The man had been wearing a radiation protection suit, mask and gloves while working at the plant’s waste disposal building, which stores radioactive-contaminated water that has leaked from the tsunami-crippled reactors.

Two Fukushima workers had died March 11 from the tsunami itself, when waves swept into the plant and heavily damaged buildings and equipment. TEPCO said the workers, both in their early 20s, were found in the basement of a turbine building.

The quake and tsunami are believed to have killed more than 24,500 people. Police said Friday that 15,019 were dead and 9,506 were still listed as missing.

Radiation leaks at the Fukushima plant have forced 80,000 people living within a 12-mile (20-kilometer) radius of the nuclear facility to leave their homes.

The nuclear crisis prompted the government to evaluate all of Japan’s 54 reactors for quake and tsunami vulnerability, and Prime Minister Naoto Kan asked that one plant in central Japan halt operations while its defenses were improved.

Chubu Electric said its Hamaoka nuclear plant in Shizuoka was completely shut down Saturday on the premier’s request. The company will build a large seawall and other safety structures — work expected to take a few years.

“Our energy policy is to stick to nuclear power,” Sengoku said on a weekly talk show on public broadcaster NHK.

He said Hamaoka was an exception and that the government’s closure request Friday did not mean a departure from its nuclear-reliant policy.

Chubu Electric Power Co., which runs the three Hamaoka reactors, postponed its decision Saturday on the government’s shutdown request.

The main concern is that shutting down the reactors would likely worsen power shortages expected this summer.

Nuclear energy provides more than one-third of Japan’s electricity. Since the March 11 disasters, buildings have reduced lighting, stores have trimmed service hours and subway operators have shut air conditioning to join a nationwide conservation effort.

The government has been reviewing the safety of the country’s 54 atomic reactors since a March 11 earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in the north. The disaster left more than 25,000 people dead or missing on the northeast coast and triggered the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl in 1986.

The Hamaoka plant, which is about 125 miles (200 kilometers) west of Tokyo, in an area where a major quake is expected within decades, has been a major concern for years.

However, Sengoku said there is “no need to worry” about other plants in the country. “Scientifically, that’s our conclusion at the moment,” he said.

Chubu Electric executives failed to reach a decision Saturday over the shutdown request and will meet again after the weekend, company official Mikio Inomata said. After the meeting, company chairman Toshio Mita left for Qatar to negotiate on liquefied natural gas supplies.

At issue is how to make up for the power shortages that would result from the shutdown of the three reactors. Inomata said they account for more than 10 percent of the company’s power supply.

Chubu Electric has estimated maximum output of about 30 million kilowatts this summer with the three Hamaoka reactors running, with estimated demand of about 26 million kilowatts.

“It would be tight,” Inomata said, adding that officials are discussing the possibility of boosting output from gas, oil and coal-fueled power plants and purchasing power from other utility companies.

The Hamaoka plant is a key power provider in central Japan, including nearby Aichi, home of Toyota Motor Corp.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan said Friday that the closure request was for the “people’s safety.”

He noted that experts estimate there is a 90 percent chance that a quake with a magnitude of 8.0 or higher will strike the region within 30 years.

“That makes Hamaoka an exceptional case,” Kan told reporters Sunday, saying the plant is the only one subject to closure for a tsunami resistance upgrade. Kan also urged Chubu executives “to understand.”

Residents of Shizuoka prefecture, where Hamaoka is located, have long demanded a shutdown of the plant’s reactors. About 79,800 people live within a 6-mile (10-kilometer) radius of the complex.

Since the March 11 disasters, Chubu Electric has drawn up safety measures that include building a 40-foot-high (12-meter-high) seawall nearly a mile (1.5 kilometers) long over the next two to three years, company officials said. Chubu also promised to install additional emergency backup generators and other equipment and improve the water tightness of the reactor buildings.

The Hamaoka plant lacks a concrete sea barrier now. Sand hills between the ocean and the plant are about 32 to 50 feet (10 to 15 meters) high, deemed enough to defend against a tsunami around 26 feet (8 meters) high, officials said. The operator of the Fukushima nuclear plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co., has said the tsunami that wrecked critical power and cooling systems there was at least 46 feet (14 meters) high.

