Gilbert and Ghosts of the Gathering
At the risk of being morbid, a lot of my concert-going decisions these days are death, age and mortality-based. I don’t go to that many shows currently due to a combination of finances, COVID-19, parenthood and being old as shit.
Also, for a very long time if I wanted to go to a concert I could almost invariably get in for free because I was head writer for The A.V. Club and consequently wielded considerable power. That’s not the case now, obviously. Nowadays “Weird Al” Yankovic gives me free passes to see his concerts but that’s about it.
I miss that. I miss the power. I miss the respect. I don’t miss actually working for The A.V. Club but I miss the perks. Those were nice, particularly if you grew up feeling poor, angry and resentful the way that I did.
When I’m tempted to see a show my motivation is generally twofold:
I’m a huge fan of the artist’s work
I’m worried that they will die soon, and I consequently might never have another opportunity to see them perform live.
That was my motivation for wanting to see Michael Nesmith and Mickey Dolenz tour as The Monkees one last time. I had a very strong sense that at least one of the surviving members would not live long enough to tour again. That unfortunately turned out to be true.
Death factors into The Gathering of the Juggalos as well. A WHOLE lot of entertainers perform at Insane Clown Posse’s annual festival of arts and culture, which dramatically increases the chances that some of them will meet untimely ends.
I’ve seen a lot of performers at the Gathering who are no longer with us. That’s not surprising considering how long a lot of these acts have been around but it is sad.
One Gathering performer that I sincerely thought I would have many, many, many more opportunities to see perform live was Gilbert Gottfried, who held down the star comedian slot at the landmark twentieth Gathering.
Gottfried seemed destined to join the ranks of the ancient Jewish comedians he grew up admiring and emulating and specialized in interviewing alongside cohost Frank Santopadre on their podcast Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast.
Gottfried was one of the acts I was most excited about seeing at the twentieth Gathering. I even pitched multiple places on covering The Gathering of the Juggalos through the eyes of legendary entertainer Gottfried. Most of the time they never got back to me. The few that did curtly insisted that there wasn’t anything newsworthy or notable about Gilbert Gottfried returning to the Gathering of the Juggalos in its 20th year of operation.
The Gathering can be a very confusing, disorienting place even if you are sober, which is seldom the case. I had a hard time figuring out where everything was, and how to get there.
One very late evening at the Gathering I was lost and confused, as usual, and then I turned around and there was Gilbert Gottfried, performing for a sizable and appreciative audience. It wasn’t like any stand-up performance I had ever seen.
Instead of doing a conventional set, Gottfried simply performed dirty jokes. And when I say “dirty jokes” I don’t mean that his set ran a little blue. Gottfried straight up read filthy jokes out of a goddamn joke book. It absolutely destroyed. In the hands of anyone else it might have seemed lazy or hack but Gottfried sold it through personality and energy.
Like so many of the entertainers at the Gathering, Gilbert was a huge part of pretty much everybody’s childhood. He represented the past in so many ways. He was the last vaudevillian, a Catskills cut-up in a post-Catskills world.
Now Gilbert has joined all of the other Ghosts of the Gathering. He will be missed, of course, but I am glad that I got an opportunity to see him perform live in one of the weirdest but also most weirdly perfect possible contexts.
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