Conspiracy Theory: Donald Trump is Andy Kaufman

Since his presidential campaign began with an anti-Mexican soundbite that might have ended a lesser politician’s bid right then and there, Donald Trump has baffled both the Republican establishment and the political pundits on television who figured that this was all an elaborate con job by the real-estate mogul to expand his brand and nothing more. So far, the Trump hate-filled balloon has only rose higher and higher, and the oxygen to the lungs of his critics seems increasingly thin. You’ve probably heard or posited conspiracy theories to explain the unexplainable Trump juggernaut, so I humbly present my own: Donald Trump is Andy Kaufman.

 

I’ll just pause here while those in the reading audience who don’t know who Kaufman was look him up on Wikipedia…

 

Okay, when I said that about Trump being Kaufman, there are one of two ways that you, the reader, could take it: 1.) I’m being facetious about Trump *actually* being Kaufman, a notorious performance artist who most assuredly passed away in 1984 from a rare form of lung cancer. I’m merely suggesting that Trump has perhaps captured the same anarchic spirit that Kaufman used to disrupt professional wrestling (as the “Intergender World Champion”) and unleashed it on the modern-day GOP. Or 2.) I am sincerely suggesting that Trump and Kaufman (who, let’s face it, you’ve never seen in the same room together at the same time) are one and the same, and that Kaufman is playing the obnoxious “Trump” character to perfection in his greatest role yet.

 

What if I told you I was leaning towards number 2?

 

No, hear me out: When he allegedly “died” in 1984 (at the height of the backlash from his Intergender Wrestling career, mind you, having turned heel to battle Jerry “The King” Lawler and supposedly suffered a broken neck and a public meltdown on David Letterman’s old NBC show in the process), Kaufman had pulled so many hoaxes and performances that left his audience’s heads scratching that no one believed it. Every few years (especially since the evolution of the internet), rumors persist that Kaufman is poised to “return” to the world at large after a significant time out of the public eye. Rumors of his return were especially persistent in 1999, upon the eve of the film Man In the Moon (a Kaufman biopic starring fellow comedian and performance artist Jim Carrey…wait, he was serious about that whole “anti-vaccine” thing?), and in 2004, the twentieth anniversary of his “death.”

 

As a Kaufman fan, I do admit that I wanted to believe that Kaufman perhaps had faked his death all those years ago, and that he would indeed return. But my more rational, less conspiracy-minded self was inclined to believe that no one would put their family through what Andy’s family suffered (and indeed, they were skeptical about his fatal diagnosis when it first came to light; they had put up with his fantasies and performances for far longer than the general public had). Still, when friends posted articles purporting to Kaufman sightings in Wal-Mart parking lots (perhaps akin to Elvis, Kaufman’s idol, who seems to haunt Waffle Houses nearly forty years after *his* alleged passing), I felt a twinge of “what if,” if only for a moment.

 

Perhaps to better understand my conceit that Trump and Kaufman are one in the same, it’s important to point out that Kaufman the man was universally loved and treasured by his close associates because, no matter how insane his antics, he was a deeply funny and warm human being, full of kindness. No one’s ever accused Trump of having a soul, to my knowledge. But Kaufman could go dark, for sure, whether as the wrestling heel or as his most beloved-or-hated alter ego, Tony Clifton. In this role, Kaufman got to play the world’s worst lounge lizard, a nightclub “entertainer” who got to be as cruel, crass, and boorish as Kaufman was sweet and kind in real life. Sometimes to throw the audience, Kaufman would appear onstage while Clifton was performing, causing fans who “knew” that Clifton was Kaufman in heavy make-up and garish Seventies garb to pause and reconsider. In those instances, it was actually Kaufman’s best friend and partner-in-crime Bob Zmuda beneath the distinctive Clifton wig and jowls. But the audience never knew that.