On Sunday, the government approved TEPCO’s plan to allow workers return to Fukushima Dai-ichi’s No. 1 reactor building to install a new cooling system after leaving its main door open overnight for ventilation, said Hidehiko Nishiyama, spokesman for the Nuclear Industry and Safety Agency.

Radioactivity inside the building has fallen to levels deemed safe for people wearing protective suits to enter, Nishiyama said. Workers rapidly installed air filtering equipment in there Thursday — their first entry since shortly after the tsunami.

“We judge the environment has improved to one that allows people to enter and work,” Nishiyama said.

Workers later Sunday removed air-filtering ducts and machines, leaving holes on the wall unplugged and the door open until Monday morning, when air monitoring staff are to enter for a final check, TEPCO said.

TEPCO spokesman Junichi Matsumoto said some air may escape through the entrance but that radioactivity is too low to cause health risks.

——

Mari Yamaguchi can be reached at http://twitter.com/mariyamaguchi

Workers have not been able to enter the reactor buildings at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, about 140 miles (230 kilometers) northeast of Tokyo, since the first days after the tsunami. Hydrogen explosions at four of the buildings at the six-reactor complex in the first few days destroyed some of their roofs and walls and scattered radioactive debris.

TEPCO spokesman Junichi Matsumoto called Thursday’s development “a first step toward a cool and stable shutdown,” which the utility hopes to achieve in six to nine months.

In mid-April, a robot recorded radioactivity of about 50 millisieverts per hour inside Unit 1′s reactor building — a level too high for workers to realistically enter. Readings taken later in April in another part of the building were as high as 1,200 millisieverts.

The decision to send the workers in was made after robots last Friday collected fresh data that showed radiation levels in some areas inside the building were safe enough for workers to enter, said Taisuke Tomikawa, another TEPCO spokesman.

Two utility workers, wearing a mask and air tank similar to those used by scuba divers, entered the reactor building for about 25 minutes to check radiation levels. They were exposed to 2 millisieverts during that time, Tomikawa said. Outside the building, the utility erected a temporary tent designed to prevent radioactive air from escaping.

Later, 11 other workers — two from TEPCO and nine from its subcontractors — wearing similar gear went into the reactor building to install ducts for the air filtering equipment. Twenty other workers provided help from outside.

The utility hopes to start allowing workers into the building to set up a cooling system around mid-May. In addition to reducing radioactivity with the new air filtering system, it hopes to reduce it further by removing or covering up contaminated debris inside the building, Matsumoto said.

TEPCO is proceeding with a plan to fill the Unit 1 containment vessel with water to soak the core and cool it, and also plans to install big fans as an external cooling system, he said. TEPCO hopes to take similar steps at Units 2 and 3 but is struggling with tougher obstacles such as contaminated water leaks and debris.

Radiation leaking from the Fukushima plant has forced 80,000 people living within a 12-mile (20-kilometer) radius to leave their homes. Many are staying in gymnasiums and community centers.

——

Associated Press writer Mari Yamaguchi contributed to this report.

A research scientist and winner of the Ig Nobel Prize (for scientists who make discoveries that “first make people laugh and then make them think”), Fisher explains the business of calamity prediction in accessible prose and everyday anecdotes. The third in his series on the science of the ordinary (previous entries were “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” and “The Perfect Swarm”) “Crashes, Crises, and Calamities” is a toolkit for understanding what is at stake in our lives and for the planet — and what happens when we don’t understand what a disaster looks like in the making.

Fisher spoke to Salon over the phone about three simple signs to heed, what animals sense that we don’t, and why predicting the future is more realistic than ever before.

There’s a long, spotty history of trying to predict the future. Can you talk about that?

People have always been trying to predict the future. Of course, when it comes to predicting the future of society, nothing has worked, even when you look at modern economic methods of prediction, which are very often based on the assumption that the future is going to be the same as the past. That’s the same as the Egyptians and Sumerians, who drew correlations between the position of the stars and the growth of crops and attempted to apply that to the future. The whole point of critical transitions and sudden change is that the future is totally different from the past. Basically, any attempt to predict critical transitions is nonsense, and I include people attempting to use biblical prophesies. I especially include them, I’m afraid.

