Gilbert Gottfried, comedian with voice for controversy, dies at 67

The Washington Post / Matt Schudel

12:53 JST, April 13, 2022

Gilbert Gottfried, a comedian with a signature honking voice who delighted in shocking his audiences with pointedly crude material and who achieved greater renown in film and on TV commercials, died Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 67.

The cause was complications from a form of muscular dystrophy that can lead to an irregular heartbeat, said his friend and publicist Glenn Schwartz.

Gottfried, who began doing stand-up comedy when he was 15, was briefly in the cast of “Saturday Night Live,” appeared in major comedy clubs and on Howard Stern’s radio broadcasts and was often featured in raunchy roasts of other comedians.

He played the squawky parrot Iago in the 1992 animated hit film “Aladdin” and appeared in dozens of other movie and television shows as a character actor or voice-over artist. From 2000 to 2011, he was in several popular television commercials as the voice of the Aflac duck.

But his penchant for jokes that could offend, especially after national tragedies, such as the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the Japanese tsunami of 2011, led to canceled contracts and a downturn in his career.

Aflac fired him within an hour of learning of tweets Gottfried had posted about the tsunami, which claimed thousands of lives in Japan. Gottfried said he learned of his firing from news reports, not from Aflac.

“I don’t regret the joke,” he said in 2017. “I regret losing the money.”

Like many comedians, Gottfried built his act around sex, celebrities and his own inadequacies. He combined an older, Borscht Belt style of a loud delivery with often-vulgar subject matter.

“Gilbert’s somewhere between Mark Twain and a birthday clown,” comedian Dave Attell said in “Gilbert,” a 2017 documentary about Gottfried.

Although he spoke in a resonant baritone offstage, much of his humor derived from an exaggerated, high-pitched, nasal inflection and a sense of the absurd. In one routine, he read passages from the erotically charged “Fifty Shades of Grey” in his trademark screech.

When he appeared on “Hollywood Squares,” a semi-scripted celebrity quiz show, he was asked, “What mammal has the largest eyes?”

He answered, “Marlon Brando at a buffet,” speaking of the renowned actor, who gained a great deal of weight in his later years. Brando complained to the show’s producers, which only prompted Gottfried to make fun of him more often.

When Julia Roberts married stone-faced country singer Lyle Lovett, Gottfried added it to his routine, but with a personal touch: “I should have asked her out. What’s the worst thing she could have said to me? ‘I’m sorry, but you have a normal-shaped head. Could you do me a favor and lie with your head inside the elevator door and let it slam against it throughout the day and then give me a call?’ I loved doing that bit. That was the only celebrity divorce I cried about. The bit made no sense anymore.”

For Gottfried, comedy had to risk being offensive, it needed to have an edge of danger that would cut through pomposity and polite expectations. For years, that quality made him a favorite at celebrity roasts.

A few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Gottfried appeared at one such event, poking fun at Hugh Hefner, and made a joke about flying on an airliner after the terrorist attacks. Someone in the audience shouted “too soon,” and the room went silent.

“You could hear people getting really angry, shocked, and gasping,” he told Vulture.com.

Gottfried then decided to tell the “aristocrats” joke — one of the oldest and filthiest jokes in the comic repertoire, one with so many variations that a 2005 documentary film was made about it, featuring Gottfried, Bob Saget, George Carlin and many other comics.

“I figured, ‘Why not go into a lower level of hell? I’ve already lost them beyond belief,’” Gottfried said. The audience roared with every twist of the joke.

“That they laughed at, and a writer wrote that it was ‘cathartic.’”

Gilbert Jeremy Gottfried was born Feb. 28, 1955, in Brooklyn, where he grew up above a hardware store run by his father and uncle.

He dropped out of high school to pursue comedy and appeared in clubs at the same time as other rising stars, including Jerry Seinfeld, whom Gottfried sometimes imitated in his act.

He was a cast member on “Saturday Night Live” in the 1980-81 season, almost always speaking in his real voice and seldom in his comic persona. Between comedy club performances, he acted in dozens of films and TV shows, including a role as an unscrupulous lawyer in “Beverly Hills Cop II” (1987). He reprised his role as the hapless parrot Iago in several “Aladdin” movies.

“Another person, when they were considering me,” he later recalled, “said, ‘I don’t know. Gilbert Gottfried seems a little one-dimensional.’ I thought, ‘So maybe they should call Meryl Streep to be the parrot.’ You know, I don’t have the range to be a cartoon character.”

Survivors include his wife of 15 years, the former Dara Kravitz; two children; and a sister.

For years, Gottfried appeared on Stern’s radio broadcasts and on late-night talk shows with David Letterman and Jay Leno. In recent years, he appeared on shows as “Celebrity Wife Swap” and the “Sharknado” TV movies and remained active on the comedy circuit.

Since 2014, he and writer Frank Santopadre hosted a podcast featuring interviews with actors and other celebrities.

“You don’t want to go on a roller coaster that advertises that this roller coaster goes very slowly and doesn’t make any sudden turns of drops,” Gottfried told Vulture.com, describing his philosophy of comedy. “You want to feel like you’re going to go on a ride and there’s a chance it will kill you.”