Gilbert Gottfried and Our Intense Spiritual Connection to the People Who Make Us Laugh
One of the unfortunate aspects of everyday life is that beloved celebrities will ALWAYS be dying. That’s because EVERYONE dies. LITERALLY, everyone. Everyone you can think of will be dead some day.
That’s depressing! That’s super-depressing. It’s so depressing that in order to just get by in this sick and sad and strange world we need to willfully forget about our own mortality as well as those of everybody else’s.
But sometimes death feels so overwhelming that that becomes impossible. 2016 was such a year. It sure felt like anyone who was anyone died in 2016. Thanks to the election of Donald Trump, my faith in the American people and American democracy died as well.
We once again seem to be suffering an epidemic of beloved entertainers dying unexpectedly en masse in a way that’s heartbreaking, obviously, but also disconcerting.
We were still reeling from the unexpected death of Norm Macdonald when his Dirty Works director Bob Saget shocked the world by dying unexpectedly at sixty five despite seemingly being the very picture of health.
In another blow to lovers of comedy, another beloved figure died in his sixties, Louie Anderson. Yesterday I was shocked and saddened by the passing of another sixty-something funnyman who was a revered staple of myriad generations of children: Gilbert Gottfried, who died at 67 from recurrent ventricular tachycardia that was complicated by type II myotonic dystrophy.
You never know just how deeply and widespread someone is loved until they die. Sometimes the immensity of the public response feels disproportionate to the late celebrity’s popularity.
I had no idea just how much people loved Bob Saget, for example, until he died. It makes sense that he’d be mourned deeply and widely considering what a central role he played in three staples of many people’s past: Full House, America’s Funniest Home Videos and How I Met Your Mother.
It’s similarly not surprising that Gilbert Gottfried’s death is the subject of intense, culture-wide grieving. Like Saget, Gottfried was a beloved fixture of many an American childhood.
Gottfried embodies comedy’s deeply Jewish past. He was the last vaudevillian, a consummate Catskills cut-up. But he embraced the innovations of today, whether in the form of podcasting or Cameo.
Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast is a nostalgic and irreverent delight and up until his death Gottfried was the king of Cameo, a game and willing entertainer who intuitively understood Cameo because it was show business and comedy and no one knew either like Gottfried.
I only attended one virtual performance during the pandemic. It was “Weird Al” Yankovic’s appearance on a live episode of Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast. I listened because Gottfried’s co-host Frank Santopadre mentioned that my coloring book would be mentioned on it.
But I also watched because I wanted to experience the surreal honor of Gottfried saying my name. I’m pretty sure he absolutely slaughtered it, which made me even happier than if he’d gotten it right.
It was a magical night that’s even more special in hindsight.
The response to Gottfried’s death really underlines the depth and power of our relationship with the people who have made us laugh, particularly if that all-important, albeit one-sided relationship began when we were still kids.
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