Kaufman, Andy

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    “Thank You Very Much” Looks at the Life of Andy Kaufman

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    “Thank You Very Much,” directed by Alex Braverman, uses archival footage and interviews to explore the appeal of a stand-up who didn’t tell jokes.A documentary subject like the comic Andy Kaufman, who died in 1984, has got to be both a dream and a nightmare for a filmmaker. Archival footage is usually used to suggest a glimpse into who someone “really” was, but Kaufman’s public appearances almost always involved him playing some kind of character, like the sweetly hapless Foreign Man (who evolved into Latka Gravas on “Taxi”) or the abrasively awful nightclub singer Tony Clifton. Kaufman suggested — and friends concur in “Thank You Very Much” (available to rent or buy on most major platforms) — that he was always playing a character, even if that character was a guy named Andy Kaufman. Trying to get at the “real” guy in this case seems quixotic.“Thank You Very Much,” directed by Alex Braverman, features several friends of Kaufman’s musing on who the real Andy was, and taps into elements of his childhood to explain some of his obsessions. But understanding the real Andy is not the ultimate point of this film. Instead, Braverman seems to be roving in search of the source of Kaufman’s appeal: Why did fans want to watch someone who was so often deliberately off-putting and exasperating? Kaufman’s act didn’t involve telling jokes (“I’ve never told a joke in my life, really,” he once said) and often seemed designed to push audiences as far as possible to see if and when they’d break.When, beginning in 1979, he started performatively wrestling women and spouting misogynistic garbage, it was awfully hard to tell whether he was satirizing women, feminists, misogynists, wrestlers or all of the above. His is not the kind of comedy you just chuckle at and move on. Today we might call him a troll.As “Thank You Very Much” shows, Kaufman was a comedian of the uncomfortable, the absurd, the confusing and at times the excruciatingly boring. Braverman wisely does not try to imitate Kaufman’s style in the film, instead opting to explore his career through old footage and conversations with people who knew him, like Lorne Michaels, Kaufman’s father (in archival interviews), the comedian Bob Zmuda and the musician Laurie Anderson (in new takes).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      10 Wild Clips to Help You Understand Andy Kaufman’s Greatness

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      The standup, who’s the subject of a new documentary, expanded the ambition of comedy. These videos show how far ahead of his time he was.Andy Kaufman became one of the most influential comedians ever in a brief amount of time — really only a decade, from his first national television appearance to his death from lung cancer in 1984 at 35. In between, his comic stunts blurred the lines of reality and fiction and found a variety of ways to provoke audiences and upend expectations, while doing more than any club performer to expand the conceptual ambition of comedy, turning stand-up into performance art. What makes this even more remarkable is that he did almost none of it via regular roles in movies or high-profile television, with the exception of the sitcom “Taxi.”And yet, Kaufman and his many characters were a constant presence in popular culture, clubs and wrestling matches and on talk and variety shows, many of which are long forgotten. These bits have lived on the internet, divorced from the context in which they appeared. Now on YouTube, the Andy Kaufman rabbit hole is deep and packed with pleasures. A new documentary on his life, “Thank You Very Much,” was made by artists who clearly spent a long time exploring it. Here are 10 of the best examples that show how Kaufman broke from the past and anticipated the future.Foreign ManThe first Kaufman character to break out was the tentative, thick-accented immigrant from the Caspian Sea known as Foreign Man, an antecedent to Borat but sweeter, more sensitive and deluded. He mangled Borscht Belt jokes that fizzle like this one-liner: “My wife’s cooking is so bad, it’s terrible.” Before he turned into Latka Gravas on “Taxi,” Foreign Man showed up in short sets on shows like “Van Dyke and Company.” In one of the first, Foreign Man loses a Fonzie look-alike contest, becoming upset at Dick Van Dyke, who, unlike some television hosts who interacted with him (see Dinah Shore), clearly delights in Kaufman. To make things right, the host offers him the opportunity to tell some jokes. Playing an overly enthusiastic innocent with a shaky grasp on English and an even looser grasp on American humor, Kaufman fumbles through some bits and a terrible Ed McMahon impression. Somehow his errors endear him to the audience. Kaufman’s large, anime-like eyes do a lot of the work.Celebrity InterviewerSilence. Kaufman uses it as well as any comedian, building suspense, tension and most of all, awkwardness. On his ABC special taped in 1977 but broadcast two years later, he used that technique magnificently in a spoof of a disastrous talk-show interview that anticipated everything from “The Eric Andre Show” to “Between Two Ferns.” As the host, looking down on his guest, the “Laverne & Shirley” star Cindy Williams, from a desk towering high above her, (a disparity he would take to more extreme heights later in his career), he stops talking entirely, and the banter ends. Then the camera moves from him to her and back again, unease building. It’s almost a minute of dead air but seems much longer. Then he asks: “You have hobbies? You have any diseases?”Bongo PlayerWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Comedian Who Anticipated Our Reality-Bent World

