THANK YOU VERY MUCH - Mark Reviews Movies

Thank You Very Much, Drafthouse Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 27, 2025

Andy Kaufman was a performance artist more than a comedian. Anyone with any knowledge of Kaufman's unique brand of showmanship could tell you that. A couple of his friends and colleagues in Thank You Very Much also say that he was something like a magician and that his bits were akin to illusions. The big concern about this documentary, then, might be that director Alex Braverman could break the illusion of Kaufman as a performer by examining the man's life and career in the form of a traditional biography.

Somehow, though, the film doesn't, because there is so much mystery to what made Kaufman tick and why his bits were the way they were. Even knowing, as we're told here, that he was a sad and lonely boy living in Great Neck on Long Island doesn't answer everything. Sure, Kaufman escaped into a world of fantasy, mostly revolving around imagining that he was running and performing for a block of programming on a TV network. He did so, in a way, because his parents lied that, when his beloved grandfather died, the old man instead had gone traveling the world.

We can infer a lot from that episode, and so, too, do the various interviewees of Braverman's documentary. Of course, Kaufman avoided reality as a kid, because he felt rejected by one of the most important figures in his young life. Obviously, he kept performing, because he and the grandfather used to joke and do little pranks, and while he stared out the front window of his house hoping his favorite person would return, maybe the poor kid thought that joking and playing around would somehow summon the grandfather back into his life.

The film tells us all of this, by way of those who knew Kaufman personally and/or professionally, but it still feels as if it's scratching the surface of the man himself. In another biographical documentary, that might feel like we're being cheated out of some insight. When it comes to this particular subject, however, we're mainly glad that the illusion of Kaufman remains intact.

After all, learning about the innocent, naïve, and child-like persona Kaufman often presented on stage and television is only part of the extended gag that seemed to be the man's career. There was his famous first appearance on the first episode of the show that would become "Saturday Night Live," when he stood on the stage with a record player blasting the "Mighty Mouse Theme." When the chorus to the song arrived, his awkward, uncomfortable, and somewhat impatient manner cracked, as he extended his arm and mouthed the words, "Here I come to save the day!" Fellow comedian Steve Martin can't help but chuckle as he explains how difficult the gag was to pull off, because Kaufman had to be funny in two very different ways for the joke to work.

The innocence of that Kaufman persona was what endeared him to so many, either as "Foreign Man" or its evolution into Latka on the sitcom "Taxi." Two of his co-stars on that show, Danny DeVito and Marilu Henner, are also interviewed here, as well as show creator James L. Brooks. If one wonders where the rest of the cast is, an episode on set, in which another of Kaufman's personas showed up one day, might explain their absence.

That other persona was Tony Clifton, an abrasive and abusive lounge singer of questionable talent. The character was nothing like the Kaufman who gleefully mouthed the catchphrase of a cartoon mouse or who, during his unsuccessful attempt to start something like a TV show for kids, stared at iconic children's television puppet Howdy Doody with what looked like genuine wonder. Tony Clifton was loud, obnoxious, and insulting, and nobody here, not even his good friend and co-writer Bob Zmuda, can really explain the purpose of this character or what drove Kaufman to playing him in such a convincing manner.

The best anyone can really say is that, sometimes, it's fun to play the jerk and that, since all of Kaufman's bits were about eliciting some kind of reaction out of the audience, Tony Clifton definitely got a reaction—especially when the character showed up on the "Taxi" set with a pair of sex workers and intentionally ruined a day of shooting. George Shapiro, Kaufman's manager, made sure to invite a journalist to the set that particular day and to record the fall-out on audio tape. Even DeVito and Henner, who generally speak with affection and admiration for Kaufman, can't quite comprehend why he'd try and, apparently, succeed to alienate his co-stars and friends to that extent.

Using plenty of footage and testimonials, Braverman presents Kaufman's entire existence as an inscrutable contradiction. That's the way it probably should be, if only because it keeps with the spirit of everything the performer did. This is a man, after all, who danced with his grandmother (if that really was her) on a talk show but who also had Robin Williams dress up as that same grandmother for his 1979 Carnegie Hall performance and, of course, spent the last part of his career making a misogynistic spectacle of himself by wrestling women. When we learn the wrestling bit was kind of a way to honor his wrestling-loving grandmother, doesn't that only raise more and more questions about the whole bit, which is already messy enough?

Thank You Very Much is quite the balancing act, then. It reveals just enough about Kaufman to put his comedic career into a personal context but not enough to ruin the inherent mystery of the man, including the long-running notion that he might have faked his own death. To ruin an anticlimax, Kaufman doesn't show up here, but the film honors his pranky legacy so well that we almost believe he might.

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