Killing As Organised Sport

You had to ask didn't you! Well on the surface K.A.O.S. is about injecting a bit of light hearted madness into university life. Our S.O.A.K. say that running around shooting each other with water pistols and such, is juvenile. Well if being straight laced and serious is being grown up you can keep it. Students have a reputation for wild antics, crazy stunts and "juvenile" behaviour. K.A.O.S. is here to keep that sense of fun and sillyness alive.

Look a little deeper and K.A.O.S. is an exercise in surviving university life. Face it, Varsity can be a very big, fightening, stressful place, especially for first year students. K.A.O.S. teaches it's members a lot of useful survival skills, for example:

• Orientation- Participating in killing rounds, hunting down and tracking your quarry is a great way to get to know the campus, it's buildings and lecture theatres, it's department buildings, it's short-cuts, hiding places and secret tunnels.
• Making friends- Yep there's nothing like killing people (and laughing about it with them afterwards) as a way of making friends! How many of the people you end up sitting next to in lectures do you get to know? Do you even know their names? But K.A.O.S gives you a name, maybe a face, possibly even important details like their subjects, hobbies and interests and then sets you loose to track them down and "introduce yourself".
• Course choices- Choosing your university subjects can be tricky, the subject maybe interesting but are the lecturers any good? Does the subject cover the sort of material you're interested in? The best person to ask is someone who's done the subject already. Since K.A.O.S. members come from every department and are of all ages the chances are someone is or has done the subjects your interested in. They can tell you if it's total crap or a real bunny paper.
• A Stess outlet- Yeah, Varsity can be pretty stressful, so when it all becomes too much there's nothing like a little harmless killing. Then of course there are the parties! The closest things I've ever found to K.A.O.S. party are the kind that theatre people throw. All inhibitions down and all showmanship at full on.

And deeper than that, birds of a feather flock together.

Most University clubs are based around some common interest or cause. K.A.O.S.'s only cause is fun. We don't care about your race, religion, gender or sexual orientation. Everyone is welcome, and well, if it turns out that you like us and we like you (or can at least tolerate you) then you'll probably stick around and have yourself one hell of a good time.

-Belle (Dictator of K.A.O.S. 1989)

Starker: Let me drive ze motorzycle, Siegfried. Zoom! Zoom!

Siegfried: STAR-KER! (makes chopping gesture) Ziss iss K.A.O.S.! Ve don't "Zoom! Zoom!" here!

Some of you will recall a different K.A.O.S. -- the nefarious spy organization whose demented schemes were thwarted, nearly every week, by agents of those fearless defenders of The American Way, CONTROL, led by crack Agent 86, Maxwell Smart.

...Would you believe...Max and his lovely assistant, Agent 99?

...Would you believe that if it weren't for Agent 99, we'd all be speaking in a hokey sort-of-German accent?

Although the orders for K.A.O.S. came from "Mr. Big" in some unnamed foreign country, for most viewers of Get Smart, the face of K.A.O.S. was Siegfried, (played by Bernie Koppel). When his schemes come to naught, Siegfried can always vent his frustrations on his sidekick, Starker (King Moody), who was as big a bumbler as Max, if not more.

Although you should not try to build up a picture of K.A.O.S. from individual episodes, apparently there are individual competing franchises of K.A.O.S., each jealous of the other. In one episode, MAX and 99 are sent to a beauty pageant to guard Miss USA from a K.A.O.S. plant. They discover the plant, but she is killed by a rival second K.A.O.S. plant, Miss Formosa. From her we learn that "Only in Formosa is there true K.A.O.S."

Finally, K.A.O.S. appears to be as much into the weird science department as CONTROL. Hymie the Robot was built by K.A.O.S., before Max and 99 reprogrammed him to work for niceness instead of evil.