Andy Kaufman Fakes His Death

Andy Kaufman was born in 1949 in New York and would later become a famous comedian... or anti-comedian. In 1978 he appeared as foreigner in the sitcom Taxi (to allow Andy to play a bunch of different roles, the character was made to have multiple personality disorder).

Kaufman would wrestle women as “Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion of the World” (offering prize money to any woman who could beat him), read novels on stage to bore the mind out of everyone, and refused to say his character’s lines during his first Saturday Night Live appearance. In 1979, Kaufman took out his Carnegie Hall audience for milk and cookies.

Because Kaufman played quite a few pranks, and his fictional life and real life were strongly interwoven (he was in-character outside the stage, and out-of-character on-stage), many doubted his death in 1984 at the age of 35, weaving conspiracy theories around it.

And in the May of 2004, Andy Kaufman seemingly returned... in a blog post:

Hey everyone. Greetings from planet earth.

Sorry about faking my death. I always knew my biggest supporters would play along until it was the right time for me to return. Yesterday, being the 20th anniversary, was a long enough time to go away. No one has ever gone away that long before. I’ve been documenting my adventures for the last twenty years in journals and will be posting some of the best stories from here.

Until today, that blog post (accompanied by a Yahoo-distributed press release, and a lot of chatter in blogspace) received 379 comments, spam comments included. Snopes.com at that time wrote:

The “celebrity-died-young actually faked his own death to drop out of the public eye” rumor has long since been milked for all its worth. Every decade sees it applied to at least one prominent entertainer – James Dean, Jim Morrison, Elvis Presley, Tupac Shakur. They’re all dead, and they’re not coming back. Ever.

Philipp Lenssen on Sunday, Mar 12 2006 reg. Conspiracy Theories.