Messing with reality is everything that Andy Kaufman is about,” says Bob Zmuda, early in the brilliant new documentary Thank You Very Much. Zmuda was a collaborator and confidante of Kaufman, the late comedian-cum-performance artist whose life, legacy and loose relationship with the truth is explored in Alex Braverman’s film (which opens at selected cinemas and is available digitally from 28 March). Kaufman died (officially) in May 1984 but remains to this day a point of pop cultural fascination. Those who weren’t around to witness his eccentric, avant-garde comedy routines may well have heard REM’s musical homage to him, “Man on the Moon”, or the 1999 Jim Carrey-starring biopic of the same name. Kaufman was never happier than when he was challenging his audience’s assumptions about pretty much everything. More than 40 years after his funeral, some still believe even this was part of a long con – that Kaufman had faked his own death, waiting to rise again when the punchline to his greatest prank comes due.
By the time of perhaps his crowning triumph – a headline performance at New York’s fabled Carnegie Hall in April 1979 – Kaufman had achieved his dream of becoming a TV star. He was already a regular on shows like Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live, and starred as lovable mechanic Latka in the hit sitcom Taxi. That night at Carnegie Hall, he presented punters with the full-spectrum Kaufman experience, described by The Washington Post as “the three-ring circus inside his head”. In between performances by veteran variety acts – the Rockettes dance troupe and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir – Kaufman performed his notorious anti-comedy routines and kept the capacity audience suspended in absolute and total disbelief, unsure at any time what was real and what was hoax. Was that his grandmother onstage, watching the show from “the best seat in the house”? Nope, that’s Robin Williams in makeup and drag. Did elderly actor Eleanor Cody Gould just drop dead while recreating a frenetic dance routine from Hollywood’s Golden Age? Her rising again after Kaufman – sporting a Native American headdress – danced around her supposed corpse suggests not. But Kaufman’s offer to take the audience out for milk and cookies following the disorienting extravaganza turned out to be true: 20-odd buses waited to take punters across town for post-show snacks, a stunt that swallowed the lion’s share of the show’s $40k budget.