This is our first real chance to predict when dramatic changes are about to occur. We haven’t been in this position before, right through history. Learning how to use it in time is the next step, and I’m not sure that we will.

What has changed that allows us to make better predictions now than in the past?

We have not had these very powerful computers that could put in the work to make the signals show up against a very noisy background. We’re in a similar position now as we were in the old days of television: You knew a picture was there, but you weren’t quite sure what it was about. As it improved, it became sharper and the background became less murky and snowy. The same thing is happening with the analysis of the fluctuations in different situations.

Your book claims that you can see the signs of an environmental disaster in much the same way you can see the signs of a divorce. How does that work?

It’s a very simple idea that applies to a huge range of problems, from predicting social catastrophes to global catastrophes. It’s looking for the subtle early-warning signs. It’s a bit like watching a swan swimming across a lake. It looks like the swan is going along perfectly smoothly, but underneath there’s a whole lot of things happening: Its feet are paddling furiously, it might run into something. We call those “critical transitions,” when something dramatic is going to occur.

When things are going smoothly, there is a balance between processes that are working to maintain control. And when these processes get out of balance, you get a “runaway.” In a marriage, there might be a family argument — someone says something that provokes someone else to say something nastier, and you get this escalation. In physics we call it the runaway effect.

When you get a dramatic transition it is because the runaway process has taken over and the question is: How can you tell when that’s going to happen? Until recently we haven’t had a clue, and it’s been with the aid of some very sophisticated mathematics, which I don’t go into in the book, that we can see what happens when we get close to one of these critical points. There are subtle warning signs, weak signals that you have got to keep your eyes open for.

What are these warning signs?

One of the signs is more extreme conditions. In a relationship, for example, you might get a period when you have violent arguments and then periods when you’re lovey-dovey. If you get these extremes, or these things happen more frequently, that’s a warning sign that you’re getting very, very close to collapse.

Another thing that happens is quick fluctuation between different states, like, for example, when the cod fisheries collapsed in Newfoundland. The fishermen wouldn’t believe it because they had one or two years of good catches, but if they had been aware of [the warning signs] before that ultimate fluctuation between high fish stocks and low fish stocks, they would have said, “uh oh.”

The third warning sign is loss of resilience. When something happens to disturb the situation, it can be very hard to recover. I like to think of that in terms of a relationship: You think you’re getting along OK, you’re agreeing and you go out to a party. Then something happens. One person gets offered a drink and takes it, and the other gets mad. Rather than recover from the situation and apologize, they glower at one another all night, and it gets increasingly hard to recover from the disturbance.

How much can the average person do to predict disaster, or is it all up to the people in lab coats?

Just a month ago, I was playing five sets of tennis three times a week when I just happened to slip and sprung a small hernia. I saw a hernia surgeon, and he said, Oh by the way, if you’re going to have an operation, you’re probably going to need to have an examination first by a cardiologist. So I went and saw the cardiologist, and he did a few tests on me, and the result is that I am going to have a triple bypass because he found that I had two blocked arteries, and I didn’t have a clue.

But I might have noticed, applying the theories of my own book, that for a few months what’s been happening is, I’ve been having periods of extreme energy and then extreme lethargy, and swinging between extreme states.

Were there warning signs for the recent disaster in Japan?

Tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic explosions, are the most difficult things to predict because they are the simplest. The warning signs are most apparent in complex situations, but predicting these one-off natural disasters is very, very hard.

Mind you, if you look on a very large scale, building a nuclear reactor on the ring of fire doesn’t strike me as the most sensible thing to do. Plenty of warning signs there, aren’t there?

There have been stories about animals running away from home before an earthquake for as long as I can remember. You talk about this a bit in your book — can we really rely on animals to help us see into the future of earthquakes or tsunamis?

I don’t think anybody has looked closely enough at whether animals really do, on a regular basis, act strangely before an earthquake. But if they do, then why would they? One possibility is that animals are responding to something quite physical. If we could find out, and if it was a real effect, and we could measure it sufficiently to check that this is what the animals are picking up, then we wouldn’t need the animals. But it’s not clear. My guess, and it’s only a guess, is that animals do pick up weak signals and that they do respond to them with fear.

