ArcaMax

In the spring of 1984, shortly after Andy Kaufman died of lung cancer in Los Angeles, friends and colleagues gathered for his funeral, which was held in his native New York. Carol Kane, who had played the wife of Kaufman's character, Latka, on the long-running TV series "Taxi," was among the mourners. Kane approached Andy's casket and she ... she gave his body a poke, actually. Just to be sure. "Because even at that moment," says Danny DeVito, another "Taxi" veteran, "she didn't think that Andy had gone."

Kaufman, the subject of a new documentary called "Thank You Very Much" (after his squeaky catchphrase), was just the sort of joker who might have staged a gag at a time like that -- who might have sat straight up in his coffin with one of those pop-eyed looks on his face, savoring the baffled reactions all around him. And there'd be no punchline, of course. As Andy himself said, "I've never told a joke in my life, really."

The joke was on us, it turned out. ("What his act was all about was embarrassment," says Andy's writing partner, Bob Zmuda.) Andy made it OK to be watching him up onstage slowly drinking a glass of water, or just sitting there checking his watch (then looking up, checking on us, and then going back to watching the watch again). One of his most genius bits involved "The Great Gatsby," the Fitzgerald novel. Andy would step up to the mic, holding the book, and announce his intention to read it aloud. The audience responded with tentative amusement. Then he opened the book and started reading, and after 60 long seconds, and then on into two, three minutes, a low grumbling would fill the air. Mutters of irritation were heard. Andy grew annoyed. "Let's keep it down, please," he said primly. "We have a long way to go."

Forty years after his death, Andy Kaufman remains one of a kind. Now those who never saw him live, or who know him only from vintage YouTube clips (or from the 1999 Jim Carrey biopic in which DeVito plays Andy's manager), can finally have the Andy experience at length. In the film, we see him interacting with stars of his time, like Steve Martin, Orson Welles, Robin Williams and Laurie Anderson, too (she was once a part of his act). Garry Shandling says, "I would still like to know who the real Andy is." Lorne Michaels, who hired him to be on the first show in the series that became "Saturday Night Live," was particularly a fan of the "Gatsby" bit, although he realized opinions were divided. "It was conceptual and it was pure," Michaels says in the film. "I wish I could say it was popular."

Andy never seemed intent on standard showbiz popularity. If he had been, would he ever have begun a side career as an "Intergender Wrestling" star, fighting only female grapplers ("I'm gonna send you back to the kitchen, where you belong"), until legit wrestler Jerry Lawler put him in the hospital with a piledriver in a Memphis ring one night? (Andy was still wearing a neck brace when a supposedly furious Lawler smacked him in the face on the Letterman show five months later.) And if straight-up fame was his main goal, would he have created an alter-ego as obnoxious as the fake Vegas lounge singer Tony Clifton, who showed up at a "Taxi" rehearsal one day with a pair of hookers on his arm and smelling like he'd slept in a dumpster overnight?

Andy put his act right out on the edge of popular acceptability. Fellow comic Melanie Chartoff still marvels at "the audacity he had -- to burn up stage time drinking a glass of water, listening to a Victrola. He didn't care about boring or making the audience uncomfortable. In fact, he really relished taking us prisoner."

Andy also had a non-surreal side that he rarely talked about. Having spent much of his youth marinating in drugs and alcohol, he set off on a new path at the end of the 1960s with his discovery of Transcendental Meditation, and in the film we see him actually putting questions to the TM majordomo Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. ("What is the value of entertainment?" Andy asks.) He also connected with Bob Roth -- CEO of the late David Lynch's TM group, the David Lynch Foundation -- who valued both aspects of the man. "He took you in," says Roth, "to go for the Andy ride."

(This film will be opening in select theatres around the country through April 11, and will also be streaming on Amazon Prime and Apple TV+.)

========

To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

----

Copyright 2025 Creators Syndicate, Inc.