DEAD
OR ALIVE
HUFFINGTON
06.16.13
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Christopher
Lloyd (left) and
Andy Kaufman
appear on an
episode of
Taxi in 1981.
It’s a long and sublimely silly list.
Take the times Kaufman read The Great
Gatsby aloud until the audience hissed
and booed. “Would you rather listen
to a tape?” he’d ask (they always said
yes). But the tape simply turned out to
be a recording of him reading The Great
Gatsby. There was his Carnegie Hall special, after which he invited the entire
audience — all 2,800 of them, includ-
ing Andy Warhol — to a meticulously
planned snack of milk and cookies.
Even a reasonable fan might have
seen in the scope of Kaufman’s lunacy
a promise that he’d someday try the
ultimate prank.
Today, there’s evidence to the contrary. A death certificate, for one. For
those who can’t make it to the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services to see the document in person, the
Smoking Gun posted an image online in
1999 to counteract a flurry of rumors the