Overview
Andy Kaufman died of a rare lung cancer in May 1984, aged thirty-five. He had never smoked. The theory that he faked it began almost immediately, and it is one of the few death hoaxes with a genuine basis in the subject's own behaviour.
Kaufman had spent his career refusing to tell audiences what was real. He performed as a fictional lounge singer without breaking character, staged a professional wrestling feud that many people believed was sincere, and conducted long bits whose entire structure depended on nobody being let in on them. A man who did that for a living, dying young of something improbable, was always going to attract the suspicion.
The case as it is made
The circumstantial argument has three parts.
The first is character: this is exactly the joke he would have made, and the only one he could never explain afterwards. The second is the illness, a cancer strongly associated with smoking occurring in a non-smoker in his mid-thirties — unusual, though not unknown. The third, and the one that gave the theory real momentum, involves his brother.
Michael Kaufman has said that after the funeral he found an essay in which Andy had written about faking his own death, including an arrangement to meet at a particular restaurant on Christmas Eve 1999. Michael went. Andy did not appear, but Michael has said he was handed a letter.
What happened in 2013
In November 2013, at an awards event at a New York comedy club, Michael Kaufman introduced a young woman who said she was Andy's daughter and that her father had faked his death in 1984 to leave public life, married, and raised her.
The story went worldwide within hours. It came apart in about two days.
Reporters identified the woman as Alexandra Tatarsky, an actor in her early twenties, with reporting indicating she had met Michael Kaufman while working at a Kaufman-themed gallery exhibition. Michael then substantially retracted, saying he had been misquoted, that he had never claimed his brother was alive, and that he was as sceptical as anyone.
One reading is that this was an elaborate joke in the family style, staged at a comedy club, which the press reported as news. Another is that Michael genuinely does not know what to believe about his brother and was persuaded into something he then regretted. He has continued to talk about the essay while declining to claim Andy survived.
The case against
The practical objections are the ordinary ones for a death faked in public. Kaufman died in a hospital with medical staff present, there was a death certificate and a funeral, and forty years have passed without a single verified sighting, photograph or document.
The cancer, while unusual in a young non-smoker, is documented and occurs. And the strongest circumstantial point cuts both ways: a man famous for hoaxes writing an essay about faking his death is precisely what a man famous for hoaxes would write, whether or not he ever intended to do it.
There is also the length of the bit. Kaufman's hoaxes had payoffs — the wrestling feud, the lounge singer, the fake fights all resolved eventually. A joke with no reveal after four decades is not really in the style being invoked.
Why it persists
Most celebrity death hoaxes require you to believe the subject wanted to disappear. This one only requires you to believe he wanted the last laugh, which is a much easier thing to believe about Kaufman specifically.
That is also why the 2013 episode was so effective, and why it collapsed so fast: it was a plausible enough performance to be reported as fact, and a transparent enough one to be unpicked by two days of ordinary reporting.