When Kaufman heard the news, he thought he’d been abandoned, and the boy was distraught. It’s here that Braverman’s film begins to shed some serious light on the subject, noting that Kaufman was extraordinarily close to his grandfather, “Papu”, so much so that when the old man died, Kaufman’s parents wouldn’t tell him, claiming that Papu simply had gone away.
ANDY KAUFMAN DOCUMENTARY TV
Where Thank You Very Much takes a deeper dive is when it loops back to his childhood as a little boy in Great Neck, Long Island, he would host imaginary TV shows for an invisible camera, moving on to become a children’s entertainer in the local area (throughout his life, he maintained he had always been “a song-and-dance man”). Such details are interesting but well known by now, largely thanks to the 1999 biopic Man on the Moon, which starred Jim Carrey as Kaufman and is never mentioned here. During the filming of Taxi, he started waiting tables at Jerry’s Deli in Studio City, and the doc finds the news footage to prove it, complete with startled reactions from the clientele. After joining the team of what would become Saturday Night Live in 1975, Kaufman would exploit his newfound celebrity by doing shows where he’d literally stand onstage and read The Great Gatsby from beginning to end, starting all over again if the audience demurred. Kaufman did both these things, becoming a regular as Latka Gravas in ABC’s hit show Taxi, but, as Braverman’s film shows, success was not a goal in Kaufman’s life, and when it looked like things were going well, he would self-sabotage. Hamburger, though, hardly would be likely to headline their own sell-out variety show at New York’s Carnegie Hall or, more significantly, get to appear on a highly successful, family-friendly TV sitcom. Nothing fascinated Kaufman more than embarrassment, and he went further into that area than any comedian has before or since, with the possible exception of Neil Hamburger. People found his nervousness charming and so they indulged him, laughing politely, only to realize they’d been suckered when the stuttering man onstage suddenly transformed into an immaculate Elvis Presley impersonation.Īlthough he would do bigger and crazier things in the next 10 years, The Foreign Man is the urtext of his comedy career. Kaufman’s act back then was known as The Foreign Man, as he spoke with a high-pitched accent and claimed to come from “an Island in the Caspian Sea.” The Foreign Man struggled to tell actual jokes and tested the audience’s patience with his long-winded patter. It seems fitting, then, that Kaufman seemed to appear fully formed from nowhere when comedy impresario Budd Friedman, owner of The Improv, booked his first slots in the early ’70s. Venice Film Festival 2023 Photos: Wes Anderson, ‘The Promised Land’ & ‘Poor Things’ Premieres, Mads Mikkelsen
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