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      You’re in a comedy club, and the guy onstage has gone quiet. He looks down at his feet, fidgets with the microphone, smiles a queasy, tight-lipped smile and, after nearly a minute of this, looks as if he might be about to cry.Listen to this article, read by Eric Jason MartinHis name is Andy Kaufman, and it’s 1977. Maybe you’re unfamiliar with him, or maybe you’ve heard he’s an up-and-coming comedian with a gift for prankish anti-bits. He has performed on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and “Saturday Night Live,” and he killed on those shows. But tonight, taping his part in an HBO “Young Comedians Special,” he has told one stinker after another, and the people who have laughed have laughed in the wrong places: at him, not with him. Other people have started to groan and boo, and Kaufman seems to be breaking down. “I don’t understand one thing,” he finally says. People laugh again, sure it’s a put-on, or hoping it is, because the alternative would be too embarrassing. He goes on: “No, seriously, why everyone is going booo, on, like, when I told some of the jokes, and then when I don’t want you to laugh, you’re laughing? Like right now.”He continues to stammer, and then he’s sobbing outright, scolding the crowd through tears. “You really showed me where I’m at tonight,” he says, emitting a raw, ugly sound, like the honk of a sick goose: Heegh-heegh. “I was just trying to do my best heegh-heegh.” He keeps scolding and honking, but as he does, the honks form a rhythm. With one hand, then both hands, he begins to play bongos in time with the honks, shaping it all into a ridiculous song. The crowd laughs harder at this twist than they’ve laughed all night, and their delight seems mixed with gratitude — for this reassurance that Kaufman wasn’t really upset, for this slippery return to terra firma.In the history of comedy, no one has shown a fuller commitment to cultivating silence, awkwardness, concern, bewilderment and vitriol than Andy Kaufman. Any comedian trades in misdirection on the way to the surprise of a punchline. But Kaufman, as much of a performance artist as he was a stand-up, saw misdirection as the main event. “I’ve never told a joke in my life,” he once said. Laughter was one among many responses he sought to engineer. “He just behaved strangely, in order to get a reaction of any kind,” Jay Leno, who worked the same clubs as Kaufman in the ’70s, has recalled. “Even hostile.”Trading against his air of childlike sweetness, Kaufman scrambled the line between entertainment, tedium, self-indulgence and combativeness. For years, he assumed the persona of a snarling misogynist and wrestled women in clubs and on TV. Some of the women were plants, some were volunteers. Kaufman beat them all. This routine, along with his belligerent lounge-act alter ego, Tony Clifton, proved so unpopular that Kaufman’s manager feared it was ruining his career. But Kaufman, more interested in provocation than adulation, only dug in more.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      George Shapiro, Talent Manager Who Pushed for ‘Seinfeld,’ Dies at 91

