Rube

Rube John Sofer - a fictional character played by Mandy Patinkin in the American comedy-drama television series Dead Like Me.

Rube Goldberg is probably the best known of all Rubes. He was a cartoonist best known for creating convoluted inventions that did a simple task in a very roundabout way. (The board game Mousetrap is based on Goldberg's inventions.) Today, his name lives on in the Rube Goldberg Competition, in which high school and college students compete to create machines that do the simplest tasks in the most complex of processes.