Remembering Gilbert Gottfried Through the Audio of his Random Roles Interview
When I discovered Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast, it was a case of love at first listen. Of course it was: I have a long and well-established history of enjoying interviews with character actors and classic TV stars, so what’s not to love? I also saw it as a perfect excuse to pitch a Random Roles interview with Gilbert, using the podcast as a springboard into a discussion about Gil’s career as a whole.
Fortunately, the A.V. Club thought it was as good an idea as I did, which led to a conversation that lasted for a little over an hour and allowed me to take him through everything from The Further Adventures of Wally Brown, a pilot that he did just prior to his infamously-execrable season of Saturday Night Live, all the way to 2014’s A Million Ways to Die in the West, in which he earned a credit which he said always made him laugh: “Gilbert Gottfried as Abraham Lincoln.”
You can read the interview here, but if you’d like to listen to it…
Well, as it happens, I did a little digging, and I found the audio. I uploaded it completely intact, which means you get all of our awkward pauses as well as the several seconds of silence when he answers a call on the other line. Hell, you even get the moment at the beginning when he asks me, “So it’s just for print?” and me assuring him that it is, but I decided to keep that in, too, because that’s what he gets for dying, goddammit. Surrounding all of this extraneous material, however, you also get a whole lot of Gilbert…and maybe it’s just me, but in re-listening to the interview today—and I had this same sensation at the time, so I’m glad to discover that it remained consistent—it sounds like I’m talking to a slightly different Gilbert than the one that I heard on his podcast.
Sometimes on the podcast, particularly with his peers, it seemed as though he felt obliged to be “comedian Gilbert Gottfried,” and trust me when I say that I loved it whenever he did so. But I also loved that my conversation with Gil was one that proved to be as sedate as it was funny, filled with a lot of laughter and a number of great stories, several of which he hadn’t yet repeated ad infinitum on the podcast. (For instance, I don’t think he’d broken the podcast seal on the Norman’s Corner story at this point.)
I’ll be honest: I had a not-too-secret dream of being a guest on the Amazing Colossal Podcast. I told Gil’s illustrious—and invaluable—cohost Frank Santopadre that if he was ever of a mind to let me do a bonus episode about failed pilots, I could be ready at a moment’s notice…and in fairness to Frank, I think he was agreeable to the idea, but I pitched the idea relatively recently, by which point I strongly suspect he already knew more about the seriousness of Gil’s condition than we did. I mean, I don’t think I’m alone in saying that I hadn’t heard anything at all about his illness, short of having the same general feelings that others had about how he was even more easily distracted than usual. But when I listen to this interview, I hear these moments…
“Oh, my God!”
“Jack Warden… I would’ve loved to have had him on the podcast.”
“Thicke Of The Night. Another tremendous success.”
It’s like I was there.
R.I.P, Gilbert.