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Thursday, November 14, 2013

Is Andy Kaufman Still Alive?

No. No he is not and stop misquoting his brother. Kaufman is dead. Dead dead dead dead dead. Besides... the guy died in 1984. It's nearly 30 years later now. Why do people always seem to assume that a guy who supposedly faked his death years and years ago went on to live a full, long life into some extreme old age? 30 years of adulthood is a lot of time to get hit by a car or have a heart attack or get for real whatever it is you originally claimed to have in the first place. Faking a death at 35 and going into hiding, there is no guarantee that you make it to 65, which is what Kaufman would be nearing now. People still have Elvis sightings. He'd be 78 now. Plenty of people don't make it to 78.

And this isn't even the first 'is Kaufman still alive' thing we've gone through. Kaufman, as everybody knows, was something of a prankster. At one point before his death, he reportedly told people that if he were kidding, he'd return 20 years later to the day. People knew enough about Andy to believe he might do something like that. (I personally had chalked it up as Andy just trying to get people to think about him one more time after his death.) First off, the day came and went, and Andy made no public appearances. Second, someone did claim that he had returned, but only through some random blog, and the claim has been debunked by Snopes. And here we are nearing the 30-year anniversary, so here we go again, and it has also been debunked by Snopes, which can be very fast with this kind of thing. And we'll probably be doing this every 10 years now until Andy's age that he would have been climbs high enough that it stops being plausible to suggest he'd still be alive anyway.

Not that Andy would probably have much of an issue with that. He is, after all, still playing mind games with people from beyond the grave, even if he no longer has anything to do with it.

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