Handout photo
U.S. comedian Gilbert Gottfried will be on stage at Centretown’s Yuk Yuk’s comedy club from March 19-22.Controversial U.S. comedian Gilbert Gottfried will be taking centre stage for a four-night stint at Centretown’s Yuk Yuk’s comedy club later this month.
The comic-turned-actor will be reaching back to his roots in stand-up comedy, performing his routine in his signature screechy-voice that often garners as many laughs as it does groans.
“It’s a funny thing to see when you look at the audience and some people are laughing hysterically and other people are either shocked or getting angry,” says 60-year-old Brooklyn born Gottfried, whose dark sense of humour has attracted a cult following.
“There’s tons of interest in Gilbert and he’s going to draw, I think, a wide range of ages,” says Chris Borris, director of the Yuk Yuk’s on Elgin Street, where Gottfried is scheduled to perform from March 19-22.
But despite his dedicated fan base, Gottfried says he still gets a surprising amount of backlash from some audience members.
“It is fun, I mean I’m amazed at people who will come to see me and still get offended, like they’ve never seen me before,” Gottfried says.
Over his 45-year career, Gottfried has never been one to shy away from controversy and he has often been among the first to find humour in a dark topic.
But in some cases his audience is far larger than any comedy club can hold and the repercussions to his jokes are more severe than a few groans and winces.
In 2011, Gottfried was fired from his job as the voice of the Aflac duck – the company’s mascot – after tweeting several jokes about the Japanese tsunami.
One of Gottfried’s tweets read: “Japan is really advanced. They don’t go to the beach. The beach comes to them.”
“I found out I got fired for that from the Internet, that was the best part about it,” says Gottfried. “I think they were already looking for someone else to do it cheaper so I think they were conveniently shocked at the time.”
Controversial or not, there are many people – fans and comedians alike – who defend Gottfried’s outlandish humour.
“I like any material, if it’s dark – even if it’s nasty – as long as it’s funny and you wrote it,” says Canadian comedian Mark Walker who opened for Gottfried in Hamilton in 1997.
“Is it funny? That’s all I really care about.”
Gottfried is perhaps most widely known for his role as the voice of the wise-cracking parrot Iago in Disney’s 1992 animated film Aladdin. The success of the film gave him a much wider audience and today he is easily one of the most impersonated comedians alive.
“Harrison Ford did an imitation of me on Hannah Montana; Miley Cyrus did an imitation of me. One thing I wish I could go back in time with a video camera and have it documented was , before he was famous for other stuff, O.J. Simpson did an imitation of me,” says Gottfried.
“Having him on tape imitating me would be like having Charles Manson on tape imitating me,” he added. “Back then he was just known as a football player/actor, now he’s known as Slash.”
Yet even with all of his success Gottfried says he still has trouble convincing himself to go on stage most nights.
“Most of the times right before I go on, I’m like backstage thinking, ‘I don’t want to go out there and I don’t want to do this, I don’t think I have the energy to do this,’ and then when I’m up there it’s like your adrenaline starts going,” he says.
“I always feel like show business is this party that I just snuck into and that any day now somebody with a clipboard is gonna come over to me and go ‘I’m sorry your name’s not on the list.”