Tragic Details About Gilbert Gottfried

If cancel culture had been invented when Gilbert Gottfried was starting out, the controversial comedian would likely have found a way to circumvent virtue signalers. It helped that Gottfried, who died April 12 of Recurrent Ventricular Tachycardia from Myotonic Dystrophy type II, had a few secret weapons in his survival pack. His dorky appearance (think of a shorter Jon Cryer with a larger gullet) and a raspy, wooden delivery made it easy for audiences to underestimate him, unwittingly providing him with a clear lane to launch his comedic ballistic attacks. When it looked like public blowback had destroyed him, Gottfried would cyclically unload another round and endure even more punishment. 

Long before social media, a thrashing in the press would have been a career-ender for Gottfried, who initially angered the scribes with his graphic comments about Pee-Wee Herman at the 1991 Emmy Awards. Inexplicably, he survived to fight another day. When asked about all those tempestuous moments that have punctuated his livelihood, Gottfried responded, "Well, never take career advice from me." 

For all those shocking anecdotes, he's fondly remembered for voicing Iago the parrot in Disney's animated "Aladdin" outing. And by all accounts, that masochistic turn at the mic never wafted into his home life. The day Gottfried died, the family issued a statement saying that he was "a wonderful husband, brother, friend and father to his two young children." But even when he was still alive, much of his life was mired in particularly sad moments.

Ask any standup about timing, and they'll likely tell you it's everything, from the pace of telling a joke to the amount of dead air before delivering the punchline. But how soon can a comic tell a joke about a recent tragic event? That seems to be a question that Gilbert Gottfried likely never bothered to ask. Case in point was a Friars Club Roast in New York that put Playboy founder Hugh Hefner in the hot seat roughly two weeks after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Gottfried naturally started out by taking shots at Hefner's love life before he launched into his infamous one-liner that stunned the room. "I have to catch a flight to California," he said at the podium. "I can't get a direct flight. They said they had to stop at the Empire State Building first." The laughs shrunk to a murmur, until a spectator yelled out "Too soon!" Hefner nervously turned away to rub at something on his face. Gottfried had lost the crowd.

Five months later, the comedian wrote a first-person account about the incident in Vulture, still quizzical about the protocol over lampooning a tragedy. "I knew there were times where people wait to make jokes about something, but I always thought that concept was ridiculous," Gottfried wrote. "Is there an office with a guy behind a desk who decides when it's not too soon anymore?"

Gilbert Gottfried never said very much about his parents who raised him when the family lived in Brooklyn. His father, Max, owned and operated a hardware store, while his mother Lillian kept house. Interestingly, Max and Lilly are what Gilbert and wife Dara also named their kids, so evidently they had some positive effect on his upbringing. Additionally, Gilbert claimed both his parents supported his venture into comedy. But he had a great deal in common with his sister Arlene, with whom he shared a unique outlook on the world: he with his comedic insight, and she with how she pictured life through a camera lens. She developed an eye that caught the attention of the city's arts community and eventually enjoyed a number of gallery exhibitions.

When their mother became sick, Arlene took photographs of her decline as a coping mechanism, saying in the documentary "Gilbert" of the photo essay she titled "Mommie:" "That's how I knew how to cope with it, by taking pictures ... that's how I dealt with the pain" (per The New Yorker). Gilbert said, "I would help my mother off the bus, because she was very weak. And my sister was taking pictures. I was horrified by the idea of the photos, and confused. But I also understood." Then Arlene was diagnosed with cancer soon after she published her photo essay. Gilbert accompanied his sister to cancer treatments, but she died from the disease at age 66.

When comedian Bob Saget passed away while on tour earlier in 2022, Gilbert Gottfried took a while to come to grips with the bad news surrounding one of his best friends. A mutual friend broke the news to Gottfried, who later said on Sirius XM's Jim and Sam Show, "I was, like, waiting for the punchline. And I thought, 'That's like a sick joke.' I was up for a punchline like that. And nothing came" (via Los Angeles Magazine). But being best buds didn't prevent Gottfried from going ballistic on Saget during a 2008 Comedy Central celebrity roast of the funnyman and star of "Full House." 

Gottfried's profanity during that roast had Saget doubling over with laughter. And it was that twisted and nuanced aspect of his humor which Gottfried said fit his friend to a tee. "I remember Bob as being very funny, very quick," recalled Gottfried on what turned out would be his final appearance on ABC's "Good Morning America." "He could be a sensitive guy, but like both of us, he would rather be tasteless and outrageous."