Andy Kaufman at the Park West in Chicago, Illinois, March 26, 1982. (Photo by Paul Natkin/Getty Images) Photo by Paul Natkin/Getty Images
By PJ Grisar
June 9, 2025
My favorite Andy Kaufman story — that doesn’t involve wrestling, pouring water on Michael Richards or bringing sex workers on the set of a network sitcom — is the time he shared headphones with Danny DeVito.
During the first table read for Taxi, Kaufman sat by himself with a tape recorder. DeVito approached after 10 or 15 minutes, tapped him on the shoulder, shook his hand and introduced himself.
“To break the ice I say, ‘Hey, Andy, what kind of music are you listening to?’” Kaufman gave him the headset. What he heard was the nonsense language familiar to fans of Latka Gravas.
“You go two ways,” DeVito told Charlie Rose in 1999, “You say he’s a consummate actor, sitting down there studying the lines that he created for this character of Latka, the foreign man. Or, he’s sitting down there for 20 minutes waiting for some sucker to ask him what kind of music he’s listening to.”
We may never know which it was, but a new documentary, Andy Kaufman Is Me, indicates the tape was more than just a prop.
Directed by Clay Tweel (Finder’s Keepers), and produced with the cooperation of Kaufman’s estate and the collaboration of the comedian’s brother and sister, the film uses 84 hours of tapes, recorded by Kaufman throughout his life, of phone conversations, fights with girlfriends, performances and ideas.
The inclusion of the tapes allows Kaufman to speak in his own words, distinguishing the documentary from Thank You Very Much, Alex Braverman’s effort from 2023. (One of the features that film had that this one didn’t: interviews with his close collaborator Bob Zmuda, which, depending on your tolerance for the character of Tony Clifton, may be a net positive).
While Braverman’s film sought a pat explanation for Kaufman’s urge to perform and seek approval — a lie told by his parents that his beloved grandfather was out of the country when he had actually died — Tweel’s approach is more holistic, and lands in a different place.
It still tells the story of Kaufman, who grew up in Great Neck, New York, and performed for hours a day to an imaginary camera in his bedroom wall. Only now we have home movies, sequences with puppets and excerpts from Kaufman’s unfinished novel, The Huey Williams Story. (Tweel’s film is lighter on the Yiddishkeit than Braverman’s, which features a snapshot of little Andy dipping his fingers in matzo ball soup, but Huey Williams’ Odyssey is centered on a trek up a mountain to receive a universal truth, so make of that what you will.)
Kaufman went from an aimless acid dropper to a serious performer through his practice of transcendental meditation during community college — where he met an Iranian immigrant roommate, not interviewed here, who inspired his foreign man persona that would become his early signature that landed him the role of Latka.
Before he did Mighty Mouse, debuted his Elvis lip curl at Catch a Rising Star or interviewed Howdy Doody at Carnegie Hall, Kaufman hosted a show for children on his college TV station, an expansion of his work as a teen performer at kids’ parties.
The portrait that emerges is familiar: an early life with a supportive, if at times exasperated Jewish family (a gruff, but loving father being the major source of tension). The touchstones were 1950s television and circus folk. The story ends with a guarded lung cancer diagnosis. It’s an interesting companion piece to the recently released Pee-wee as Himself, about his near contemporary Paul Reubens.
Kaufman shares a lot of DNA with Reubens, but where Reubens split his identity like an atom, Kaufman’s ambition was to always blur the boundaries between his life and act, not out of a concern for privacy, but in the effort to contain more multitudes than anyone anticipated. He wanted, he told his assistant, to have people discover he was Tony Clifton only after he died.
“I’m an artist and life is art to me,” he tells his sister, Carol, in one of the many conversations he recorded.
But while insisting on Andy’s fluid personas, Twill and his talking heads, including family members, friends and comedians he influenced, resist making Kaufman an enigma or an annoyance to costars and producers.
His antics — panhandling, busing tables at the height of his fame — are overlooked for more expressions of sincerity. We hear him call a woman who sent him hate mail when he was on a tear as the Bobby Riggs of wrestling, explaining to her that his chauvinistic heel was just a character he plays, and that he’s thinking of retiring the bit due to its poor reception. (That he wanted that hostile response is mentioned, but left under-explored; the sexual incentives for showdowns with women are ignored.)
This Andy is vulnerable. boyish, devoted to his family and needed to be liked. His personal foibles and problems with romantic intimacy are framed as making up for time lost in high school, when he was an awkward outcast. The SNL ban, the cancelling of Taxi, the flop that was Heartbeeps are treated as serious blows, not, as Zmuda and others have suggested, an infamy he relished as a result of his elaborate kayfabe.
If it’s not an entirely satisfying conclusion, it’s because it’s more entertaining to believe that Kaufman was really a grand trickster saboteur — or occasional captor of an audience, as when he read The Great Gatsby in its entirety — whose commitment was an ultimate expression of his art. A Kaufman who cares less what people think comes closer to the ideal of the brand of comedy he helped pioneer and the image he looked to project.
For me, the real Kaufman will always be the one who dared to be unpleasant, who didn’t tip off the late night hosts, who loved to read the hate mail and didn’t shed the illusion for the people he offended. He’s a straightedge sweetheart, sure, but one who had an essential id embodied by the sleazy lounge singer who got the equable Judd Hirsch mad enough to drop an F-bomb.
It may not be quite right in capturing his essence, but, when given DeVito’s choice, I’ll choose the second option every time — he was waiting for the sucker, and we were all it.
