Ha Ha Ha, Hoax Hoax Hoax: Andy Kaufman Bullshit via his Idiot Brother

You know something?

Andy Kaufman wasn't too funny when he was alive. He's even more annoying dead.

Aside from ripping off every ethnic clown that came before him for his "Latka" character on "Taxi" (it could easily have been Jose Jimenez), Kaufman was a comic better heard about than actually seen.

Ha ha ha, he liked to pretend to be an obnoxious lounge singer.

Ha ha ha, he'd lip sync to the theme from Mighty Mouse.

Ha ha ha, he'd pretend to wrestle people, or he did wrestle professional fake wrestlers, or...who the hell cares?

Kaufman was, at best, a "performance artist," which would be a good excuse for not getting laughs. Was Tony Clifton real? Not real? Always Andy? Sometimes Bob Zmuda? That's not exactly entertainment, is it?

Kaufman died of cancer (not very funny) yet despite doing so in a high profile hospital, WITH A DEATH CERTIFICATE, the feeble and unfunny "Andy is still alive" act went on and on.

The latest "Andy is alive" crapola was reported by Fagin-goon Harvey Levin's infantile TMZ squad of snots, geeks and teenage guffawing baboons. Some woman got up in an obscure comedy club (and they've all been pretty damn obscure since 1988 and the days when The Improv and Catch actually booked rising stars) and announced she was "daughter of Andy."

This inane story was picked up by all the lazy newspaper websites that are too short-staffed to do anything but parrot "According to TMZ..." Which makes as much journalistic sense as saying, "According to a fart at Burger King..."

How long would it take before somebody recognized this hoaxing bitch, and put together that she and Kaufman's idiot brother were playing a game? Not long at all.

Michael Kaufman, who was quoted as saying he had some kind of letter from Andy saying he was alive, and who professed to at least believe there was a "50-50" chance the woman sharing the stage with him was his niece and not a prankster, should be ashamed of himself. If a performer's act is so deathly dead that nobody wants to see tapes of it or hear recordings of it, then all the desperate "he's still alive" games in the world will not help.

There should be a law against "hoaxing," but that would also imply there's an effective law against e-mail "spoofs," or other obnoxious activities that waste time and money. This woman might as well claim to be a Nigerian princess, or be from Chase or Paypal asking you to go to a (fake) website and put in your password to correct a "security" problem. If you fall for it, too bad for you. Meanwhile, hooray hooray for TMZ and the rest, who make money off website traffic and don't care what they do to get it.

Face it, Kaufman was not Lenny Bruce. Not Mort Sahl. He wasn't up there taking risks to liberate language or address the abuse of minorities or to point out an emperor with no clothes. All he was doing was a lip sync to Mickey Mouse and other "satires" on what might or might not be the limit to a paying customer's endurance.

Michael Ochs, brother of Phil, has not had to resort to hoaxes, schemes, and the sick "he is still alive" game that Michael Kaufman has played. Phil Ochs can still speak for himself anytime somebody wants to hear one of his records. The fact that not everybody wants to watch an Andy Kaufman video, or see a movie about him, is no excuse to play twisted games that end with "Andy would love this, ha ha ha." Andy, let's remember, and let me say it again, also liked to lip sync to Mighty Mouse.

Hopefully now that his idiot brother and his fake daughter have been exposed, and the death certificate the drooling twerps at TMZ can't find is out there for all to see, we'll have an end to the "Andy Kaufman is still alive" bullshit. To Kaufman's idiot brother, I say this: Go put up some leaflets about the missing Avante Oquendo. Go interview the latest babbling nutjob who did or didn't molest and kill Etan Patz. Or find Ken Bowser (of the award winning Phil Ochs "There But for Fortune" film) and see if there are enough legitimately hilarious clips on Andy to create a documentary anyone would want to watch.

They say the pun is the lowest form of humor. I'd say doing a lip sync to the Mighty Mouse theme is a lot lower, and has even less potential for getting any kind of laugh. In that regard, both the physical Andy Kaufman and his film clips are dead. Concentrate, Michael Kaufman, on seeing if you can revive the latter and get somebody to laugh. As for the "still alive" hoax...it's way past Andy's expiration date...a date you can easily check by looking at...HIS DEATH CERTIFICATE.