Alex Braverman’s New Documentary, ‘Thank You Very Much,’ Reveals Andy Kaufman as Never Before

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.