Gilbert Gottfried (born February 28, 1955, in Brooklyn, New York) is a Jewish American stand-up comedian and actor noted for his grating voice, his squint, his Brooklyn accent and his tendency to shout. Although he has a rather clean image on television and film, his stand up routines and appearances on The Howard Stern Show can be raunchy and racially explicit.
He has played numerous roles in film and television, perhaps most notably voicing the parrot Iago in Disney's Aladdin (1992) and all sequels and spin-off and co-starring in the Problem Child movies (1990 and 1991). Although not a regular, he also appeared in the short-lived 1992 TV series The Amazing Live Sea Monkeys and voiced a crazed dentist "Dr. Bender" on the show The Fairly OddParents (The show's creator, Butch Hartman, took over his role.).
Since 2000, he has also been the voice of the duck in the AFLAC commercials and Digit in the math-mystery cartoon Cyberchase on PBS Kids GO!, as well as the magical imp Mr. Mxyzptlk on Superman: The Animated Series. He also played a nasty wisecracking criminal genius named "Nick-Nack" who used toys to commit crimes on Superboy (TV Series). Gottfried makes regular appearances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. He shocked the audience in a Jeopardy! parody portraying Eminem repeating "Biatch" many times.
While it has been said that Gottfried's re-telling of the venerable Aristocrats joke at a Friars Club roast of Hugh Hefner just three weeks after the September 11 terrorist attacks inspired Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza to produce a film about the joke, Jillette and Provenza point out that they had already filmed Gottfried and that, in fact, it was their project that inspired him to choose that joke as his response to the audience's claim that there are certain unspoken limits in comedy. Gottfried initially began his performance at the roast joking that he had intended to catch a plane but couldn't get a direct flight because "they said they have to stop at the Empire State Building first." As audience members responded with gasps and cries of "too soon!", he launched into The Aristocrats.
Gottfried was a cast member of the NBC late night series Saturday Night Live during its nadir, the 1980-1981 season. Gottfried's persona as displayed in SNL sketches was very different; he spoke in a mellow, low voice. He appeared for twelve episodes before being one of the several cast members fired when Dick Ebersol took over the producer's chair.
Around 2002, Gilbert Gottfried appeared in an infamous McDonald's commercial parody. It featured a grossly obese woman dragging her child into a McDonald's restaurant while the child screamed and desperately tried to escape her clutches. Gilbert's voice could then be heard saying, "EVERYBODY'S SO FAT! AND IT'S ALL BECAUSE OF MCDONALD'S! I'M LOVIN' IT!!!"
Gottfried was part of an online advertising campaign for Microsoft's Office XP software, showing the Clippy office assistant would be removed, showing its demise as part of a series of Flash-animated cartoons.
Aladdin (1992)
