My Friend, Gilbert Gottfried. Stories From an Incredible Life
When I get interviewed, people often ask me who my favorite comedian is. For the past 40 plus years I always had the same answer, … Gilbert Gottfried. I like unique and different, and nobody was ever more unique and different than Gilbert Gottfried. Never was, never will be!
When I entered Gilbert’s funeral at the Riverside Chapel in Manhattan I was greeted by one of his closest friends Roastmaster General Jeffrey Ross. We hugged and he said to me, “You lost your favorite comedian.” Everyone knew. Gilbert knew. I never made a secret of it and told him to his face many times. He shrugged it off in his humble way, but I’m glad he always knew how I felt.
I wish I remembered exactly what year I met Gilbert but it had to be in the late 70’s, when I was running down to the city to hang out with the crew at SNL and trying to make my way into show biz. In one of the photos below he had a mop of dark curly hair and I’m guessing that was taken late 70’s/early 80’s. Gilbert was kind of shy and awkward and I used to invite him to come with me to parties. I would drive him home to the apartment he lived in with his mother which as I recall was on the Lower East Side and I distinctly remember one night asking him, “ Does your mother get it? Does she know that you’re Gilbert? Does she have any idea who you are?” because I couldn’t picture any mother understanding Gilbert, … and he was like, “ I don’t think so.” I would always wait for him to get inside as I always felt kind of protective of him.
In a story I have never told before I once took him to a party in a club. I don’t recall which club. I just recall us in a little kind of VIP room off to the side when Gilbert chose to walk out and began yelling out the “P” word and the “C” word at the top of his lungs, alternating between the two for no apparent reason. A group of girls was coming in and one of them thought he was referring to her and hauled off and punched him in the nose so hard that he was bleeding profusely. I remember taking him off to the side and I don’t know where I got them from but somehow I remember clearly pressing napkins to his nose to stop the bleeding. The rest of the night was a blur, but I’ll never forget that incident.
I don’t know what it says about me, but I really felt that I understood Gilbert and his comedy, … even his strangest actions and references made sense to me. He made me laugh in a way that no other comedian ever did. I would recruit people to come with me to see him, the same way I instigated W.C. Fields nights when I was in college. I recall a night at Carolines when it was at The Seaport and I was begging him to stop because the pain in my body was so intense I thought I’d need an ambulance. I literally couldn’t breathe from laughing so hard, and I hardly ever laugh. He would come out on stage with his eyes closed which he had been doing forever, and take a paper napkin, shred the lower half of it, so it hung down like tentacles, and blow through them making them separate and likened them to a squid. Then he’d do jokes about squids with one of my favorite words “plankton” and end with, “Nobody has more squid material than me”, as if anyone else in the world even had one squid joke. He must have loved it when he heard about Squid Game. I know I did!
In 1992 a talented filmmaker/director named Frank Chindamo hired me to write a series of short futuristic comedy films for Playboy TV. Frank was one of the very first people to put short films on mobile phones.I called in friends like Richard Belzer, Pat Cooper, Phoebe Legere, Phil Hartman, and of course Gilbert Gottfried. Phil’s wife wouldn’t let him do it because we were shooting in a strip club as a location and she was adamant about not letting him go to that kind of place even though it was off hours and the club wasn’t open for business. The films had to be funny and sexy and in those days most girls were not working out, so I had to cast dancers from the club in certain roles. I cast Gilbert in a film called “Seeing is Believing” where he’s wearing very strange glasses that he had to focus like microscopes in order to see clearly, and he wondered why he wasn’t having any luck meeting girls. The other reason he was striking out might have been because the pick-up line I wrote for him in the script was “ Excuse me, would you like to see some pictures of my furniture?” at which point he’d take out his wallet and show girls pictures of his couch, dresser, and desk. The Exec. Producer was out in LA and had to ok each of the scripts and made me change the line from furniture to computers, which were kind of new at the time but not nearly as funny as furniture.
It was one of my first tastes of censorship by suits with no sense of humor. So Gilbert decides to get new glasses and his friend tells him that for a few extra dollars he can get X-ray vision which Gilbert thinks will allow him to see through girls’ clothing. I turned my dental office into an eye doctor’s office and cast a girl named Camille Donatacci to play the sexy nurse, who years later went on to become Camille Grammer, wife of Kelsey Grammer, and a star on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.At the end of the film the doctor gives him a little remote control thing which I still have and treasure, and tells him when he wants the X-ray vision to kick in to just press this little button.Gilbert can’t wait to try it out on the sexy nurse so he presses the button, but unfortunately for him he gets real X-ray vision and all he sees is her skeleton, and he goes nuts in the doctor’s chair. In those days when I would drive him home I think he was living in the projects on West 28th street. He never invited me up and from what people told me he never invited anyone up. It didn’t look particularly safe and I recall watching him go in like I was his date!
