5 min readThe documentary André Is an Idiot sounds like nothing you’d want to watch. On paper, it might seem like a miserable downer in which 55-year-old André Ricciardi records his feelings and experiences as he dies from cancer. But, believe it or not, this movie made me laugh more than any film in recent memory. It’s the year’s best comedy so far.
The title alone should tell you something. It was proposed by the frazzle-haired André himself. “The title he really wanted was: Andre Is Dying of Cancer ’Cause He’s a Fucking Idiot,” says Tony Benna, a lifelong friend who finished the movie after André’s death. “My suggestion was to shorten that and lose the expletive. But he wanted that to be the title because he wanted to make sure that nobody thought he was making fun of cancer.”
Why was he so hard on himself? He didn’t take care of his health and didn’t do the early checks that might have saved his life. He messed up. No question about it. So his dying wish was to roast himself mercilessly and go into that good night as a cautionary tale by way of comic relief.
The movie won the audience prize at Sundance last year, and A24 is finally releasing it to theaters now. It’s surprisingly uplifting for a story about a dude who has one foot in the grave while he’s trying to kick his own ass. Ridicule can’t hurt him now anyway. (RIP, August 6, 1968—December 21, 2023.)
Explaining who he was is much harder to do. As a young man, he was a wild card. He stayed that way as an old man—or, at least, for as old as he got. He kept a stash of drugs in his closet to use as currency in case of a natural disaster. He bought a pair of pleather pants from a Kim Kardashian wardrobe auction, but not because he was a superfan. “My plan was to scrape her DNA off of them, and we could clone her from them someday,” he explains in the movie.
In 1995, André not only married a Canadian woman named Janice to fortify her immigration status in the U.S., but he decided that they could establish their bona fides by volunteering as contestants on The Newlywed Game. They fared pretty well—mostly because they devised an elaborate way to cheat. If that’s not love, what is? Then they fell for each other for real and raised two daughters in their subsequent decades together.
He made a living creating bizarre ad campaigns, but to call him an “advertising executive” makes him sound like a buttoned-up suit-wearing businessman. Don Draper would have had this hippie-looking lunatic drop-kicked out a window on the 37th floor of the Time-Life Building. André was much more Mad magazine than Mad Men.
Even Benna struggles to define his friend’s role on this planet. “It’s a great question,” he says. “André is one of the most complex individuals I’ve ever met. He’s one of those people you meet once in a lifetime if you’re lucky. His mind was so brilliant. The way that he thought, the way he viewed the world was very cynical in a way, but also he had this way of seeing the bad parts of the world and saying, ‘You know what? Fuck that. Let’s bring up the underdog. Let’s help people.’ ”
They met when Benna was an entry-level ad-agency employee (“a young gun doing all the grunt work,” as he puts it), and he credits the older creative contributor with helping him fulfill his own ambitions. “But also he did that for everybody,” Benna says. “I guess to answer your question in a shorter, more succinct way, I would say that André was a man who lived unapologetically as himself for his entire life.”
That life was cut short when André was 55. If he’d been more careful with his health, he might still be here. So as his final act in a very performative life, André wanted to make a movie that held him up as a cautionary figure, albeit an amusing one.
“His motto was no cops, no doctors,” Benna says. “But by the end, his motto became no cops, some doctors. So we can all change a little bit, I guess.”
André Ricciardi died on December 21, 2023—but not before filming a documentary that just might change your life.
André Is an Idiot is much more than a public-service message urging everyone who reaches middle age to get that most dreaded of checkups for colon cancer. But yes, it’s that too. (My appointment is now set. Thanks, André.)
I couldn’t believe that my friend, the publicist Emmy Chang, was so persistent in pushing this goddamn colonoscopy movie on me. But she deserves a shout-out by name, because she was right. It was hysterically funny. And heartbreaking. It makes you feel all the things. I’m so glad she twisted my arm.
In addition to being subversively hilarious, the film is also meaningful. Human beings are in never-ending need of reminders that nothing is truly promised. The end is out there, and it may surprise us at any time. The best we can do to make sure that our time is not wasted is to avoid deferring the things that make us happy. In that way, maybe André squeezed more living into his too-brief span than someone who got twice as long but lived half as much.
At one point in the movie, André books a session with a sort of life coach (death coach?) who urges him to come up with meaningful final words. The company, called Death Yells, takes him to a canyon at sunset to bellow whatever he comes up with into the void. “So long, suckers!” is what André comes up with. “Come and get me, spaceman!” is what the coach suggests. (“Gettin’ weird,” André responds.)
André Is an Idiot is hysterically funny. And heartbreaking. It makes you feel all the things.
The movie gets plenty weird too. Puppets stand in for some of his more elaborate musings about how to face the end, like when he devises a Running Man–style reality-TV show called “Who Wants to Kill Me?” in which ex-girlfriends, amateur magicians, and wannabe serial killers compete to pull his plug in a way that’s more gruesome than cancer but also a lot faster.
“He had this power. Anytime something got too heavy, he would crack a joke and take the edge off,” Benna says. “So we didn’t have to sit in that uncomfortable moment. He would relieve us of it. He does the same thing in the film.”
André is so good at it that it’s easy to start believing this movie might have a happy ending after all. He’s such a live wire throughout most of it that you become convinced that his premise is faulty. He’s going to beat this thing. But then, about two years into his chronicle of battling colon cancer, he starts to get thinner. The mad-scientist hair is gone. The news from his doctors makes his formerly phony-baloney wife cry.
We tell ourselves the same story. The road ahead is long. There’s no end in sight. There will always be more time. Until we get a diagnosis that refutes that belief, we just keep on keeping on, perhaps waiting too long for the things that matter.
I started wondering what I would shout into that canyon. What words could I offer the people I’m leaving behind? I guess I’d choose just two: Don’t wait. That applies to so much—colonoscopies and beyond.
Whatever time you have left, the hour and a half you spend watching André Is an Idiot will be worthwhile. Go find it. Have a good laugh. Don’t wait.