There have been scads of TV specials, documentaries and books about comic performance artist, singer and hoaxer Andy Kaufman in the 41 years since his death.

I swear I’ve tried to take in one and all, from that sentimental, cute and childish pre-Pee Wee ABC special he did — belatedly aired around the time of his death — through his first biographer, who figured he had Kaufman nailed down as someone who perfected his shtick as a tween and basically repeated himself in more and more bizarre and maddening ways right up to his untimely death at 35.

His “alienating comedy,” intentionally bombing, posing as a virulent sexist, taking on weird disguised and untalented personas that could never have gotten on TV, was part and parcel of an entire career devoted to making his audience uncomfortable.

Our response? A lot of people, to this day, think he faked his death, the ultimate “commitment to a bit.” His “Taxi” co-star Carol Kane says she poked the corpse at his funeral “just to be sure” it wasn’t a hoax.

“Thank You Very Much” is the most thorough examination of Kaufman’s childhood, his psyche, his influences and the things that drove his art. For those who still care — and really, there has been no one who has done what he did and how he did it since — Alex Braverman’s documentary fills in more of the blanks than all the ones that preceded it.

There’s an image of tiny tyke Andy glimpsed in “The Peanut Gallery,” the kiddie audience present for broadcasts of “The Howdy Doody Show” in the mid-50s. We see and hear 20ish, bearded Andy challenge his Transcendental Meditation guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on “What is the value of entertainment?”

Their exchange, with the yogi chuckling at the audacity of the increasingly pointed queries, all but predict Kaufman’s future in entertainment back in 1970 and is one of the highlights of “Thank You Very Much.”

“Oddness is just a means of creating contrast,” Andy’s guru intoned. The yogi couldn’t have been more on the money if he’d added a verse of “That’s Entertainment!” as a kicker.

The late Robin Williams weighed in on his sometime collaborator. Michael Richards and Melanie Chartoff recall his intentionally disastrous “performance,” live on TV’s “Fridays.”

The wrestling, reading aloud from “The Great Gatsby” way past the point where the point it was funny on “Saturday Night Live,” “banned” from the show by popular vote, staging fake feuds and altercations with hecklers with his pal Bob Zmuda and fellow hoaxers, it was a career striking in its impact on the culture, and in its brevity.

Danny DeVito and Marilu Henner remember Kaufman posing as a panhandler down the street from where they were filming the sitcom Andy had just been cast in, “Taxi.”

Childhood friends, his parents and Andy himself talk about the childhood he reached back for and the trauma that might have triggered that.

The Tony Clifton alter-ego gets his due.

And the late Garry Shandling, seen in a pained and brief archival interview, adds “I would still like to know who the real Andy Kaufman was.”

Zmuda and Kaufman’s girlfriend Lynne Margulies are among the most authoritative witnesses and analysts of his mind and what shaped him.

I’d never seen Kaufman’s community college roommate, the Iranian-born Bijan Kimiachi, who relates how he became Kaufman’s “foreign man” model, Kimiachi’s “gift” to his friend.

Another great “get” for Braverman’s film? The avante garde singer and artist Laurie Anderson remembers her years as Andy’s favorite designated heckler/slap-fighter. She was “attracted to the violence in Andy,” a button-pushing comic for a “very violent country.”

There is a stunning amount of extant footage of Kaufman doing bits, playing clubs all the way to Carnegie Hall, on TV from a ’74 Dean Martin summer replacement series, doing “the foreign man,” through a Dick Van Dyke series two years later to “Saturday Night Live” and culture devouring stardom.

Steve Martin had him on when he guest-hosted “The Tonight Show,” and in an interview for this documentary, breaks down the comic tension that Kaufman made his own, playing variations of the guy “who has no business being here (on stage, on TV, etc).”

As Kaufman would stumble and seemingly struggle to tell a joke or find a laugh, the first giggles would be nervous. The guy wasn’t just bombing, he was deer-in-the-headlights freezing up.

“He’s also funny when he’s waiting,” Martin observes. The TM-trained comic was making comic magic out of awkward pauses and silences.

Generations have grown up since Kaufman’s death, and decades have passed since that Jim Carrey biopic, “Man on the Moon” came out. But if fans want to remember his work, art, genre-bending performances and signature bits, as well as his sad and precipitous decline, “Thank You Very Much” covers all the bases.

It’ll more than do until Andy comes back from the dead and has the last laugh in the greatest hoax of them all.

Rating: TV-MA, drug content, sexual subject matter, profanity

Cast: Andy Kaufman, Bob Zmuda, Marilu Henner, Robin Williams, Lynne Marguiles, Steve Martin, Lorne Michaels, Melanie Chartoff, Bijan Kimiachi, Michael Richards, James L. Brooks, Jim Burrows, Laurie Anderson and Danny DeVito.

Credits: Directed by Alex Braverman. A Drafthouse Films release on Tubi, other streamers

Running time: 1:39