Did This Lost Charlie Kaufman Sketch Foretell Adaptation?

Unless you're a comedy nerd on the level of Jon Hamm, the chances are good that you don't remember much about The Dana Carvey Show. For the uninitiated, the short-lived 1996 sketch comedy series helped launch the careers of Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Louis C.K., 30 Rock showrunner Robert Carlock, and Oscar-winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman -- who was apparently up to his future tricks in writing an unaired sketch about Weird Al Yankovic and his twin brother.

Said Carlock about Kaufman's Adaptation-y idea in the oral history of The Dana Carvey Show for GQ.com:

I had a great relationship with Charlie. He was working on those movies at the time; he was working on Malkovich and Human Nature and one other, I think. He's a quiet person and a private person and didn't exactly light up the writers' room, but he was fun to hang out with. The one sketch of his I really enjoyed was Weird Al Yankovic and his brother, Weirder Al Yankovic--who took Weird Al Yankovic's songs and parodied them so they would turn back into the original song. And then Weirdest Al Yankovic would take those songs and make gibberish out of them. The usual meta nonsense.

Sounds slightly familiar. For interested parties, Kaufman kept to himself on the eight-episode sketch comedy series, and his future success surprised at least some of his co-workers. Said Carell: "Who knew that way back then the quiet guy at the end of the hall was going to become the mad genius of cinema?"

· Teats Out: An Oral History of the Rise and Fall (and Rise) of "The Dana Carvey Show" [GQ.com]