Read the complete write-up of Gilbert Gottfried net worth, age, wife, children, height, family, parents, cause of death, movies, tv shows as well as other information you need to know.
Introduction
Gilbert Gottfried was an American actor and stand-up comedian. 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.
Early life
| Name | Gilbert Gottfried |
| Net Worth | $8 million |
| Occupation | Actor, Comedian |
| Height | 1.67m |
| Age | 67 years |
Gilbert Jeremy Gottfried was born on February 28, 1955, until his death on April 12, 2022. He was born and raised up in Brooklyn, New York, United States. He is the son of Lillian Zimmerman, a homemaker, and Max Gottfried, who ran a hardware store with his own father, above which the family lived. 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. During his 12-episode stint, he was given very little airtime and seldom used in sketches. Gottfried recalled that a low point was having to play a corpse in a sketch about a sports organist hired to play inappropriate music at a funeral. Despite this, he had one recurring character (Leo Waxman, husband to Denny Dillon’s Pinky Waxman on the recurring talk show sketch, “What’s It All About?”) and two celebrity impersonations: David A. Stockman and controversial film director Roman Polanski.
Career
Gilbert Gottfried also played accountant Sidney Bernstein in the 1987 film Beverly Hills Cop II which reunited him with friend and fellow SNL alumnus Eddie Murphy. Beginning in the late 1980s, Gottfried was a favorite guest of Howard Stern’s, often impersonating Andrew “Dice” Clay, Bela Lugosi as Dracula, and a senile Groucho Marx. Although not a regular, he also appeared in The Amazing Live Sea Monkeys, as well as voicing the crazed dentist Dr. Bender and his son Wendell in The Fairly OddParents and the voice of Jerry the Belly Button Elf on Ren and Stimpy.
Three of Gilbert Gottfried’s most prominent roles came in 1990, 1991, and 1992, when he was cast as the adoption agent Igor Peabody in Problem Child and Problem Child 2 and the parrot Iago in Aladdin. When asked how he prepared for the role, Gottfried said, “I did the whole DeNiro thing. I moved to South America! I lived in the trees!”.
Check Out: Louie Anderson net worth
Gilbert Gottfried reprised the role in Aladdin: The Return of Jafar, Aladdin and the King of Thieves, the television series and various related media, such as Kingdom Hearts and House of Mouse. However, the character was ultimately recast to Alan Tudyk for the 2019 remake. Gottfried also voiced Berkeley Beetle in 1994’s Thumbelina. Gottfried was the host of the Saturday edition of USA Up All Night for its entire run from 1989 to 1998.
Gottfried was a recurring guest star during the Tom Bergeron era of The Hollywood Squares and became the central figure in a bizarre episode that aired on October 1, 1999. In this episode, the two contestants made nine consecutive incorrect guesses, six of which were to be game-deciding questions asked to Gottfried. Penn Jillette, who, with his partner Teller was a guest on the same episode, berated a contestant earlier for giving an incorrect guess by shouting “You fool!”, which Gottfried himself then began to use, with most of the other stars including host Bergeron himself eventually joining in with every successive wrong guess, beginning with the second question he was asked. As a consequence, it took the entire half-hour to play only one game. Appropriately, the episode became known as the “You Fool!” episode.
He provided the voice of the duck in the Aflac commercials and Digit in Cyberchase, as well as Mister Mxyzptlk (pronounced “Mitz-yez-pit-lik”) in Superman: The Animated Series. He reprised his role as Mxyzptlk in Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham, Justice League Action, and Lego DC Super-Villains. He also voiced a nasty wisecracking criminal genius named Nick-Nack in two episodes of Superboy (he also co-wrote an issue of Superboy: The Comic Book, which featured Nick-Nack’s origin). Gottfried made regular appearances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
In 2004, Comedy Central featured Gottfried’s stand-up material for Shorties Watchin’ Shorties. Gottfried was part of an online advertising campaign for Microsoft’s Office XP software, showing, in a series of Flash-animated cartoons, that the Clippy office assistant would be removed. In 2006, Gottfried topped the Boston Phoenix’s tongue-in-cheek list of the world’s 100 Unsexiest Men. In April 2006, Gottfried performed with the University of Pennsylvania’s Mask and Wig Club in their annual Intercollegiate Comedy Festival.
In 2006, Gilbert Gottfried made an appearance on the Let’s Make a Deal portion of Gameshow Marathon (as a baby in a large high chair, he says “Hey Ricki, I think I need my diaper changed!”), and in the Dodge Viper in the big deal (where he tells the contestants “What were you thinking?!” because neither one picked it). He also guest-starred in The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy as Santa Claus in the one-hour Christmas Special. He voiced Rick Platypus in an episode of My Gym Partner’s a Monkey entitled “That Darn Platypus”.
Gilbert Gottfried appeared as Peter’s horse in an episode of Family Guy entitled “Boys Do Cry” (in which Peter Griffin is enthused to learn that Gottfried is providing the horse’s voice). He also guest-starred in Hannah Montana as Barny Bittmen. In January 2009, Gottfried worked again with David Faustino for an episode of Faustino’s show Star-ving. In 2011, Gottfried appeared in the episode “Lost Traveler” on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit as Leo Gerber, a sarcastic computer professional working for the NYPD’s Technical Assistance Response Unit, which producer Warren Leight said could become a recurring character.
