Ensign Redshirt: Eight PM

Some suit from Division just showed up to cause trouble. They think we’re not doing a good job keeping tabs on Evil Spock. While I agree, it’s not like they’ll do any better. The new guy, Brad, is a weenie. His idea of investigation is Google. He’s a joke.

Then again, that might be part of his master plan. Some people are a few steps ahead of the rest of us, able to laugh inside while they make us uncomfortable. Evil Spock is one of those guys. Andy Kaufman is another.

Andy is a performance artist often mistaken for a comedian. He was a dadaist who hated traditional stand-up so much that once he denied audience demands for familiar routines by reading The Great Gatsby until everyone left. Even when he wasn’t making people demand their admission price back, Kaufman was unconventional. Playing Carnegie Hall in 1979, he mixed his popular stuff—"Foreign Man", his Elvis impersonation, "The Cow goes Moo" song, and wrestling women—with a healing ceremony for a collapsed elderly person and taking everyone out milk and cookies after the show. He and the audience met on the Staten Island Ferry the next morning to continue the show.

Public perception was a big part of Kaufman’s comic material. He made several appearances on NBC’s Saturday Night Live and threatened to become popular. Kaufman responded by bringing his women wrestling schtick to a national TV audience, angering many fans of the show. After a vote banning him from ever appearing again, Andy appeared one last time to say he wouldn’t be appearing on the show again. He staged a public feud with a pro wrestler, Jerry Lawler, faking an injury sustained in the ring. Kaufman also introduced the world to his three adopted children, all grown African-American men, on Late Night with David Letterman.

Arguably the greatest prank is the one he couldn’t play—the claim that he would fake his death and come back in twenty years. His death in 1984 (of renal failure, for which he even sought a cure through psychic therapy) was greeted with skepticism among fans and celebrated in 2004 by friends. Andy Kaufman is not listed on the Social Security Death Index, allowing for the possibility he is still alive.

In the case of Brad from Division, though … he’s just a weenie, pure and simple. His braniac move just now was to bring the Presiden’ts ex in to lead an investigation into some shady dealings. Takes a fox to eat a fox, I guess. Not my problem. I may be headed to Mexico undercover.

Transmission ended.