A wide-ranging conversation with RealGilbert, by andrewrgoldman
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Comedy Central roasted Alec Baldwin in September. You haven’t been on one of these roasts in like nearly a decade, right? The 2011 Trump roast was one of the last ones you did. Why? It’s a little weird now remembering how back in 2010 people were incredibly offended on behalf of Conan when he lost The Tonight Show.
I used to go up onstage and just fuck around, and I would do stuff where the audience would scratch their heads. I’ve heard that they used to put me on to clear the audience out at the end of the night. But I’d imitate other comics, which would make the other comics and the wait staff laugh. I used to imitate Jerry a lot. Remember, back then, Seinfeld was just another comic hanging around the clubs, just waiting around to go on at three in the morning. He had never been on TV.
In what’s become a famous moment, at the Hugh Hefner roast a couple weeks after 9/11, you joked that it was difficult getting a direct flight back to New York because all the flights “had to make a stop at the Empire State Building.” The joke bombed. What was that like? When you had Bruce Vilanch on, who worked with him, he said that Paul Lynde was miserable that he hadn’t become as big a star as Woody Allen.My question is a chicken-and-egg one. Do you think his career might not have gone as far as it could have because he was famous for hating Jews and he lost work? Or do you think he found it convenient to blame Jews for his career stalling?
Right, you were one of the first people who lost a job for tweeting, when the insurance company Aflac fired you as the voice of its duck after you made some Japanese tsunami jokes on Twitter. Do you know if anybody affected by the tragedy was hurt by your jokes? Or is that question even relevant? What’s really amazing to me, having seen your act a few times now, is, do you think the Aflac people had any idea what you talk about onstage? I mean, your act is so much more offensive than the tweets.
Considering the kind of material you did, it’s kind of amazing that you ever got corporate gigs. I remember when that kid Ryan White died of AIDS, you were on Howard Stern doing a bit about what Andrew “Dice” Clay would say at his funeral. Didn’t Stern lose advertisers over that? In your 2011 book, Rubber Balls and Liquor, there was only one moment where I stopped and was like, Yikes, I don’t know if he could get away with this joke anymore. There’s a rape joke, the one about the woman going into a bar. You remember it?
I’m sure you remember when Daniel Tosh got a lot of heat because he had said to a heckler who didn’t like one of his rape jokes, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by, like, five guys right now?”I wouldn’t know the exact way, but, I mean, because something’s bad taste doesn’t mean it’s not funny.
I’m just kind of happy when somebody else is being declared the villain. It’s sort of like when you see a bunch of kids in the schoolyard beating up the kid with thick glasses and braces. And you go, Oh, thank God they’re beating him up, they’ll leave me alone.Oh gosh, I really wanted to talk to you about it. Has there ever been a point where you have heard something and said, “Okay, well now we know there is a line and it can’t be crossed.
But what if Heidi Klum had made that joke? Or had made some sort of anti-Semitic remark? Would you have been in favor of her suffering any repercussions? Maybe losing a gig? Well, I guess if Dinklage were considering me for a series he was doing, maybe I’d leave out the midget jokes. Once, I did my show at some club. After the show, these two electric wheelchairs come out. They’re these two brothers, both really stunted growth, and they’re strapped into the wheelchairs, and they can just barely move one hand to move the lever. I thought, Holy shit, I’m in trouble here. Both of them, first of all they wanted to have their picture taken with me.
I saw you twice recently, and I told you how brilliant your performance was. The only thing that really, truly shocked me was your paper-plate-and-masking-tape bit when you do an impression of Al Jolson singing “Mammy.”I’m curious, has anybody said to you, “Jesus, Gilbert, that bit’s a little too close to blackface for it to be permissible in 2019.”
So when we have Michael Richards go onstage and shout the N-word, I think his defense was that he was just being purposely edgy and trying to offend his audience. But it wasn’t funny, and he obviously suffered major consequences.
Do you think that having gone through what you went through with Aflac put you in a position where you can’t help but sympathize with Louis?Believe it or not, I’ve never read the New York Times bit.You were on the last season of the Celebrity Apprentice for two episodes before getting fired. Any Trump stories you can share?
Yes, but I still remember sitting in front of the TV at one in the morning and I think I was going to watch either The Invisible Man or the Charles Laughton version of Phantom of the Opera and the news was on, and at SeaWorld this girl in a bikini was riding a killer whale and something freaks the whale out and it starts going crazy and leaping and throwing her off, basically like what I guess a killer whale does when it’s a killer whale.
I remember when my agent called and said they want you for the show, I wasn’t jumping in the air. I would tell people uncomfortably. I’d say, “I don’t know, I think they kinda want me to be on Saturday Night.” Then when they let me go from the show, also, I wasn’t devastated.Never. But Jean had loads of tape on everybody because millions of people were auditioning.
I’ve met your wife and kids and been to your apartment in Chelsea. It’s honestly very difficult to reconcile your life now to what I understand of it before you were married. Your friend Penn Jillette once told a reporter of your “pathological” cheapness. Did you really, as he said, live in an apartment full of unopened boxes?
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