I was so happy when I heard he was getting married. I know he thought it would never happen for him. I understood when he said in the documentary that it felt like science fiction in a way. It was hard for him to picture himself with a wife and children. He was Gilbert! I too could never picture myself with a wife and children even though I was lucky enough to have them, but for some reason I grew up with the idea that I would never have those things. The concept was a bit overwhelming to me. I just felt very happy to know he would get to experience the joy of that, and he did. He was so crazy about Dara and his kids Lily and Max. I’m so sad that they lost their Dad at such an early age.
I was with him the night he got fired by Aflac for the Japanese tsunami jokes, and he gave me permission to represent him in an appearance I was doing on the radio the next day. I asked him if he wanted to come on the air and discuss it but he said he trusted me to represent him. I recall saying that Gilbert didn’t have a mean bone in his body, and would never intentionally hurt people’s feelings, despite the fact that he could get himself to say things that I couldn’t say if I was home alone. I have a feeling that’s why he worked with his eyes closed, so he couldn’t see people’s faces when he said the things he said.
In 2008 when I was writing the book “Make ‘Em Laugh” on the history of The Comic Strip, owner Richie Tienken very often sat in with me while I was doing the interviews. I interviewed every big star that came out of that club except Eddie Murphy which is a whole other story. I sat down with Seinfeld, Chris Rock who wrote the intro to the book, Ray Romano, Colin Quinn, Jim Gaffigan, Susie Essman, Lisa Lampanelli, Lewis Black and many more including Gilbert of course.But Gilbert held the distinction of being the only one to insist that we take him out to lunch. The others all came to sit with us in the club to help bring back memories.I remember confirming the date with Dara which was always important in order to make sure that Gilbert remembered and would show up. We picked him up at his apartment and he chose a place called Pastis which was the trendiest and most expensive place at the time.Even though it was lunch time the place was packed and way too noisy for an interview, but we had no choice. I think I ordered a burger. Gilbert ordered several things on the menu, and just kept ordering while Richie saw the price going up and up. He was footing the bill. Gilbert even ordered things that weren’t on the menu and when it came time for dessert, I had to start the interview at which time Gilbert announced that he had never actually been at the club, and that he just came for the lunch. I couldn’t get a straight answer out of him, and he was saying things like he stood outside the location for years waiting for it to be built, and he heard it had good electricity and a comfortable chair that the comedians took turns sitting in. I thought Richie was going to have a heart attack, wondering how we could possibly use this in the book.
But it was perfect “Gilbert” and for me it was a dream come true. I got to riff with Gilbert Gottfried which had been a dream of mine all my comedy life. To be able to use my own bizarre references like I did with Salvador Dali. I once got to spend an evening with Salvador Dali, and I knew that Dali was so out there that there was nothing I could say that would freak him out. It was the same with Gilbert.
I was at the Friars event back in 2014 when he told a joke so distasteful that Shecky Greene walked out and threatened to quit The Friars. I did interviews with them that day, and brought Shecky on air with Ron and Fez to discuss the incident. Over the years I’d see Gilbert at shows, Friars Roasts, Friars events, at his benefits for P.S. 11, the school his children went to, and the last time I saw him was just before the pandemic. We were at Gotham Comedy Club and I think it was at a benefit for P.S. 11.We were downstairs in the green room and as we came upstairs I noticed that Gilbert was having a hard time climbing the stairs. I recall holding his elbow and giving him some support. I didn’t say anything of course but it made me sad to see. Then he went onstage and crushed! Totally crushed doing what he did with all the parents in the crowd. Eyes closed as usual he said things no one else could ever say.And I even understood his awkward hand movements fumbling around the mic when it looked like he didn’t know how to pick it up or hold it. I recall doing something like that myself.
In 2015 up at Just for Laughs they put on a false funeral for Gilbert. He was the very first comedian to be “honored” in their show “Waked.” I interviewed him at his faux “funeral” where we discussed how it felt to be memorialized while still alive:
It makes no sense to me that he isn’t here anymore. He was like a cartoon figure come to life and cartoon figures don’t die. They live forever, and Gilbert’s comedy and his memory will definitely live on forever. I can hear his voice right now. R.I.P. Gilbert, I hope you know how much you were loved!!!
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