Gottfried read a section from the hit book Fifty Shades of Grey in a June 2012 YouTube video, which was created with the aim of using Gottfried’s trademark voice to make fun of the book’s graphic sexual content. In 2013, Gottfried became a member of “Team Rachael” on the second season of Food Network’s Rachael vs. Guy: Celebrity Cook-Off. In March of that year he appeared on ABC’s Celebrity Wife Swap. He swapped wives with Alan Thicke. He was also a commentator on truTV Presents: World’s Dumbest.
On May 28, 2014, Sideshow Network premiered Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast, an interview series where Gottfried and his co-host Frank Santopadre discussed classic movies and talk to “Hollywood legends and behind-the-scenes talents” who shaped Gottfried’s childhood and influenced his comedy. His first guest was Dick Cavett. Gottfried was the third contestant fired during the fourteenth season of the NBC reality show The Celebrity Apprentice. In 2016 he played the ‘Pig Man’ in a comedy/fantasy film Abnormal Attraction.
In 2017 he appeared as himself in Episodes, where a contestant on a fictional TV endurance game show is penalized with “48 hours of Gilbert Gottfried”. On June 10, 2018, he appeared in a special segment of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver where, for UK viewers only, a segment about the UK’s law restricting the broadcast of debates from the Houses of Parliament was replaced by five minutes of him reading “3 star Yelp reviews”, along with host John Oliver telling the audience “you brought this on yourself because of your stupid law”.
Gilbert Gottfried returned on November 18, 2018, in the show’s last episode of the year to read out extracts from the Brexit agreement, again for UK viewers only. He had previously performed as “the real voice of Jared Kushner” in dubbed film clips on the show. On July 31, 2019, he appeared as a guest in episode 170 of the Angry Video Game Nerd. On January 10, 2022, he guest-starred as God on the season finale of Smiling Friends.
Comedic tributes
Danny Gallagher of the Dallas Observer wrote that “Gottfried has one of the most original formulas in the history of comedy”, adding: You don’t just laugh at the punchline when Gilbert Gottfried tells a joke. You laugh at the setup. You laugh at his comments about the joke. You even laugh at the segues between his jokes.
Gilbert Gottfried was known for speaking in a loud and grating voice, which was not his natural speaking voice. Mark Binneli of Rolling Stone described Gottfried as a “squinting, squawking mass of contradictions”, noting his status as “one of America’s filthiest stand-ups and one of the most successful voice-over artists in children’s entertainment.” He was known for joking about recent tragedies. In a July 2012 op-ed for CNN, he wrote:
I have always felt comedy and tragedy are roommates. If you look up comedy and tragedy, you will find a very old picture of two masks. One mask is tragedy. It looks like it’s crying. The other mask is comedy. It looks like it’s laughing. Nowadays, we would say, ‘How tasteless and insensitive. A comedy mask is laughing at a tragedy mask.’
Controversial jokes
Gilbert Gottfried made “an endless series of masturbation jokes” in reference to Paul Reubens’ arrest for masturbating in an adult movie theater at the 43rd Primetime Emmy Awards. Viewers on the East Coast saw the entire set live, but Fox TV censored the broadcast for the West Coast delay. Fox issued an apology, stating that Gottfried’s jokes were “irresponsible and insulting”. Gottfried said that producers stated he would not be invited back, and Rolling Stone wrote that the monologue resulted in his being “blacklisted”.
Check Out: Ellen Foley net worth
During his monologue at a Friars Club roast of Hugh Hefner three weeks after the September 11 attacks, Gottfried joked that he had intended to catch a plane, but could not get a direct flight because “they said they have to stop at the Empire State Building first”. This was one of the first public examples of 9/11 humor. Audience members responded with hisses and a cry of “Too soon!” Realizing he had lost an audience “bigger than anybody has ever lost an audience”, Gottfried then abandoned his prepared remarks and launched into the venerable Aristocrats joke, winning back the audience. Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza used Gottfried’s monologue as a segment in their 2005 film The Aristocrats.
Cause of death
Gilbert Gottfried died in Manhattan, his cause of death was from recurrent ventricular tachycardia, complicated by type II myotonic dystrophy. He died on April 12, 2022, at the age of 67. However, in March 2011, Gottfried made a series of jokes on his Twitter account about the earthquake disaster in Japan. Aflac, which does 75% of its business in Japan, responded by dismissing Gottfried from voicing its duck mascot on March 14, 2011, and announced a casting call for his replacement as the voice of the duck. He was replaced by Daniel McKeague (who did an impression of Gottfried) on April 26, 2011.
Wife
Gilbert Gottfried was married to Dara Kravitz, they had their wedding ceremony in 2007. He first met his wife Dara Kravitz at a Grammy Awards party in the late 1990s. The couple had two children together: a daughter, Lily Gottfried and a son, Max Gottfried. 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 2017.
Gilbert Gottfried net worth
How much is Gilbert Gottfried worth? Gilbert Gottfried net worth was estimated at around $8 million. His main source of income was from his career as an actor and stand-up comedian. Gottfried successful career earned him some luxurious lifestyles and some fancy cars trips. He was one of the richest and influential actors in the United States. However, as a frequent guest on Howard Stern’s radio show, Gilbert Gottfried was known for impersonating celebrities, including a profane, homophobic Andrew “Dice” Clay, an elderly, senile Groucho Marx, and a seductive Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula. He was also known for his “Rabbi Gottfried” character, where he would sing religious songs in faux-Hebrew sounding gibberish in a deliberately annoying, heavily accented voice.