 

Now, I realize it’s crazy to suggest that Donald John Trump is not a real person at all but a creation of a talented performer whose most memorable characters either endeared themselves to the audience (Foreign Man/Latka on “Taxi”) or drove that same audience to hiss and boo and finally hate him (the wrestling champ, Clifton). But if you put aside the facts for a moment (or “facts”), doesn’t it seem plausible? After all, how do we know that Trump is who he says he is (son of a real-estate mogul, a mogul himself, a graduate of the Wharton Business School, etc.)? Couldn’t it all be a cleverly constructed ploy by Kaufman, long underground in the guise of this “Trump” (doesn’t the name along suggest it’s a pun on something, or else a too-real-to-be-real name, like that of fictional presidents in movies?) and finally ready to re-enter the public life? Or hasn’t he been playing Trump since 1984, if not earlier? Consider Trump’s facial appearance; you’d swear that could be just a really poorly-rendered latex mask, if you didn’t know any better. But what if you do know better? Why would his skin be so orange? And that hair, it’s obviously a cheap wig, perhaps clamped in place Joe Dirt-style to keep Kaufman/Trump’s brain from exposure to the elements?

 

My hypothesis (and keep in mind, like most conspiracy theorists, I only use scientific terms to make my outlandish claims appear legitimate): Sometime in the fall of 1983, Donald Trump as we knew of him before then dies in a deliciously ironic way for a rich asshole (like, say, actually trying to dive into a gold-coin pool like Scrooge McDuck and breaking his neck), before the news gets out Andy Kaufman gets ahold of this information somehow. Let’s say…carrier pigeon. No, Illuminati. Yes, every conspiracy theorist’s favorite bugaboo, who control everything, they *arrange* for Trump to die so that Kaufman (who can’t get work after the fall-out from his wrestling-heel days) can step into a new role. It’s Tony Clifton writ large, and he and Zmuda get to work. But they can’t have Kaufman known to inhabit the role, so they concoct the “rare lung cancer” diagnosis so that Kaufman (who was not a smoker) can suitably “die” with a cloud of suspicion over him to distract fans from the sudden re-emergence of Donald J. Trump from, say, several months of vacation in Antarctica. So when Kaufman’s “death” is announced in May 1984, Donald Trump can slip back into American consciousness and no one bats an eye. Over the rest of the decade, “Trump” becomes louder, more obnoxious, declares bankruptcy (actually a front so Kaufman can finally get actual surgery to “look like” Trump, he’s been wearing the latex mask all this time and it’s starting to show), bounces back, has numerous public scandals, takes to social media with the instincts of a tween Taylor Swift fan, and finally emerges in 2015, thirty-one years after his “death,” to destroy the GOP from the inside, because it will be the greatest Andy Kaufman performance of all time!

I suppose you have a better theory…?

The Semester Ahead (A Plan That Will Surely Be Revised Often)

One last week between now and the start of the fall semester at the university, which means I will also be teaching Composition to the young'uns who are coming in as freshmen. I really haven't even thought about the classes I'm signed up to take, to be honest (and for some reason, I signed up for four classes, I may re-think that by drop time). No, it's been all about thinking about me standing in front of a room, telling people "I'll be your teacher for this semester, and I will not tolerate any having of fun or joke-telling. I will run this classroom with an iron fist, you hear me?"

Though in my own experience as a student, such teachers rarely were memorable or that good at their jobs. No, the teachers I liked and from whom I learned the most managed to balance out discipline and joviality. If you messed up something in their class, you didn't fear their loud yelling so much as their lack of any yelling, just a stern look of disapproval and disappointment. I hope to emulate that in my own teaching this year. But if I have to, I will lower the mother-f*&%-ing boom on those young punks.

