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PERSONALITY PEEKS:
GILBERT GOTTFRIED, Comedian

by FRANK O'DONNELL
December 15, 2006

I can't wait to see Gilbert Gottfried perform. That's not something you'll hear me say about many comedians.

Tell the truth, the more I talked to the guy for this interview, the more excited I got. He rambled on, switching from topic to topic, firing away in his familiar nasal tone. He had me laughing from the start, when I asked him how he was.

"Aaah!" was his response. I could see the shoulders shrugging, the face scrunching up. Pretty good too, considering this was a phone interview.

"How do you spell that?" I wondered.

"Gee, I don't know. Tell you what. Have a contest at your newspaper. Ask people how to spell it. Whichever one you like best, that's the way it's spelled."
 
He'll be at Catch A Rising Star Comedy Club in Lincoln Park on Thursday, December 21. I ask what people can expect at that show. "A couple of minutes where you say, okay, this isn't funny, and you throw a chair at me."

Isn't that what happened to Michael Richards? Didn't it all start with someone telling him that he wasn't funny. "Oh, by the way, Michael Richards is my writer now," says Gottfried. "I'm doing ‘Showtime at the Apollo.'" He pauses, then adds, "I'm also working to get Charles Manson out of jail."

Just in time for the holidays, Gottfried has a DVD on the market: "Gilbert Gottfried Dirty Jokes."

"It's got all my favorite disgusting dirty jokes," says Gottfried. "It's been out for a while, but I just figure, it's the perfect holiday gift."

I tell him that I don't necessarily think of him as a "dirty" comic.

"Let me tell you, when it comes to comedy, most people don't think of me." Self-effacing and sarcastic. You've got to love this guy.

Gottfried started doing comedy at the age of 15. "It was in Greenwich Village. I guess I was too stupid to know I wasn't funny. That's me, stupid and unfunny and sneaking into bars when I was 15. Oooh, I broke a law. Look at me, I'm Al Capone."

I ask about his first big break. "It's a weird thing. A lot of things that people thought were breaks weren't. I was on ‘Saturday Night Live,' the season right after the original cast left. That was a horrible season. It was like, how dare they put on a different cast. The critics attacked the show before it even aired. When it did air, we proved we were even worse than they thought."

Shortly afterwards, MTV filmed a bunch of Gottfried's short sets as bumpers, and aired them between videos. "People started saying, who's that guy, and I started getting work."

Eddie Murphy's "Beverly Hills Cop 2" is what Gottfried considers his big break. He played an annoying accountant named Sidney Bernstein, who bribed Murphy's character to look the other way on some trumped up parking tickets. "Not a day goes by, someone doesn't come up to me and do my line about, ‘Is there something I could hand you?'"

Gottfried frequently pops up on "The Tonight Show," playing all sorts of characters. "That's fun," he says. "They'll call me in for stuff. I never know what I'm going to be until I get there. I've been Yoda, King Kong, King Tut, Queen Elizabeth…"

I tell him that will be my headline: "Gilbert Gottfried - Queen!"

"That's right," he says, "I'm finally out with it. And I'm roommates with Neil Patrick Harris, in case you needed to know."

Gottfried's happy to be working, mostly because "I'm horrible when I have free time. My days when I'm not working are kind of like waking up, then trying to waste time til I have to go back to sleep."

[Gilbert Gottfried appears in two shows at Catch A Rising Star Comedy Club in Lincoln Park, on Louisquisset Pike in Lincoln on Thursday, December 21. Call 1-800-720-PARK for tickets and reservations, or check out the Web site at www.lincolnparkri.com.]