I was in Sri Lanka just a fortnight after the Christmas Day tsunami, and our driver happened to be in the region south of Sri Lanka just before it came. He told us that there were many animals that he saw heading for the hills. That’s another story that reinforces the idea that animals might be picking up something. It might be changes in pressure. All we know is that we don’t have that sense.

How does Western society deal with predicting the future differently than other parts of the world?

We’re a bit more self-absorbed, and we talk about individual freedoms and individuality. But that concept is quite alien to some other cultures. Some cultures think in much more of a group mentality.

It’s a scary question, because you start asking a question like this at a dinner party and you get people who have been thinking about this, and the future of the world, and it always comes back to the one thing where no one is prepared to grasp the nettle. We can talk all we want to about predicting the future, but the one thing you can predict is that the continued growth in population is going to lead to catastrophe. Underlying it all — our behavior, our pollution, our use of resources, the way that we muck up ecosystems — underlying all that is the fact that there are just too many damn people. And there’s no way that everyone in the world could live at a moderate Western level. There’s not the resources. You can make that prediction without talking about fluctuation or talking about extremes.

And it is very hard, but our best chance is to look for those weak signals. Our best chance is not to wait until the event is almost upon us. Look for the tiny little hints beforehand and say, “OK, look, something is coming up here. Let us prepare ourselves. It’s important and really does matter.”

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!”

Everything about Gottfried’s comedy is intended to grate, from his shrieking delivery (in person, he speaks softly and thoughtfully) to his material, which is in rich display in his new comedic memoir “Rubber Balls and Liquor,” where the Brooklyn-born Gottfried manages to squeeze a warmly remembered childhood and sometimes perilous career (he was an “SNL” cast member for the much-derided 1980 season, the year after all the originals left) in between a succession of generously filthy stories and jokes. We spoke over a lunch picked up by Salon at a Midtown Manhattan steak restaurant, during which Gottfried carefully ordered three courses — including a New York strip, with a side of baked potato and a side of broccoli — most of which he barely touched and had wrapped to go. An edited transcript of the lunch follows.

So about those tsunami jokes…

It’s amazing. I think millions of years from now when aliens land here and are digging up our civilization, they’re probably going to be looking at all the reports and say, “This guy must have caused the tsunami.”

When I look at how the media just went nuts with it, there were so many tricks they had. Number one, they didn’t say “his jokes,” they said, “his comments and remarks,” because if you say jokes, it just lets the air out of the sails. If you say “jokes,” people say, “Well, yeah, he’s a comedian, he makes jokes.” And then you say, “Yeah, but these were bad-taste jokes.” And then people go, “Kind of like the bad-taste jokes I heard at work today.” And then they go, “Well, this is a guy who starred in ‘The Aristocrats,’ and is on every roast and was on ‘The Howard Stern Show,’ so we were of course shocked that he would do something in bad taste.”

Then they pick out some of the jokes, and they go, “We’re warning you ahead of time that this is shocking and offensive.” So they present it, and it’s what I’ve always thought about the media, they [warn that something] is shocking and offensive, like, “We’re good, we’re watching out for you,” but it’s really their way of saying, “Here, we got you now, you gotta watch this.” And it’s OK for them to say it, because they have a stern look on their face. The people most outraged in the beginning were TMZ and Perez Hilton, Dr. Laura. Oh, [CNN's] “Showbiz Tonight” picked me as the most provocative celebrity, beating out Charlie Sheen.

Who doesn’t want to be provocative?

Yes. But then to talk about how offensive and how wrong it was, they brought out Kelsey Grammer’s ex-wife Camille, and she was…

She was the voice of reason?

Yes!

TMZ and Perez Hilton have built their brands having it both ways.

Right, Perez Hilton, who outs gay stars and draws penises on their faces, was very shocked and offended. And the best part is that they always say, “Too soon,” and “Too soon” meant that if I had waited like three more days, the tsunami was forgotten about. And what I remember was turning on the TV one day, and all of a sudden I noticed there’s not one mention of the tsunami, and the big news item all over the place — all over the Internet, all over TV — was that Chris Brown got angry backstage on “Good Morning America” and threw a chair. And the tsunami was lucky to get mentioned after funny sports bloopers.

Did you regret the jokes? Because you did delete the tweets.

Oh, yeah. I deleted it. And then they dug [them] up.

