Andy Kaufman Exhumed?

There's this video that's been making the rounds about the interwebs for over a year now, purporting to show a German film crew venturing into Beth David Cemetery in Elmont, NY, locating the grave of Andy Kaufman, and digging it up. Since I don't spend my entire life online, I just now became aware of it.

It's pretty disturbing stuff, even if it is fake, and I'm sure it is. Here's why:

There are moments when the camera is just focused on mud while they dig, that the chain of evidence is lost. They could have switched at that point to a different grave at a different site.

This body was not buried six feet deep as is customary. On the other hand, I have heard that lazy gravediggers often don't bother to bury the bodies very deep (as with Louisville's Eastern Cemetery). On the other other hand, this being a celebrity, you'd think they'd have gone by the book on this one.

This body seems to be in a plain pine box, the kind that are used for pauper's graves.

This body was not embalmed, given its state of decay and given that Andy was supposedly buried in 1984. The clothes are completely rotted away, which is all wrong. Even exhumed Civil War-era bodies still have some vestiges of their clothing left.

The skull is planted upright even though it is clearly disconnected from the spine. This is highly unlikely. The skull usually ends up flopped over to one side or the other.

It sure is a lucky break that the hole they dug (amazingly straight-lined for a guy with a shovel) just happens to align perfectly with where the underground coffin ends up appearing - so perfectly that the guy can just reach in and open the door effortlessly. This, more than anything else, screams hoax and fail.

Lastly, it would seem very strange to go to so much trouble and only bring one camera, and then hand it to someone who starts jiggling the camera around wildly once the body is revealed. A straight shot from the open grave to pan around and show us that we are indeed still in Beth David Cemetery would have been logical, too.

I don't know why 99% of everything on the internet is always fake. Perhaps it's not actually about the internet, but that 99% of everything with the human race is fake and always has been. That would explain quite a lot of history and current events.

Then again, maybe Andy really did fake his own death, and made this video to mess with our minds. I could buy that.


- - JSH