American stand-up comedian and actor Gilbert Gottfried passed away yesterday at the age of 67. His persona as a comedian featured an exaggerated shrill voice and emphasis on crude humor. His numerous roles in film and television include voicing the parrot Iago in Disney’s Aladdin animated films and series, Digit LeBoid on PBS Kids’s long-running Cyberchase, and Kraang Subprime in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Gottfried was the voice of the Aflac Duck until 2011. He appeared in the critically panned but commercially successful Problem Child in 1990.
From 2014 until his death in 2022, Gottfried hosted a podcast, Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast, which featured discussions of classic movies and celebrity interviews, most often with veteran actors, comedians, musicians, and comedy writers. Gilbert, a documentary film on Gottfried’s life and career, was released in 2017. At age 15, Gottfried began doing amateur stand-up in New York City and, after a few years, became known around New York as “the comedian’s comedian.” In 1980, Saturday Night Live was being retooled with a new staff and new comedians; the producers noticed Gottfried and hired him as a cast member for season 6. Gottfried’s persona in SNL sketches was very different from his later characterization: he rarely (if ever) spoke in his trademark screeching, obnoxious voice and never squinted.
In the late 1990s, Gottfried met Dara Kravitz at a Grammy Awards party. They were married in 2007 and had two children together: daughter, Lily, and son, Max. Gottfried was raised in a Jewish family, but he said on his podcast that he did not have a bar mitzvah. One of his sisters was Arlene Gottfried, a New York street photographer who died in 2017Gottfried died in Manhattan from recurrent ventricular tachycardia, complicated by type II myotonic dystrophy, on April 12, 2022, at the age of 67.