I Watched ‘Jim & Andy’ With Andy Kaufman’s Family

It’s hard to describe the experience of talking to your dead brother through Jim Carrey’s body.

Carol Kaufman-Kerman tries anyway. It was 1998 or ’99. She had flown to Los Angeles, where the filmmaker Milos Forman was shooting a biopic about her famous big brother. The movie was Man on the Moon. The deceased brother was Andy Kaufman, the enigmatic performance artist who had died from cancer in 1984. And the star who greeted her was Carrey—or was it Andy? His ghost?

Those lines seemed blurred: Carrey was spending the entire film shoot in character. Or in characters, rather, since he vacillated between Kaufman and Kaufman’s favorite alter ego, the obnoxious lounge singer known as Tony Clifton. When he spotted the star’s real-life sister, he greeted her jovially, the way Kaufman might have: “Hey, Carol! Over here!” Carrey-as-Kaufman asked if she wanted a milkshake. It was eerie. This was her brother.

“I think that Jim Carrey was a vessel,” Kaufman-Kerman says, discussing the experience in a Brooklyn café two decades later. “This may sound a little wooo-hooo”—she mimics a cuckoo bird—“but I do believe he allowed Andy to come through him. I also chose to believe that Andy was coming through him. When he looked at me, I’m not kidding. [It was like] speaking to Andy from the great beyond. I felt like he was coming through as the evolved, astral Andy.”

Kaufman, with his childlike grin and surrealistic repertoire of impressions and oddball characters (including Foreign Man, who morphed into Latka on the hit sitcom ), specialized in the rare art of pushing every gag to the limit. He chafed at the term : Kaufman did not or occupy any pre-existing category of entertainer. He did impressions, bombed on purpose, lip-synced to the theme, found ways to prank his crowds (he once had an