The lower lair
In INSTRUCTIONS NEVER TO DESTROY VIEW OR DUPLICATE, A and B remove King Baggot's Hollywood Walk of Fame star. Beneath it is a ladder. At the bottom waits a horned, trident-bearing “King Baggot,” who performs damnation, show-business patter and seismic catastrophe as one continuous act.
Jerry
The spectacular identity eventually collapses into a much more Los Angeles biography. His name is Gerald, or Jerry. He once had a rent-controlled one-bedroom on Las Palmas and an easy job editing music videos. As paid music-television work dried up, he devised a replacement occupation: make up a guy and become him.
The transformation is funny because the borrowed identity is not simply an invented celebrity. Historical King Baggot really existed. Jerry converts somebody else's decayed fame into employment, occult authority and real estate.
A job made from a person
Pseudobaggot has been living beneath Hollywood Boulevard for years as “King Baggot, Lord of the Underworld,” using a trident as an earthquake device. He also describes a second setup around a fake grave on Whittier Boulevard, equipped with a flood-producing scepter. Apocalypse has become a two-property freelance practice.
This makes him an unusually compact figure for Function / Defunction / Refunction: music-video editing loses its economic function; a forgotten actor's name is refunctioned as a persona; the persona becomes an occupation; the occupation itself becomes stale enough to need a successor.
The gimmick breaks
Jerry wants A and B to take over. They refuse the actual deaths implied by the bit. B breaks the trident with surprising ease—“like any other gimmick”—and Pseudobaggot is left wailing over his irrelevance. The sequence makes the wrestling sense of gimmick literal: a fabricated persona can organize an entire reality until someone tests the prop.
Connections: Kayfabe · Naming as Instantiation · Work & value · Reality / deception · Hollywood.