadness. Howdy Doody was not really Kaufman's best friend. That role was his grandfather's and when he died, his parents didn't tell little 5-year-old Andy and so he would sit for hours, staring out the window of the family home in Great Neck, Long Island, waiting for his grandfather, who never arrived. He later transferred that loneliness into performing for pint-sized pals.
OK, lonely child, we get that.
You will learn (or remember) that Kaufman was, roughly from the mid-1970s until his death in 1984, a frequent and often confounding presence. He performed in some clubs and on college campuses but most people saw him on television, with appearances on 'Saturday Night Live,' various late night talk shows and as a regular cast member of the television series 'Taxi,' on which he played a variation of his Foreign Man character named Latka Gravas.
I saw him and found him amazing, confusing, irritating, fascinating, obnoxious … but enough with the adjectives. Let's hear from the late Robin Williams: 'Andy was traveling at the speed of life.'
That life ended when he was buried at Beth David Cemetery in Elmont, Long Island. He was 35 years old. The cause of death was lung cancer.
It was cloudy and chilly, the temperature in the 50s and many in the crowd were convinced that the coffin was empty, such was the Kaufman image that they believed, fueled by the fact that Kaufman never smoked, that this was just another in the series of stunts and put-ons that peppered his career.
Most (myself included) never believed that, but it was easy to understand that the resurrection that began soon enough, sparked by the highly rated 1995 NBC special, 'A Comedy Salute to Andy Kaufman' on NBC. The band R.E.M. had earlier paid tribute to him in the 1992 song 'Man on the Moon,' which songwriter Michael Stipe called 'a funny, sad eulogy to a very great man.'
That song provided the title for a 1999 film. It was such a big deal, directed by Milos Forman, and the title character was so coveted that such stars as Tom Hanks, Nicolas Cage and Edward Norton expressed interest. Jim Carrey took the unusual steps of making an audition tape to get the part and gave up about half his usual $20 million fee to play the role of Kaufman.
One of the frequent talking faces in 'Thank You Very Much' is that of Bob Zmuda, played in the film 'Man on the Moon' by Paul Giamatti.
A child of Chicago's Northwest Side, Zmuda was a struggling actor/comic when he met the then-unknown Kaufman by chance one night at a Manhattan improv comedy club in 1974. They were 'kindred spirits' and spent the next 11 years making mischief on stage and off, 'hell-bent on 'slaughtering' the status quo.'
Zmuda wrote a couple of books about his pal. Along with Lynne Margulies, an artist, filmmaker and the last companion of Kaufman's life, he gives this documentary a personal punch.
Zmuda's first book, 1999's 'Andy Kaufman Revealed! Best Friend Tells All' (written with Matthew Scott Hansen), came just before what is the definitive Kaufman biography, 'Lost in the Funhouse: The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman,' written by the late Chicago author Bill Zehme.
He had the cooperation of Kaufman's family, did extensive research and interviewed more than 200 people to provide what he called 'the march of a genius from the time he was a child.'
As I wrote when it was published, 'One can almost feel his exuberance at being unshackled by the constraints of his previous books. One can feel it is his prose.
'Much of the book is composed of alternating voices and that takes some getting used to. There are sure to be some readers who won't be able to hack it, especially when Zehme seems to enter Kaufman's mind. But for those willing to make the trip, there are great rewards. The material on Kaufman's early years is fascinating and it soon becomes clear that Zehme's plotting and style are meant to be a reflection of, or an attempt to match, the inner workings of his subject's mind.'
Zmuda said he spent 11 years in close, sometimes collaborative contact with Kaufman to create what he called 'the story of my relationship with Andy. Nothing more.' His next book, 'Andy Kaufman: The Truth, Finally,' written with Margulies, offered such limp insights as, 'Fun was everything with Andy. Breakfast was fun. We'd play the card game Crazy Eights for hours at breakfast because it was so much fun.'
You might be drawn to one of these biographies after watching this documentary. More likely, you'll wander over to that immortality machine, YouTube. There you will find plenty of Andy. But after watching, you will still have questions for which there will never be any answers.