Some things I hope to not do or not do as much:

1.) Be online - a simple look at my activity log on Facebook for any day over the past three months is enough to shame me into considering rehab...even as I type this up and plan on posting it on FB. I never said I was perfect. I did cut back on online "killing time" shit last year with my school work, and I imagine my students would prefer it if I placed their work over any time I could be spending trading jokes with friends online. It helps that I don't have internet at my place, though I do have a TV, which leads me to number 2

2.) Watch TV - this is helped by the fact that a lot of my shows are off the air or just on nights where it'd be far better for me to sleep. Jon Stewart leaving the Daily Show, for one (though I for one welcome our new fake-news anchor who is also named Trevor), Colbert being on the Late Show now also. I love The Nightly Show, and @midnight, but my schedule is thus: Monday, Wednesday and Friday I got to be up and ready to go to teach at eight in the morning. So no late nights Tuesdays or Thursdays, and it wouldn't hurt me to get to bed earlier the rest of the week. Yes, there's this thing called DVR, no I don't have it. I've over-indulged on TV this summer (good and bad), there really are fewer and fewer things for me to get excited about (I refuse to watch NBC after the way they shat all over Community, for instance).

3.) Stay up late - I think if I'm "staying up late" on a night where I'm not planning on getting up at five the next morning, it had better be because I'm working on something for one of my classes or working on something I've assigned my students and which they have turned in and are expecting a grade on. Because few college students are pacified with the "sticker for participation" tactic anymore.

4.) Read for fun - I've overindulged this summer, which is good. A lot of the "reading for fun" became, either by design or by accident, reading-for-my-creative-thesis, and I've already got a pretty hefty list of things that I could say inspired me directly or indirectly with whatever shape my final thesis ends up being. I'll still need the occasional trashy cash-in book about "stupid things" like sports or celebrities behaving badly, but I hope to limit that.

5.) Eat crappy food - my waistline expanded over the first two semesters of grad school, and I was all set to start getting up early and walking around Sertoma, as well as cutting back on the obvious crap I ate. But then I forgot to set my alarm the first full day off from school, and it's been that way ever since. I hope to have time to do the bare minimum of exercise, but cutting back on terrible food (in that it's terrible for you, not terrible to eat) would help immensely.

Now, having said all that: plans tend to change once they meet reality, and I imagine many of those things will falter when confronted with whatever reality springs up. But I know this going in, and I know that I don't want to let anyone down, least of all my students who put work into their class assignments (I would hope, anyway). I volunteered for the early shift, mostly because I figured I'd have an easier time of it with parking (I hope, anyway) but also because I figure it's best to get the teaching out of the way early in the day, like going third or fourth in a speech class. I hope so, anyway. There's a whole lot of hope in this, I guess. Teaching is one of those things where you never know how you'll be at it until you try it. And I'm about to get my call-up in a little over a week's time.

Hopefully I don't break a leg literally

Jon Stewart Leaves "Daily Show," Opens Up Neighborhood Arby's

Like a lot of you, I discovered The Daily Show when I was in college (or maybe it was on a trip to the beach, when the house my family was staying at happened to have Comedy Central...anyway, for the purposes of this story, let's say college). I was charmed by the "fake news" format, the skewering of a tired old dinosaur of news-gathering, the nightly news. The host was tall, blond, a former Sports Center guy who seemed like he would coast on this gig for a while.

I'm talking about Craig Kilborn, the original host of the show. I went to college for the first time a long, long time ago.

But then, things were different: I thought I'd manage to finagle my way into a job on Conan O'Brien's NBC show as a writer, so I neglected class. You can already tell how that turned out without me going into further detail. Kilborn and the Daily Show were required viewing in my college dorm room, mostly because my roommate for my first semester liked to stay up late and I...I had eight o'clock class. In the morning. No wonder I didn't feel like attending. At any rate, Comedy Central was something that I didn't have back in old Walhalla, not anymore (we'd had CC back when we first got cable, twenty-five years ago, but it wasn't really "Comedy Central" yet). And when I flunked out and had to return home with my tail between my legs, it was something that I didn't have again, until about 2005 or 2006.

