The Internet changed comedy, but it hasn’t changed Gilbert Gottfried
The voice of a ‘busted Cuisinart’ mixes the humour in a way that still works
Gilbert Gottfried was a cast member on Saturday Night Live so briefly (one season) and so long ago (1981), that many people have probably forgotten he was ever on it. Like his own agent did. Soon after his inglorious departure from the TV program, his agent “called me very excitedly, before the agency people got around to firing her, to tell me she got me an audition for Saturday Night Live,” Gottfried wrote in his mercilessly self-deprecating 2011 memoir, Rubber Balls and Liquor.
More than 30 years have passed since that moment of keen indignity, but Gottfried still laughs at the memory. “It shows what a brilliant, crack agent I had,” he says in a phone interview. “I had to explain to her that, ‘I was on that show, and it lasted about a year, and it was on national TV, and I was fired, and it was in all the papers.’ ”
What about the recent Rolling Stone article that ranked all 141 SNL cast members from over the years, and put him at No. 137? He laughs again, and says that whenever he sees an article about SNL, “The first thing I turn to is the ‘whatever happened to?’ page, and if I’m not on there, I can relax.”
Gottfried sounds relaxed. He’s calling from a diner in Atlanta, where he’s lunching on mashed potatoes and gravy with a side of sautéed spinach. His speaking voice is a slightly tempered version of the more outrageous one that, with his humour, has made him famous.
Gottfried’s been on a long list of TV shows, from Family Guy to 30 Rock to CSI to Law & Order, and in many movies, most notably as the ill-tempered parrot Iago in Disney’s Aladdin. He does voice work in video games, and tours relentlessly. Long ago his peers labelled him “the comedian’s comedian.” I ask, what does that mean? “I don’t know,” he says, “that the audience doesn’t find me funny?”
Audiences do enjoy Gottfried — he’s prospered in comedy for four decades now — but there have been notorious exceptions. Shortly after 9/11 he told an audience in New York that, “I have to fly out to L.A. I couldn’t get a direct flight, I have to make a stop at the Empire State Building.” He was booed. He recovered by telling a version of The Aristocrats, the famously dirty joke so treasured by comedians.
Ten years later, in the days after the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan, he tweeted jokes about Japan that were poorly received. That cost him his long-running gig as the voice of the duck that quacked “Aflac” in the insurance company’s TV commercials.
I ask him, is there a joke you would take back?
“No,” he says. “Jokes nowadays should come with a set of instructions that say, ‘If you like the joke, laugh, if you don’t like the joke, don’t laugh.’ It’s become such an insane thing now, particularly with the Internet, that everyone wants to go crazy and have a new villain of the week. The Internet makes me feel sentimental for old-time lynch mobs, because they actually had to get their hands dirty and do stuff. With the Internet you sit in your underwear on the couch.”
After the Japan jokes, Buzzfeed called Gottfried “a huge ---hole.” The news-ish website changed its tune four years later when the comic’s aggravating voice caused a remarkable medical breakthrough.
In March 2014, journalist Ron Suskind wrote in the New York Times about how his son, Owen, seemed entirely normal until age three, then he suddenly “fell silent” with regressive autism. Years of treatment and testing could not penetrate Owen’s wall of silence.
One day, Suskind picked up a puppet of Iago, the parrot from Aladdin, and as he spoke to his son, he impersonated Gottfried — whose voice Suskind describes as “a busted Cuisinart.” Yet, Owen immediately started to converse with his father through the puppet. Suskind wrote, “I’m talking to my son for the first time in five years.”
Owen is now a young man, and earlier this year he appeared on stage with Gottfried at Comedy Central’s Night of Too Many Stars fundraiser for autism in New York. Together, the boy and comic performed scenes from Aladdin. Buzzfeed predicted that viewers’ hearts would melt.
I ask Gottfried, how did that experience make you feel? He says, “It’s the first time my voice has been used for good instead of evil.”
Does it mean that people should bring their children to his shows in Ottawa? “Oh yeah, bring your two-year-olds with you.” (Editor’s note: Do not bring your children.)
Hear more of Gottfried’s voice at gilbertgottfried.com, in his “Amazing Colossal Podcast!” Or hear him read passages from Fifty Shades of Grey, which is not an experience for the timid yet, somehow, it is not to be missed.
See links to all these clips at ottawacitizen.com/bigbeat.