Gilbert Gottfried: A Tribute
Not all celebrity deaths are equal. Some are just personal. Gilbert Gottfried's untimely passing is one just celebrity death for me.
It's not personal in the sense that I knew the man. My experience with Gilbert is limited to the time I got introduced to him at the Friar's Club by my buddy Nick Stevens when I was one of the comics hired to write jokes for the roast of Boomer Esiason the year NYC was hosting the Super Bowl. And I'm sure I shamelessly fanboyed him. Because for me, it was like being 5 years old meeting Santa at the mall. A small, hilarious, filthy Santa with a voice like a siren.
That night he delivered one of the hardest laughs of my lifetime, telling an endlessly profane, excruciatingly obscene joke that went on and on, while Boomer melted into the stage, all the millionaires and billionaires in the theater looked on in silent horror, and I and the other writers nearly had heart attacks from the weapons grade awkwardness. It was sublime. I'll never forget that moment.
Among my most frequent listens over the last decade or more have been Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Obsessions, with his co-host and straight man Frank Santopadre, and offshoot Amazing Colossal Obsessions. The first has always been an incredibly entertaining show business interview show, with everyone from comics to actors to authors to guys who are experts on everything from old movies to kids programs. The second is a condensed show, where they take a deep dive into obscure topics like TV Debuts of 1969 or 1970s Death Songs. Both were perfect showcases for Gilbert's vast, savant-level reservoir of completely useless knowledge. Listening to him know who played what minor side character in some old Universal Studios horror film (a special obsession for him) or be able to off-key screech his way through the entire theme song to the awful Hannah-Barbera cartoon King Kong off the top of his head was to truly bear witness to greatness.
But what made those shows special was the humor. Bizarre, often raunchy, but always 100% genuine comedy gold. It's been a staple of my downtime listening since I first came across it, whenever that was. Doing weekend stuff around the yard. Running errands. At the gym where I'd be laughing to myself on some apparatus like an asshole and not caring. I'm not exaggerating when I say they've been the No. 1 source of pure belly laughs in my life over the last 10 or so years. Also, while comics are rarely a great audience and tend to appreciate a great joke more than laugh at it, Gilbert was an even better audience than he was a comic. And that is saying something. His laugh was irresistibly infectious.
Anyone who's listened knows the stories he told the most often, because he'd work some of the most outlandish into any conversation. The more awkward the better. There's the one about Cesar Romero (Joker from the Batman TV show) supposedly having a fetish for young men throwing orange wedges at his bare ass. "Now some say it was tangerines ..." That just got funnier the more he shoehorned it into the interviews. Then there was the one about TV icon Danny Thomas preferring to lie under glass coffee tables and having women go No. 2 on the glass. Another about some old Hollywood legend who kept a pet chimp who would perform oral on her. He had a million of them. And he told each one a million times.
He was just that guy with a gift for dirty, tasteless, inappropriate humor and made you love him for it. Because he was funny, but also totally without fear. If he bombed, he just ignored the silence and pushed on. And if you were offended by his off-color jokes, that was a you problem, not a Gilbert problem. At least until he told the Japanese Tsnuami joke that cost him his lucrative job as the Aflac duck. Of course he's infamous for a 9/11 joke that he told as soon as comedy started back up that went, "I'm supposed to go out to LA, but I couldn't get a direct flight. We have a stopover at the Empire State Building." And when someone yelled "Too soon!" he pretended they meant he should've paused longer before dropping the punchline.
That one caused an uproar, as you can well imagine. But my personal favorite joke he ever told went something like, "You can tell how good a person someone is by how long they held out after the World Trade Center collapsed before they masturbated. My first time was between Tower 1 and Tower 2." Horrifically, irredeemably bad taste. But when I heard him say it, I knew that eventually we would all be able to move on.
But I've gone on too long here. I'm a big believer in the idea that the best way to pay tribute to an entertainer or an artist in any field is with their own work. So here's a random sampling of Gilbert Gottfried at his best. Take your pick. All jokes NSFL:
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And as a bonus, Gilbert does Walter White:
And Gilbert's exotic reading of 50 Shades of Grey:
RIP, to the man who once said he got an acting gig because they were looking for "a loud, annoying Jew." And a national treasure who is already missed. Thanks for the laughs, Gilbert.