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      He left his job as an agent in the 1970s to guide the careers of Jerry Seinfeld, Carl Reiner and other comics.George Shapiro, an ebullient Hollywood talent manager who nurtured and oversaw the careers of comic personalities like Jerry Seinfeld, Andy Kaufman and Carl Reiner, died on May 26 at his home in the Beverly Hills section of Los Angeles. He was 91.His family announced the death in a statement.Mr. Shapiro was most closely associated with Mr. Seinfeld, whom he signed as a client soon after watching him perform at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles in 1980. He lobbied NBC to build a series around him and was an executive producer of the hugely popular “Seinfeld” sitcom.“He was the only person to read every draft of every episode of the series and was very critical as they went from first draft to shooting draft,” Mr. Seinfeld said in a phone interview. “He was the only one who really knew what we were doing.”He added: “The bond between George and I was, we thought show business was the greatest thing invented by man, and we couldn’t get enough.”Mr. Shapiro was also an executive producer of Mr. Seinfeld’s Netflix series, “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” which is on hiatus.A schmoozer who loved to be on sets, Mr. Shapiro was a partner for more than 40 years with his childhood friend Howard West in their talent management firm Shapiro/West & Associates.As managers, they oversaw and protected their clients interests by being executive producers of various projects, including “The Last Remake of Beau Geste” (1977), starring and co-written by Marty Feldman; “Summer Rental” (1985) and “Sibling Rivalry” (1990), which Mr. Reiner directed; and two TV specials starring Mr. Kaufman.Mr. Shapiro first watched Mr. Kaufman perform at the Improv comedy club in Los Angeles in 1975 and was impressed by his bizarre, idiosyncratic act. He soon signed him and persuaded him to join the cast of the sitcom “Taxi” in 1978, despite the comedian’s reluctance.“They already had the character of Latka. And, of course, Andy did this Foreign Man character, so it was a perfect match,” Mr. Shapiro told Newsday in 1999. “Taxi,” too, was a hit.Mr. Shapiro and Mr. West were executive producers of “Man on the Moon” (1999), which starred Jim Carrey as Mr. Kaufman. (Mr. Kaufman died in 1984 at 35.) Danny DeVito, a producer of the film, played Mr. Shapiro, and Mr. Shapiro had a role as a club owner who had once fired Mr. Kaufman.Early in the film, Mr. DeVito tells Mr. Carrey, “You’re insane, but you also may be brilliant.”Mr. Shapiro’s other clients included Robert Wuhl and the producer and writer Bill Lawrence, who is known for the TV series “Spin City” and “Scrubs.”George Larry Shapiro was born on May 18, 1932, in the Bronx. His father, Ira, was a furrier. his mother, Sylvia (Lebost) Shapiro, was a social activist. George’s time at P.S. 80 in the Bronx, where he met Mr. West, was the subject of two documentaries, “The Bronx Boys,” in 2003, and “The Bronx Boys Still Playing at 80,” 10 years later.As a youngster, he loved comedies, including those made by Laurel and Hardy and Abbott and Costello. “I sat in the theater and felt like someone was tickling me,” Mr. Shapiro said in a Television Academy interview in 2007.He got a stronger whiff of show business as a teenager while working as a summer lifeguard at the Tamiment, a resort in the Poconos, where writers like Neil Simon; actors like Dick Shawn, Carol Burnett and Pat Carroll; and the director and choreographer Herb Ross created revues and other shows. Agents traveled from Manhattan to scout talent on weekends — the sort of future that appealed to Mr. Shapiro.“I said, ‘This is your job?” he said in the Television Academy interview. “To watch the show, to have a nice dinner, to come to a resort with a lake? I have to look into that.”After graduating in 1953 with a bachelor’s degree from what is now New York University’s College of Business and Public Administration, Mr. Shapiro served in the Army for two years. He considered a career in social work and sales — his older brother, Don, was a salesman in Texas and offered him a job — but got a mailroom position at the William Morris Agency in Manhattan with help from Mr. Reiner, his uncle.He was soon promoted to agent, with a salary of $38 a week, before eventually moving to the company’s Los Angeles office, where he specialized in packaging mid-1960s TV series like “Gomer Pyle — USMC” and “That Girl” with the actors, writer and directors represented by William Morris.But Mr. Shapiro disliked being responsible for so many clients, and so in 1973 he started his own management firm to focus on a few preferred ones. Mr. West, with whom he had worked at William Morris, soon joined him, and they ran Shapiro/West & Associates until Mr. West’s death in 2015.To push for a sitcom for Mr. Seinfeld, Mr. Shapiro sent numerous letters to Brandon Tartikoff, the president of NBC Entertainment. The nudging eventually led to a meeting with Mr. Tartikoff and other network executives at which Mr. Seinfeld laid down a firm rule.“Jerry made one thing clear,” Mr. Shapiro told the Television Academy. “He said, ‘I’m not going to play a shoe salesman or an accountant or a father with a job.’ And he came up with the premise of the series, that he would play himself.”In recent years, Mr. Shapiro produced “If You’re Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast” (2017), a documentary in which Mr. Reiner talked to nonagenarians like Betty White and Dick Van Dyke, and “The Super Bob Einstein Movie” (2021), about the comic actor and writer known for his ongoing television portrayal of Super Dave Osborne, a hapless parody of a daredevil.Mr. Shapiro is survived by his former wife, Melody (Sherr) Shapiro, from whom he was divorced; his daughters, Carrie Shapiro Fuentes and Stefanie Shapiro; a son, Danny; five grandchildren; and his brother. His marriage to Diane Barnett ended with her death in 2005.Mr. Reiner’s son Rob Reiner, the actor and director, said Mr. Shapiro had been a nurturer, professionally and personally.“He loved my dad, he looked up to him — he was like a father to him,” said Mr. Reiner, whose company, Castle Rock Entertainment, produced “Seinfeld.” “George loved being around my dad, and when he started getting older, he’d come over to the house and walk him around the block. That’s the thing you need to know about George: He took care of everybody.” More