There’s this phrase that keeps coming up every time we’re on a conference call with the various teams helping us build the new version ofTCGS. I’m the one that keeps saying it.
“Like minded people.”
I’m making very clear to everyone involved with this thing that I really believe this show is about its viewers. Because I want the show to be many things – first and foremost, I want it to be funny. I think our show is a very funny comedy show. I think on its best days it’s as funny as anything else going. That’s important to me.
But our show is also odd and emotional and definitely different than most other stuff, and I think because of that it attracts a certain type of person. In the most broad way, I’d say it attracts a lot of people who ask the question “Why?” a lot. For a variety of reasons – why do I feel the way I feel, why is entertainment the way it is, why do I have to play by the rules, why don’t people like me have a place, why do people ignore me? There’s tons of why questions and I think many of our viewers are people who question things a lot.
And I’m really proud that our show is a place where they all convene. They’re not all the same, but they share something similar that makes them support what we do. You can feel it.
Our show is a place where like minded people find each other. I’m proud of that.
It’s also something I’m fiercely protective of, because 17 years ago I had a moment where my love of bizarre comedy lead me to find a like minded person, a guy who I think in some ways saved my life. A guy who I don’t really know but who is one of my oldest friends. A guy I wonder about and worry about and who knows as much about me as anyone even though we’ve only met three times.
I have never really shared this story in full. It’s long and it’s weird but I want to get it off my chest.
In 1998 I arrived at Rutgers University and the depression I’d been hiding from the world became a massive problem in my life. It was a burden and a weight and it almost killed me a handful of times. I don’t want to go all the way into it because it’s a long story best told elsewhere, but you need to know that when I say I suffered from a dangerous level of depression I’m not fucking around or saying it lightly.
Now one thing I did have is that I obsessively loved certain things. The Smiths. J Church. Marvel Comics. Wrestling. The Warriors.
But most of all in that era, what I loved was Andy Kaufman.
In 1998, you really couldn’t see too much of what Andy Kaufman had done. I obsessed over “I’m From Hollywood” and the other tributes Comedy Central would play to him. I watched SNL re-runs obsessively hoping to catch the episodes he was on (this was before DVR and On Demand and even program guides that told you what episode was coming – you had to just sit at the television to see if it was one you wanted.) Taxi was easy to consume. But mostly you read about the stuff Andy pulled. And not even that much – there was really only one website about him – www.andykaufman.jvlnet.com - which I can’t believe is still up and running all these years later. I sucked up every piece of info that came across that website from when I first found it in the mid-90s.
I also was constantly in the market for tapes of Andy. Tape trading was a big thing back then – you’d go to concerts and sometimes people would be selling bootleg live footage of stuff. Flea markets you could sometimes find old things. And at Rutgers guys would come through and sell videos at the student centers, but they were mostly live footage of bands. Two of my most prized possessions back then were that I snagged a copy of “My Breakfast With Blassie” and the thing Andy and Zmuda did at the Catch A Rising Star anniversary show. That one I even had an original copy of with the real case. I was into this shit.
One resource that did exist was the Andy Kaufman Usenet group. These were hard to navigate message boards that were kind of lawless and that I found pretty intimidating. But there was a Usenet group dedicated to Andy that you could find good stories at. It didn’t update all that often but you could go through the archives and occasionally find cool shit.
One day, when I was without exaggeration as depressed as I’ve ever been, I got on my computer and went to the Usenet group to see if there was anything new there. And while there was nothing new about Andy, there was a very strange post. I don’t remember verbatim what it said, but it was basically a tabloid-esque update on “SomeKid”. This post pre-supposed that this guy SomeKid was an international celebrity that everyone would be familiar with. There was a link to a website that I followed.
There I found a picture of a very chubby boy with frosted tips, and a bunch of dated notes detailing the comings and goings of “SomeKid”. They were really rambly and bizarre but definitely funny, and the fact that I found them through the Kaufman board made me realize that whoever made this really shitty website was being funny on purpose. There was an AOL instant messenger address listed on the site – just a few letters and a bunch of numbers - and I added the guy to my buddy list.
He signed on a few days later and I messaged him that I saw SomeKid in a mall in New Jersey and people were flocking all around him. He thanked me and signed off. The update about Jersey went on the SomeKid website immediately. For weeks, I kept feeding him very dumb statements about my encounters with SomeKid and he kept adding them to his page. I was the only person participating in this. I am fairly certain that I was the only person visiting his site.
Over time, I started telling this person some things about my life and he started telling me about his. I won’t list his real name as some of this post will get sensitive, but we’ll just call him “KP” for the purpose of this post. He learned that I was in New Jersey and really feeling troubled. He was actually the only person I was telling about my problems with total honesty. He knew I was in Jersey, at Rutgers, and dangerously sad. This creative stranger on the internet was the only person I’d ever told that to in blunt terms.