By then, of course, Kilborn was long gone (first to CBS, then into the yawning void that characterizes formerly famous people as "has-been." I'm sure he'll have a reality show before all is said and done). Jon Stewart, whom I was aware of only as a middling actor in some films I kinda avoided (he was in some Adam Sandler movies, and Death to Smoochie), was the host of the show, and he had become a force of nature by taking on the Bush administration's criminal war in Iraq. I'd bought the book America without having seen the show because, well, I just had a feeling that it was in my outrage wheelhouse. 2004 was probably the angriest-at-Bush I had ever been (especially when the asshole won a second term, I was livid), and that Daily Show book soothed my heartbroken liberal soul.

So we got Comedy Central sometime in 2005 or 2006, because the good people at Northland figured I and my grandparents had had our fill of CMT ("hey, it's a channel, I guess") and other lousy programming options. We also got VH1 (and I was able to reconnect with music and care about it again up until Iggy Azalea came along). But Comedy Central meant The Daily Show, as well as (eventually, because I didn't like it at first) The Colbert Report.

I won't bore you with the near-decade then that I've had to watch the show under Stewart's tenure, nor the moments that made me laugh hardest or made me think the most (sometimes they were both in the same act). And with Trevor Noah coming in to take over, it's not like The Daily Show is dying. But it feels like it.

I know that, during the time I wasn't able to see the show (yes, I know, there's this thing called "the internet" with all kinds of videos of cats playing keyboards and other nonsense, but be patient with me), Stewart steered the show away from the genial mockery of the Kilborn era into a more potent, more focused attack on the media and on the ways in which certain administrations (like, oh I don't know, the Bush one) manipulated that media for their own benefit. A lot of those same outlets seem to be tripping over themselves to damn with faint praise Stewart as he embarks on his final week of shows. I saw something on Fox News (if ever there was a "fake news outlet," it's those jackholes) where the once reputable Howard Kurtz tried to say that Stewart's "secret meetings" with Obama were a big deal. This is the same network that practically lived in Dick Cheney's sphincter from 2001 to 2008...anyway, the fact is that yes, Stewart is a leftie (and not just in terms of which hand he writes with). So what? News itself, the real deal, has been moving away from "objective" reporting for so long that I can't even begin to think of when it last was indeed objective (Ancient Sumer, maybe?). Bill O'Reilly is the right's Jon Stewart, only not funny on purpose. Sean Hannity is Colbert's character without the irony. And your point is what, exactly?

For as much as I'll miss Stewart when he made me laugh, it won't mean as much without the moments when something happened that was terrible, and I anticipated that evening's or that week's first new episode, to see his commentary about it. The most recent, on the shootings in my home state, might rank as just the most honest moment in news on the entire event, because the "agenda" Stewart was pushing that night was just outrage that this shit continues to happen, and that we don't seem willing to do anything about it (oh, we're able. Don't let anyone tell you we're not). I know Trevor Noah will do his best to fill that void (and Larry Wilmore, on The Nightly Show, is easily the peer of Stewart when it comes to showing outrage at horrific events, while still trying to save us all with the comedy that makes such tragedies bearable). But it won't be the same.

During Jon Stewart's tenure, he seemed to age well beyond his years. He's fifty-two, I think, but he looks far, far older. Trying to make sense of all the crap that passes for "news" these days will do that to a man, I'm sure, and I think he deserves a rest. But goddam it, I need him around to mock the powerful and unrepentant as he's done for fifteen years (almost ten of which I got to see). Imagine what he could do with a Trump presidency...oh lord, if that's what it takes to get him to come back, let him stay retired.

At any rate, the world of news (fake or otherwise) is better off for Stewart's tenure. You may disagree, but that's your opinion. And if you think Stewart was bad for this country, well...what's say you and me go get a meal down at Arby's? You know what, you go ahead and eat that roast beef sandwich, I can wait.