Salon.com > Gilbert Gottfried

So, Gilbert Gottfried, about those tsunami jokes …

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 18:01:00 +0000

It had been about a month since Gilbert Gottfried lobbed those brutally crude jokes about the Japanese tsunami when I met him earlier this week. He still seemed a little stunned by the reaction, which included a public drubbing by the morality police, and being fired as the voice of the Aflac spokesduck. Still, he couldn't quite make himself grovel for forgiveness. "You start to feel sorry, and then you wonder what you're feeling sorry for," he says. "That I made jokes?"

Sure, they weren't just any jokes. (Buzzfeed has ranked the most jaw-dropping of them.) But in many ways, they are typical ones for Gottfried, 56, who has paved a long career with the shock and awe of the taboo. He is famous for his version of the notorious "Aristocrats" joke, delivered a mere three weeks after Sept. 11, at a New York Friars Club roast for Hugh Hefner, which has somewhat romantically been christened (by Frank Rich, the New York Observer and the film made in honor of the joke) as the moment it was OK to laugh again. That epic release was made possible, though, only by the World Trade Center joke Gottfried detonated right before, which drew boos, hisses and the refrain that could wind end up as Gottfried's epitaph: "Too soon!"

Aflac hiring for “America’s Greatest Job”

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 20:50:00 +0000

Aflac is opening the field to people who want to take a quack at doing the new voice of the insurer's ever-abrasive duck mascot.

Aflac Inc. will begin accepting submissions on Wednesday in the search for someone to replace Gilbert Gottfried, who was ousted last week after voicing the duck for more than 10 years because he made insensitive remarks on Twitter about the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

Rather than hire another celebrity voice right away, Aflac decided solicit submissions from the general public, said Chief Marketing Officer Michael Zuna.

"There's a lot of undiscovered talent in the U.S.," Zuna said, citing shows like "American Idol." "We're calling it America's best job."

Anyone interested will be able to submit a 30-second audio or video file belting their best version of the Aflac duck's signature "Aflac" squawk at http://www.quackaflac.com. The company wants to hear interpretations of the character that may be different from Gottfried's, Zuna said.

A 2006 ad featuring the Aflac duck in a silent movie -- without Gottfried's voice or any dialogue at all -- was re-edited to promote the talent search and will begin airing Wednesday. It points users to contest details on the Aflac Duck's Facebook page.

Sympathy for Gilbert Gottfried

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 19:55:00 +0000

Too soon. After sending out a series of jokes about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami on his Twitter feed, comic Gilbert Gottfried has been roundly excoriated for his poor judgment, and on Monday, he lost his gig as the voice of the Aflac duck. Though he's since deleted the offending gags, nothing ever goes away on the Internet. Buzzfeed compiled 10 of the more outrageous ones -- a relentless string that included the observation that "I was talking to my Japanese real estate agent. I said 'is there a school in this area.' She said 'not now but just wait'" and "I asked a Japanese girl to sleep with me. She said 'okay, but you'll have to sleep in the wet spot.'" Aflac, the No. 1 insurance company in Japan, said in a statement that the comments "were lacking in humor and certainly do not represent the thoughts and feelings of anyone at Aflac."

“The Aristocrats”

Fri, 29 Jul 2005 20:50:00 +0000

"The Aristocrats," Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette's exhilarating documentary about the genesis and continual evolution of one very dirty joke, is less about free speech than about the freedom of speech. And viewing it as a manifesto only detracts from its indelicate, yet delicately calibrated, brilliance. It doesn't matter that AMC has opted not to run the movie in its theaters: That's not censorship but a business decision. (Everyone has the constitutional right to be a numbnuts.) Nor is it particularly meaningful that conservative critic Michael Medved has sniffed derisively at the picture, like a dog who thinks it's above the smell of its own shit. The inherent offensiveness of the joke itself (more on this later) is the controversial sticking point. But the picture itself is so ebullient and celebratory that it practically beams with perverted innocence. It also moves with an acrobat's timing. (I've seen French art house movies that aren't nearly so beautifully made.) All of this is a roundabout way of saying that unlike Medved, I know art when I smell it, and "The Aristocrats" is it.