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who had disappeared in 1958. “The managers saw that he was getting old so they got rid of him. And then from ’58 to ’60 they didn’t have anybody, so they said that he was in the Army. In 1960, they got a new guy who played the part of Elvis Presley until ’69—this guy, you noticed, didn’t look at all like the other guy, didn’t have the sideburns or anything. Then, when they saw that his movies were falling off at the box office, they came up with another guy and he looked different! He played the part until ’73, until they got another guy and this guy was overweight, but then they saw that business was really falling off—the concerts and the records weren’t selling. So they got rid of that guy and they said that Elvis was dead. That was just so they could sell a lot of records, which worked. And in a few years, they’ll get another guy and say, ‘We were only kidding—Elvis is alive!’”

Well, it was a theory. And, denial notwithstanding, it was a theory of rebirth; it was about returning anew from nadir, about reinvention and rising from ashes. Lately, he could not help but smell smoke, even if he wished to believe otherwise. The slap had resonated across the land and telegraphed excitement and stirred legitimate sympathy. But it had also stirred a deeper concern for his (apparent) wayward psyche; he was dangerous now; he was out of control; he had last been glimpsed raving on television, which was an uncomfortable image to have pressed into collective memory. Certain people—ones with power—preferred, more than ever, to aggressively avert their eyes from him. George’s chagrin was evident when he did not bother recounting the Letterman incident to his tape recorder; in fact, George had been speaking to his tape recorder less and less in the past year, as woe and concern overtook excitement and wonder. By October 1982, he would give up the career chronicling altogether. From that point forward, his foremost responsibility would be that of tending to damage control and soliciting offers that did not often materialize—plus Andy would begin doing things he did not tell George about, such as plotting his own death, which was nothing if not the penultimate bombing.

Earlier in the year, there had been a Fridays party at the home of co-producer Jack Burns and, there, Andy took Burns and John Moffitt aside—“He said, ‘I want to talk to you,’” Moffitt would recall. “So we went down to Jack’s basement rec room and closed the door, figuring he had a new big idea for the show. Then he told us, ‘Now, what I want to do the next—within the next year or so—is to pretend I’m dead. I want people to believe I’m dead and so I’m going to disappear. Then a few months later, I’m going to reappear again—hopefully on the show. And I think this is gonna be the best thing I’ve ever done—this is gonna be the biggest!’” (Fridays, however, would be canceled that fall and, anyway, Moffitt and Burns thought he was probably, almost certainly, kidding about the whole thing.) Then, later that summer, after the slap, he met with Saturday Night Live producer Bob Tischler and writers Barry Blaustein and David Sheffield to discuss possible ideas he wished to execute in the new season—one of which was to issue a “comedy challenge” (à la wrestling) to Bob Hope, wherein if Hope could get more laughs than Andy in some kind of contest, Andy would have his own head shaved; conversely, if Andy won, he would be called “Mr. Bob Hope” for a week. (Andy quickly reneged on the idea—“I don’t think I can win, ’cause I’m not funny,” he said.) Tischler recounted, “But then he told the three of us, ‘You know, the hoax I’d really like to pull off is my death. But I’m afraid of doing it—because when I do these things, I do them for real, and so I wouldn’t even be able to tell my parents. And I wouldn’t want to hurt them.’” But throughout the next year he would posit the idea to other people—to Zmuda, certainly, as well as his sister and his brother and also Mimi Lambert. “He said, ‘What if I pretended to have cancer or something?’” Lambert would recall. “I was horrified. I said, ‘Forget