Right, which always makes it look like there’s been a coverup.

Yes. With the Internet, if you erase something it just means you have to spend another half-minute to find it. It’s just like when they go “so-and-so did not comment.” If you’re avoiding their news show or their paper, then you’ve got something to hide. I actually did have cars parked outside my building, with these different news crews and people hiding in hallways.

Were you shocked when Aflac reacted the way it did?

I remember I was away in Philadelphia working; I came back and then the whole world blew up. When people say, “Are you sorry you did it?” I’m kind of mixed on the whole thing because it’s my character. You start to feel sorry and then you wonder what you’re feeling sorry for. That I made jokes?

Those particular jokes are exactly what you do.

The funny thing was, any comedian who heard it didn’t understand what the big deal was about, and usually started their emails to me with, “Hey, did you hear about the Japanese so-and-so,” and then they’d go into a joke. And my fans, in the very beginning when it first happened there were the psychos’ emails, the ones who I think live on the Internet and are shocked; I think they’re the people who send hate mail to Jennifer Aniston for calling Brad Pitt…

Right, right. They take it all very personally.

Yes! But then there was just an overflow — pardon the pun — of people going, “Hey, what’s the big deal? You made jokes.”

Did anyone you know say, “Too soon”?

No.

The other part that really got me was when they’d report how much these things hurt the Japanese people. And I’m thinking, so what this means is that when the tsunami was taking place, their top priority was [going to] Gilbert Gottfried’s Twitter account, translating the jokes, and being offended. I’m thinking, they really need to get their priorities straight.

And the crazy people in the press were saying, “Imagine if it was your loved ones,” and I’m thinking, so? If it were my loved ones I [wouldn't be] going, “Let me get onto some Japanese comedian’s Twitter account, and see what he’s saying…”

Did Aflac contact you immediately?

I really can’t say much about that.

Was that the extent of the fallout?

Well, it’s hard to say what may or may not have happened. At times like this I get a better understanding of things like the House Un-American Activities [Committee]; you know, maybe no one was out-and-out saying, “We’re not hiring you because we’re scared of this,” but they just weren’t hiring you.

So you’re left to your own paranoia.

Sure.

At the same time you’ve got your book coming out, so there’s that. Has it all helped your comedy?

Nothing can help my comedy. [Laughs] But what I did notice was that the thing that started all this — my Twitter account — was at this certain level, and it wasn’t going much higher, and then all of a sudden it just exploded. Like 50 times as many people were following it.

And I did a thing on “Funny or Die” called “Too Soon” that’s me throughout history telling bad-taste jokes. I’m convinced that when Christ was on the cross there were people around there telling jokes to each other, making sarcastic remarks.

What is Twitter like for a comedian?

I find the whole Internet, number one, how quickly everything moves … like, I feel like if tomorrow I say I have a Twitter account, they’ll go, “You’re still on Twitter? We stopped using that years ago.” I feel like this line has been erased between people who do stuff and everybody else. So, like, columnists and writers who you used to buy a paper to read what they had to say, or watch their news shows … it’s like the line is erased, now everybody is commenting on things, with some people … much like with cellphones, when you hear somebody on a cellphone going, “I’m about three doors from your house now, OK, now I’m two doors, OK, now I’m in front of your building, I’m about to press the button.” It’s like they narrate their entire life.

Everyone wants the stage now.

Yeah.

You were sort of a prodigy; you were performing live in the Village when you were 15. How different are you now from then?

I remember when I started out I was doing mainly impressions, and I remember I would do Bela Lugosi, and you know, back then, as I said in the book, growing up the greatest film school in the world was in your living room, because you’d turn on the TV and there’s all these movies coming on constantly. So I remember part of my act I would do Groucho Marx and Bela Lugosi, and the funny thing is, even back then, it was pretty dated with my references. And then somewhere along the way I started more kidding around in between the impressions, and it developed into whatever I developed into.

Do you think that’s changed a lot? Is that how young comedians do it now?

That’s a scary thing, that I find very worrying. Now, if someone wants to be a comic, they just film themselves and put it on YouTube. And they haven’t learned anything, they haven’t learned to develop anything or how to experience working in front of an audience. When I see people doing stuff on YouTube, or even if they’re just writing things, I always think, Wow, thank God this wasn’t around when I was that age.