I found out that he grew up in North Carolina but now lived on an Army base in Hawaii. He was two years younger than me and his life was pretty brutal as well. He was a skater kid who had a whole gang back home, but when his family got stationed out in the Pacific, they were put on a base where there was literally only one other person who wasn’t an adult. That was his neighbor, a nine year old boy named Tyler. His only real option for friendship was this kid who was seven years younger than him, and to top it all off Tyler was kind of a dick and a bully.
We were very isolated kids, but we found each other. I can say for myself that this relationship got me through about two of the hardest years of my life. I can’t speak for my friend but I bet he’d say something similar.
We started talking on the phone. For a while, it was just brief calls. KP was a hacker and a phone phreak, which I didn’t know was still a thing by that late in the 90s. Sometimes in the middle of the night I’d get a call in my dorm room and I quickly learned that random late night calls were usually KP. I remember once picking up the phone and hearing him say “Watch this” then I heard a series of clicking noises and a few ladies speaking in foreign languages. A few minutes later that stopped and he said “We were just secretly listening to a bunch of operators in Korea.”
He had the number of an insane inventor in San Francisco who claimed he made bracelets that gave you eternal life. We’d call this guy in the middle of the night and pick his brain. I started giving KP the numbers of other people in my dorm. He’d call and prank them while I silently listened on three way. We were bored troublemakers giving each other a friend even though we were faceless to one another and lived 6,000 miles apart.
We also started causing a lot of trouble with the SomeKid website. Back then a lot of websites had “Guestbooks” where you could leave messages, and tons of bands had guestbooks on their web pages. We started doing this very innocuous thing where KP would leave guestbook messages as SomeKid on the websites of local North Jersey punk bands. It was to make me laugh since he knew I was going to see these bands a lot and that I’d eventually find his SomeKid messages on their website. It was pretty stupid and harmless.
But for some reason, this one band called Lanemeyer flipped the fuck out. KP would talk weird shit as SomeKid and they engaged to an extreme degree, telling SomeKid they would kill him and stuff like that. It was absolutely trolling which I’m not super psyched to admit I did back in the day, but it was meant to be harmless and we didn’t anticipate that it would cause a scene.
Now KP loved it. He never backed down and started threatening Lanemeyer right back, as SomeKid. He said he’d sic lawyers on them, claimed he had millions and could shut them down, and insulted their music. On top of that, I was going to a lot of their shows at the time, because I legitimately liked them. I’d tell KP about shows they had coming up and he’d post stuff as Somekid like “Yo when you guys play the Wayne Firehouse I’ll be there and you can say this shit to my face.”
I’d then go to these shows, and I swear, there was a months long stretch where at Lanemeyer shows they’d get on the mic and be like “SomeKid didn’t fucking show AGAIN and if you know him tell him we’re gonna find him and kill him.” And I’d be there shaking my head, marveling at the fact that my friend I’d never met managed to cause this much trouble from that far away.
This built to an incident where I was hanging out with friends of mine who were in a band called Shorty, and they were debating whether or not SomeKid was ever actually going to show his face. This was in one of their living rooms. These were not people who knew I had any involvement in this. A bored teen in Hawaii somehow managed to spread this thing far enough that I was hearing about it independently of him. It was kind of amazing and kind of addicting.
KP and I wound up making a website where we’d put up essays and chat logs and accounts of phone calls we did. For example, a guy once messaged me in the middle of the night and threatened to fight me. This was because my AOL profile said I was a Rutgers student. It was almost definitely sexual, though he denied this. This guy would do this constantly, and I’d always tell him to meet me at a location. I wouldn’t show. Then he’d message me later that week and ask me what happened. I’d make up an excuse and the whole thing would repeat. It was bonkers.
KP and I got him to give us his phone number and we started calling him on three way. He would pick up within the first ring every time. It was clear he had a phone line dedicated 100% completely to fielding calls from young boys he was trying to fight. We’d talk to this guy for hours, then post our accounts of it on the website. (That whole thing ended with me telling the guy to meet me at the corner near my house where I watched him from a window. It was fucking terrifying and we cut that one off at the pass.)
It was dumb, it was antagnostic, it was pointless – but it was also two very creative kids finding a way. KP was a lifeline to me for years. We chatted every day online and talked about three times a week on the phone. We talked about him moving to NYC so we could be comedy partners. That never worked out.
Almost no one in my real life knew about the existence of this human. And the ones who did didn’t realize how close we were.
The first time we met was in 2000, in New York City. I had just started taking my first ever class at the UCB Theater. His mom was visiting a friend and he tagged along. We met up early in the day before my class. It was pouring rain – I mean, monsoon like conditions.
We went to the Museum of Television and Radio and watched everything they had on Andy Kaufman. The Fridays incident, his late night special, just everything out there. It was one of the happiest days of those few years for me.
We were so soaked that we had to stop and buy sandals at a foot locker. I went to my improv class and he went back to North Carolina (I believe he’d moved back there by that time.)
When he got back to North Carolina and I found UCB we both finally had some outlets and didn’t need each other as much. I was obsessed with performing and improv and that community really embraced me. He got back to kids his own age, back to skating, back to having a real life basically. And we still talked and emailed and sent videos back and forth – but we stopped updating the website. We didn’t need it.
