“Cancer” and “comedy” aren’t exactly things you expect to hear in the same sentence, and “joy” might feel even farther away. But a new documentary called “André is an Idiot” has found a shining light in that darkness, and it’s connecting with audiences worldwide.
It follows André Riccardi, a man who starts his journey by learning he already has stage four colon cancer and chooses to document his final months with humor and heart. “It’s fascinating that I am dying,” Riccardi says in the film. “One way to deal with it is to make this film.”
The Sundance Award–winning film is screening at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, including a special Q&A with director Tony Benna. He joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to talk about finding joy where you’d least expect it for this week’s Joy Beat. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Arun Rath: I just watched this film, and it is wonderful. To help people understand how a film about a guy dying of cancer can be funny and joyful, let’s start off by you telling us about André and how he approached dying.
Tony Benna: André is one of the most irreverent and hilarious people I’ve ever met. He lived his life using humor to get through all the hard times — and the good times. It was just part of his core.
I would say that when he was diagnosed with stage four cancer, of course, he used a proportionate amount of humor to get through this. I like to say when I first started the project, I knew that cancer was not funny, but André is definitely one of the most hilarious people I’ve ever met, so having a hilarious subject really helps add to the comedy.
Rath: I kept thinking about that line from Dorothy Parker: How humor isn’t a sword, it’s a shield. And André, by his own philosophy, believes that the sicker he becomes, the funnier he should get.
Benna: Yeah. You know, that was one of the things that I was trying to unpeel as I was documenting André: Will this stop being funny at some point? I figured, you know, any human going through something like this is going to probably lose their sense of humor at some points … but André didn’t. It really surprised me, and I think it surprised everyone around him, including his family.
It was one of those things where, you know, the humor wasn’t just for André; the humor was to help everyone around him. There’s that cheesy line, “Laughter is the best medicine.” Well, in this case, I feel that laughter wasn’t just the best medicine for André’s cancer. It was the best medicine for all of us — his friends, his family, and everyone who loved him.
Rath: It’s funny hearing you say that because it was a surprise watching it, because I kept waiting for the turn at some point where the humor is just going to fall apart. That doesn’t happen.
But there is a turn, though, where he realizes that the humor is not always a shield when it comes to his loved ones. There’s this line that I wrote down where someone tells him, “Be generous. Let them be sad.”
Benna: Yeah. I think that was the hardest thing for André. He was vulnerable in so many ways, right? He would show us what was going on with his body. He would crack jokes that were self-deprecating. But when it really came down to seeing pain in the faces of the people that he loved and visiting that area of grief more, that’s where he struggled.
One of the most vulnerable-seeming humans you’ve ever met [was] learning to become truly vulnerable on multiple levels, so he had to go a little bit deeper with his vulnerability during the process.
Rath: It’s a super intimate film, and I’m curious how you worked together. Did you set ground rules going in, and did they change?
Benna: You know, André, since he had cancer, I said, “Whatever you want to look into, we’ll document” — within reason. I mean, giving André that freedom is a scary thing to do. There’s so much that’s not in the film that we shot.
André wanted to go to a radon mine in Montana and breathe radioactive air. People were literally putting radioactive eye drops in their eyes and drinking radioactive water. André didn’t believe in this as a cure; he was just curious. He wanted to do nine grams of mushrooms, which he did. He had a crystal healing session. When he brought up the head transplant, I was pretty sure that, if we went to Italy, he was going to try that.
I think the hardest part for me was really trying to piece it together in a linear story because, as you’ll find in the film, André’s mind is going a million miles a minute, jumping from thought to thought, which makes the film really entertaining and fun. You get to kind of look into the psyche of this man, but also, it made cutting it into a linear story a bit difficult.
Rath: For you, getting to the final cut of it … André, we should say, lives for more than three years after the stage four diagnosis — he’s a hell of a fighter. You were working on this project for a long time. Were you working on cutting it over the course of three years? Did it change dramatically in the final version in any way that you weren’t expecting?
Benna: The edit [was happening] simultaneously with production. By design, we wanted André to be able to see some of the stuff we were creating along the way. You know, we didn’t know how long we’d have him. As a gift, we had an editor — Prav Potu from San Francisco — who was cutting the scenes from a very early stage.
But after André passed away, I took control of the edit to cut the film into a more linear fashion, and that was one of the more difficult challenges of the film: Figuring out what to cut. We had so much great material, and I could sit there and laugh at André all day long, and I think the audience feels like they want more at the end as well. But to put this into a 90-minute, neat package was really hard. And also, to find that throughline that we’re talking about — of resilience and vulnerability — to piece that together in a way that made sense emotionally, I think, was one of the bigger challenges.
Rath: In the film, at one point, there’s this talk about the “death taboo” — about talking about death. This film is more in the spirit, at least, of the “good death” movement: That you talk about this stuff, you interrogate it and examine it. It really hit a chord with me. I’m curious about the reaction you’ve been getting as you’ve been screening this. There must be a lot of people feeling appreciative of what you’ve done.
Benna: Yeah, I think the film hits on a couple of different levels. One of those, as you mentioned, is opening that conversation around sickness and death. We tend to shy away from that. We hear a friend gets cancer; we might send our initial condolences or call and reach out in the beginning. But then, I think a lot of us kind of shell up and get a little nervous [about] what that next step is and how to interact with them.
André and his friend Lee in the film really sort of cracked that code by saying, “Let’s not change anything about our friendship. Let’s joke the same. Let’s have the same sense of humor.” I hope that this film inspires people that have a loved one, friend or family member going through this to reach out, watch the film together, laugh together, and then open that conversation after seeing the movie.
We’re not all going to be as hilarious as André, but I still think that getting a laugh for 90 minutes with a friend or family member who’s sick and then opening that conversation and making sure that you’re keeping the same relationship you’ve always had with these people and that nothing’s changing, because I do feel that there is a disconnect.
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