You think you wouldn’t have developed your chops?

Yeah. I think I would have terribly undeveloped, unfunny bits that I’d be doing on YouTube.

There’s this new kind of celebrity comic, Kathy Griffin being an example, who isn’t crafting jokes, but just trying to create a sort of amusing persona, maybe getting a reality show.

Yeah, there are the people who just have a certain quirky personality and get famous. That’s another thing now. Reality TV has totally destroyed soap operas. They’re gone. They used to be the biggest thing in the world, they’re gone. Sitcoms are pretty much dead. There used to be billions of those on, now they’re dead. It’s just so much cheaper to make reality TV.

Which spawns stars like the Situation, who bombed thoroughly recently during the roast for Donald Trump. Is it satisfying to see something like that?

What I thought about that was, he did bomb. But it’s like, so now because he’s bombing on TV, he’ll still be making a fortune from the TV show, and he’ll get paid a few hundred thousand to show up at a restaurant opening.

To bomb.

Yeah.

I envy like crazy those people who get money to show up at events, where they just walk down the red carpet and then sneak out a side door.

You’ve never been paid an appearance fee?

No.

Do you get a lot of requests to just tell the “Aristocrats” joke?

Oh yeah.

Do you?

I tell jokes from my dirty jokes DVD, but the “Aristocrats” one I don’t tell that much. I’m almost like rebelling against people who want it, and that was a funny thing too as far as people being offended. It started with the Sept. 11 joke. And they’re booing and gasping and yelling, “Too soon!”

I think a lot of people forget the first part, the World Trade Center joke that really upset people. They just remember the “Aristocrats” joke — and that Gilbert made it possible for us to laugh again.

Yes!

What I love about that, they were all offended and shocked and outraged, and then I win them back by talking about incest and bestiality. And they go, “That’s OK. Now we can relax.”

You had to know the World Trade Center joke was going to be risky.

Yeah. I definitely wanted a reaction. There was the case of people walking around putting flags on their cars and flags on their lapel like, “Look, I’m doing something,” just like the red ribbon that cured AIDS. Scientists saw those red ribbons and suddenly realized they had to cure AIDS. And what I remember, too, about that time, they were thinking of canceling the Emmys, and then they decided to run the Emmys because there’s just too much money in the Emmys not to run, but people would be dressing down. So Pam Anderson showed up and she was not showing as much cleavage — that makes the people who died in the World Trade Center feel that much better.

The funny thing is, a couple of days after the whole Japan thing, I attended a funeral. And you know, of course, at the funeral people were going up speaking and they were telling funny stories about the person, and you’d see people whisper something to another person and they’d laugh nervously, and I had people come up to me and say, “I know I’m going to hell for this but I laughed at some of those jokes.”

I put up on Twitter a line from George Carlin. He said it’s the duty of a comedian to find where the line is and cross it. And I thought that put it much better than I ever could.

There is no bigger laugh than when you’ve just crossed the line, is there?

Yeah, and there’s that laugh where people laugh extra hard because they don’t want to laugh.

Have there been times when you think, that was too far?

Sometimes when I say it. But then afterward I think, What is going too far? When people first learned to communicate there were people laughing at bad things that happened, as some kind of release. As long as civilization is around that’s going to happen.

Your book is coming out, while Tina Fey’s book will be at the top of the bestseller list. Are you going to topple her?

Oh, naturally. [Laughs]

Are you a fan of hers?

Yeah, I guess. I did a voice on an episode of “30 Rock,” so I guess I’ll be a fan.

What was the episode?

Oh, it was peculiar. It was an episode of the show where they’re auditioning people for their “Saturday Night Live”-type show that they do, and there’s a guy who does impressions, and he does a dinner party impression of me, Martin Scorsese and Christopher Walken, [and] they actually got all of us to do our own voices. There’s also a scene too where they get voice messages saying, “Hire this guy, he’s great,” from me, Scorsese and Walken. And they believe it’s the real people. And Tina Fey says, “This guy is really impressive, he did a film with Martin Scorsese, he was in an off-Broadway show with Christopher Walken, and he studied the Meisner technique with Sir Gilbert Gottfried.” [Laughs]