Over the years we lost touch. One night I was at the UCB Theater, at the Troll 2 show Curtis Gwinn and John Gemberling infamously put on, when I felt someone tap me on the shoulder. I turned around. KP was there with his mom and his girlfriend. They randomly stopped in NYC while on a trip, randomly went to theater, and I happened to be there. We watched the show then walked around for like half an hour catching up.
The only other time I saw KP in person was when we did TCGS for the first time at DSI Improv in Chapel Hill, NC. He came by and we got to talk a little bit. For maybe fifteen minutes.
Me and this person I’ve known for 17 years, we’ve actually only hung out in person for maybe three or four hours total, and almost all of that was on a rainy day in the summer of 2000.
There was a long stretch where I thought KP was dead. That’s not a joke. I hadn’t heard from him for like six months and he wasn’t answering my texts or emails. His girlfriend got in touch with me and asked me to reach out. He was having a tough time. Turns out he was down in Florida and was in a stretch where things weren’t great (I do not judge this – the basis of our relationship was that both of us had some issues that flared up from time to time.) He saw a telephone pole with an old phone box attached to it and realized it was a super old and rare piece of equipment. So like the phone phreak he’s always been, he climbed the pole and tried to take it. The cops chased him and he dove into the Gulf of Mexico. Cops on boats surrounded him and one dragged him into their boat and tazed him while he was covered in salt water. I wish I was kidding.
This is both the most troubling and coolest story I have about my friend.
We went through NC on the RV tour and I reached out to KP, but he wasn’t around. I caught up with his lady though. He was dealing with some stuff and laying low out of town. This seems to be a theme with us – I’ll have some tough times and eventually reach out to him. He’ll have some tough times and eventually reach out to me. We don’t need each other like we once did but we still lean on each other from time to time.
When I got cast as the lead in a sitcom a few years back he reached out right away and was like “You said you were going to do comedy and you went and fucking did it.” He was one of the first people I ever told about my plans to really go for it. He was there when I was a sad kid in a dorm room trolling Andy Kaufman message boards. Out of all the congrats, his probably meant the most.
When we started TCGS, he let me know that he felt like it was what I was really supposed to be doing. He’s called in a few times. I always know it’s him. He always knows I know. No one else knows that we know each other. We continue to be quietly and secretly friends.
He also has a Big Lake joke he’s been planning on asking the Human Fish for over three years, but never managed to get through on the phones for it. It is the best Big Lake joke out of the many I have heard.
I have a friend. I have a very good friend, who’s been there for me many times over the years, even though I’ve only seen him three times in the flesh. It’s a relationship that’s helped me time and time again.
And the only reason it happened is because KP and I both liked weird comedy, connected to it, and through it we found each other.
Like minded people.
Now I get to have a TV show. And a lot of the people who have watched the early iteration of that TV show are friends with each other. People date because of this TV show. People exchange holiday gifts with people they’ve never actually met, because they are friends who met online rallying around my TV show. A lot of these people are sad and need each other.
They are like minded people.
My show connects them. To me, that is a badge of honor. Proud doesn’t begin to describe how I feel about creating this portal of entry, this dumb comedy show, that lonely kids connect through. I know to my core what it is to feel lonely, to fall in love with something weird, and to subsequently feel a little less lonely when you realize other people are in love with that weird thing too.
I feel like I’m this guy who turned out ok when for many years I didn’t think I was going to. Comedy and the internet and a friendship that coalesced because of those elements mixing together helped me keep my head up until things got more ok. And now I see that a lot of the people who like my work, they just fundamentally don’t feel ok sometimes. But they let me know we make them feel more ok, and I see on Facebook, on Tumblr, on Twitter that they’re all friends and it gives me great joy to know that while I can’t help everybody, I can help some people help each other.
Like minded people.
This is one of the many things I have to thank Andy Kaufman for.
PS – I texted KP and told him I might write this. He wrote back and said if I did, he wanted to use it as a platform and make sure people know an opinion he holds very close to the vest right now: “The Smithsonian in DC needs to flip their moon rock. If they have people touching it, flip it on a schedule to actually touch moon, not tourist cells.”
And that’s the real triumph of shows like Black-ish, Empire, the CW’s Jane the Virgin, and the Shonda Rhimes’ Three Hour Tower of Power—they give us cultural touchstones without giving us cultural parodies.
"But racial and cultural diversity in mass-market major studio-supported films seems to have stalled out. For every familiar version of historical black struggle in movies like The Butler (2,933 screens, grossed over $116 million) and The Help (3,014 screens, grossed over $169 million) that gets a wide release, smaller and more nuanced portraits of life as a person of color get critical acclaim but less support, like Pariah (24 screens, grossed $769,000) and Girlhood (5 screens, grossed $30,000).
“Hollywood is shooting itself in the foot by not focusing on diversity.”
Thanks to everyone who watched Fusion's live coverage of the State of The Union with me and the "No, YOU Shut Up!" gang. Hope you also liked the debut of my new Host Module! It reminds me of something from my childhood, but I can't quite place it...
