Articles and Interviews

Onstage, Gilbert Gottfried isn't afraid to name names. ''I'd like
to have a kid,'' he says, ''but I'd probably get a Frank Sinatra Jr.
instead of a Gilbert Gottfried Jr. I'd totally screw up like that.''
He can be complimentary; he admires Donny and Marie Osmond, he says,
''because they aren't afraid to take chances.'' Sometimes he not only
flirts with tastelessness, he takes it out to dinner, buys it a
couple of drinks and embraces it passionately. ''I went up to Jackie
O, and I wanted to break the ice,'' he says during a bit about
cocktail party faux pas. ''So I said, 'Do you remember where you were
when you heard JFK was shot?' '' Yet for all his verbal chutzpah,
Gottfried, after almost 17 years as a comedian, is still so scared of
audiences that he performs with his eyes closed. Says his friend
Robin Williams: ''I told him he'd get a lot more exposure if he kept
them open, but he wouldn't listen.''
He may not have to. In the past few months Gottfried, 32, has
walked blindly into a memorable guest spot on The Cosby Show (he
played a former patient's husband who recognizes Bill Cosby in an
auto showroom at an inopportune moment), a job as a manic pitchman
for MTV and a scene-stealing cameo in Beverly Hills Cop II. In Cop,
Gottfried portrays Sidney Bernstein, a neurotic accountant who is
menaced by Eddie Murphy. Jokes Gilbert: ''I play a loud, obnoxious
Jew -- it's a real stretch for me.''
He's really a little nervous about all the attention he's getting.
He says his big fear is that someday a magazine will run a picture of
him diving into a swimming pool, accompanied by the caption ''Gilbert
makes a big splash in the '80s.''
< Gottfried had two earlier chances to make a splash, though
each proved more of a dive. He was in the Saturday Night Live lineup
in 1980-81 but didn't get much airtime. Next came a regular spot on
Thicke of the Night two years later. ''I think of Alan Thicke as
Perry Como without the excitement,'' Gottfried says. Neither show did
much to help his career, at least in part because of Gottfried's
shyness. Says his friend Joe Lauer, who manages comics: ''You always
had to fight for position on those shows, and Gilbert's not like
that. He needs to be nurtured.''
Gottfried, who until recently lived with his mother, Jackie, will
not talk about his personal life. When he is asked a question about a
subject he regards as private -- such as his family -- his face
clouds over, and he either throws out a joke to mask his discomfort
(''Are my parents religious? Yes, my father's a Muslim; my mother's a
Hare Krishna'') or scrunches his face and says, ''Gee, I don't
know.'' As his friend David Brenner once said, ''Have you ever had a
weird dream, and in the morning you can't remember all of it? Well,
that's what talking to Gilbert is like.''
Gottfried explains his evasiveness this way: ''Every time I give a
straight answer and read it in a magazine, I say, 'Ouch.' One day I'd
like to talk to a psychoanalyst about why celebrities reveal so much
of themselves in interviews.'' Ironically he's a big fan of such
tell-all tales. ''I love to read it when actors say that they
approach their characters from the core, or actresses from sitcoms
refer to themselves as survivors. Like they've been through the
Titanic.''
Maybe he just doesn't have much to talk about. ''King Tut had more
of a life after he died than I have,'' he claims. He is not known to
date, and if he never allows anyone to see his home, it may be
because, he says, his place in Manhattan's SoHo district ''looks like
the type of apartment they find when they finally track down a serial
killer.''
Raised in Brooklyn, the youngest of three children, Gottfried says
he ''aspired to be a nonentity.'' He was 15 when he started hanging
around comedy clubs and trying out material during ''open mike''
nights. One early gambit was to come up onto the stage in the middle
of another comedian's routine, pretend to be an agent and demonstrate
how the jokes should be told. Other comedians heard about his
outrageous behavior and began flocking to see Gilbert perform in New
York and L.A. ''Gilbert is the anti-comic,'' says Robin ^ Williams.
''He was predicted by Nostradamus.'' As for his trademark -- the
tightly shut eyes -- Gottfried says, ''It's a gimmick I got from
Helen Keller. She said, 'Look, it works for me. If you like it, you
can use it too.' ''
In the early '80s Gilbert made a couple of TV pilots, including
one in which he played opposite three orangutans. He says the
exposure did more for the apes' careers than for his. Then last year
Gottfried landed the part in Cop. On the set, according to the film's
publicist, ''He constantly cracked Eddie up. And it's very hard to
get Eddie to laugh.'' (Complains Gilbert: ''Now I'll have to say
something nice about him.'') Gottfried augmented his role with
improvisations. ''It was written much shorter and absolutely
straight,'' he remembers. He is unfazed by complaints that his
exaggerated portrayal of the accountant is anti-Semitic. Indeed,
rather than appeasing his critics, Gottfried provokes them: ''Jesse
Jackson once said of me, 'He puts the ''Hi'' in Hymietown.' Louis
Farrakhan said, 'I generally don't like Jews, but I could watch this
guy forever.' Josef Mengele gets the giggles whenever he watches
me.'' A little more gravely, he says of his critics: ''I don't know.
I guess it's the best publicity you could ask for.''
Gottfried has already done another cameo, in Bob Goldthwait's Hot
to Trot, and he has an as-yet-untitled album coming out later this
year. ''We wanted to call it Abbey Road, but there were legal
problems,'' he says.
As to his next career move, Gottfried allows that ''to be
perfectly honest, I don't know where I'm going. I wouldn't rule out
doing TV.'' But TV or movies would mean staying in L.A., and perhaps
buying a car. And that, he says, is ''too scary for me to think
about. I always try to avoid anything that has to do with my life.''

That, of course, has become second nature, and the foundation of a
career. Quick, Gilbert: Close your eyes and tell a joke