Gilbert Gottfried: Funniest man alive

aero otm re duck nuances

Mother Nature still not quite as homicidal as Harry Truman

ok now that's a tension-breaking joke

xpost OK, TamTam, I get where you're coming from now.

Coming to Broadway, 2016: Kelsey Grammer as King Lear, Gilbert Gottfried as the Fool.

mother nature's kill rate is 100%

Can we change thread title to Gilber Gottfried: MOST INSENSITIVE MAN ALIVE

THIS THREAD TITLE MUST NEVER BE CHANGED

have we talked about the effect of distance (time) at all here? like holocaust jokes are de rigeur now and people make 9/11 jokes, which means it's just a matter of time before tsunami jokes are "ok" to some degree. and it's a tricky thing, because the first people who manage to find the time when those jokes are "ok" get the benefit of being "edgy," but if you jump in too soon, you get the gottfried treatment.

some talk of the 7 day rule above

Gottfried was widely praised for making a 9/11 joke "too soon", so it's not hard to see what his reasoning might have been.

http://cdn3.iofferphoto.com/img/item/169/639/422/SwzY.jpg

GG wasn't even the first to the scene, and his jokes weren't funny at all. pretty sure I remember laughing at 9/11 pics on Photoshop Phriday the same week it happened. 4ch*n posters went to work right away, too. (the only funny picture I have seen from this was a shop'd World of Warcraft Cataclysm reference to the now famous whirlpool pic. Tried to find it to post here, but am at work so can't actually go to the site.)

I promise I'm not an insensitive dick, either. I get emotional watching this shit, but am very much in the humor as catharsis camp described up thread. Honestly, I don't even see why this type of stuff is funny to people who don't care about it.

Honestly, I don't even see why this type of stuff is funny to people who don't care about it.

To sum up what I learned on Openbook on Friday: "haha, fuckin' japs"

crucial diff between 9/11 jokes and tsunami jokes is that 9/11 jokes have always seemed, to me, to be inherently political. ime most of the ppl that react with horror to 9/11 jokes aren't all that concerned with the human tragedy of what happened---in the actual lives and stories and families of the victims---but are in general more wrapped up in what it "meant for the nation." their offense isn't grounded in their empathy or inability to suspend emotion, but in a weird sense of secular piety. like "you just don't ~say~ that!!!!"

gah

there is also a Rule of Three in comedy

i believed you the first time gbx

Was that final gah your Flight 93 of the series?

Good point though. Each time.

well also 9/11 happened "to us." It wasn't like some guy goin "you hear about some hilarious shit that went down abroad this week?" and riffed on a tragedy across the world. it was pretty clearly "we are all shellshocked, let's try not to lose sight of ourselves & let's stay funny & creative as a way of not giving those who attacked us the satisfaction of beating us down." You don't get to do that with other people's tragedies imo

dr morbius: the funniest man alive

mostly i'm thinking of a coworker that came to a halloween party at my house (in...2005?) that was disgusted, DISGUSTED, by the costumes two of my friends were wearing (a couple): tallwise stripey PJs, one with a little plane on a wire attached to his shoulder, the other with a plane exploding into her chest. this same coworker regularly dropped pearls of wisdom about 'ghettos' and poor people and in general betrayed a complete lack of compassion or curiosity about the world, so i can only assume her horror was rooted in how terrible it was that two people could just be so ~tacky~

xps

9/11 jokes were also a reaction to the kind of "this is how you're supposed to react to this tragedy" super hokey patriotism and "irony is dead now" bullshit that was kicking up pretty quickly at the time. not really anything to react against here (except for the jon via chi's of the world, I guess).

xps

I definitely do not think Gilbert's 9/11 jokes were politically motivated in any way fwiw. I think he just goes "oh, I have some jokes about planes crashing into buildings somewhere..."

Thing that never gets acknowledged is that Gilbert Gottfried cribbed that 9/11 joke off one Howard Stern made 20 years earlier after the Air Florida crash.

well sure. i mean, i've never even heard the jokes in question. just that i, personally, have always read a little political subtext into joking about 9/11. most of the few i've heard have scanned as rxns to "super hokey patriotism." probably because i ~wanted~ them to be exactly that.

xp

damn, this seemed like it was really going to end in jon/via/chi quitting ilx

not that i want the guy to quit ilx but i feel a bit cheated

I'm not 100% sure about this, but I kind of feel like part of what I appreciate in GG's stuff (definitely when I watch his 9/11 stuff, maybe with these tweets too) is that it kind of feels like the

people with 'zero practical connection' to the events

are the targets. He's not there to help them with their trauma, they're the ones he's trying to offend. You know, this idea that a disaster like this brings out an army of hand-wringers, sat in front of their tvs being all "omg I can't cope with this" and GG's aim is to say FUCK YOU, YOU'VE GOT NOTHING TO COPE WITH. I mean, the people who are directly dealing with the aftermath in Japan now are absolutely not the ones taking offence at his dumb gags, they're very unlikely to even be aware of the tweet stream of a minor comic right now.

Like I said, not entirely sure I believe in this myself, just an alternative hypothesis.

am i led to believe that Gottfried was still doing the voice up until the japan jokes? I mean it's one voice doing one word. They could've, i dunno, taped it and just replayed it for every commercial. this is the real story here

― brownie, Tuesday, March 15, 2011 2:15 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

think you're taking the implications of the firing a little too literally. like, obviously they could keep running the ads (or making new ads with the audio he recorded 10 years ago for the initial ads), but the point is they want to publicly admonish him for the jokes and cut ties from him. plus i'm pretty sure he'd still be getting paid if they'd kept him under his contract and kept running ads that probably generate automatic royalties for GG.

also iirc he says "aflac" multiple times with different inflections in some of the ads fwiw

lol I just remembered that yesterday I worked on a story for work about how "spokescharacters" are gaining popularity over celebrity endorsements because you can't have a Tiger Woods-esque scandal that will damage your business when your mascot is Poppin' Fresh (e.g.) - guess that backfired

you can't have a Tiger Woods-esque scandal that will damage your business when your mascot is Poppin' Fresh

You missed the story of the orgy with Betty Crocker and Aunt Jemima.

Poppin' Fresh did time for child endangerment

lol

"poppin fresh porn" About 52,200 results (0.09 seconds)

n/a that's bs there is soo much flo the progressive lady porn out there and it's like nobody cares about that

waht

*googles furiously*

"so much"? ew

you make it sound like a thriving subgenre

hey there's a whole insurance mascot pr0n world out there, lotta hot gottfried on flo action

Holy crap. Plenty of Rule 34 for anyone thinking about googling Erin Esurance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBPAQ6CJvTo

i think the idea is that the spokescharacter won't actively go out and embarrass your company (unless it is voiced by gilbert gottfried)

maybe the geico gecko will take over 2 and a half men

A Man and a Half and Ronald McDonald

the headline on VladTV is "Comedian Gilbert Gottfried GOES IN on Japan"

i think the idea is that the spokescharacter won't actively go out and embarrass your company (unless it is voiced by gilbert gottfried)

I understand that but this is not like Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan where he's the "face" of the company. He plays a stupid duck.

yeah in a case like this i think it's less about GG being held to a moral standard as a spokesperson endorsing the company and more about "wait, our guy said what? yeah we should stop paying him and tell everyone we're not working with him anymore, we don't want any of that to blow back on us."

this is one of those things where i understand why every actor involved did what they did and dont really begrudge them