He was a regular on late-night talk shows and radio shows, notably Howard Stern’s, a venue where he could unwind his often rambling stories and veer a bit further into the blue comedy he specialized in. It was that same unchecked humor that made him a regular on Comedy Central’s series of roasts, in which celebrities take turns jabbing at the guest of “honor.”
Mr. Gottfried was, more than many comedians, a creature of late-night TV, reveling in aliens, lounge lizards and other weird corners of American pop culture — as he demonstrated when he hosted “Up All Night,” a weekly presentation of B- and C-grade horror and action movies that ran on the USA Network from 1989 to 1998.
He himself appeared in several movies of roughly the same quality. In “Highway to Hell,” a 1991 horror comedy, he played Hitler. In the fourth, fifth and sixth installments of “Sharknado,” about an extreme weather event that rains man-eating fish from the sky, he played a reporter.
In more recent years, Mr. Gottfried co-hosted a popular podcast, “Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast,” with Frank Santopadre, focusing on some of the more obscure corners of showbiz and featuring interviews with movie and TV actors and other comedians. And he continued to appear in whatever pop-culture ephemera came his way, including “Celebrity Apprentice” and, with his wife, Dara, “Celebrity Wife Swap.”
In 2011 Mr. Gottfried published a well-received memoir, “Rubber Balls and Liquor,” in which he copped to his penchant for crude humor but refused to apologize.
“I don’t always mean to offend,” he wrote. “I only sometimes mean to offend.”
Gilbert Gottfried was born on Feb. 28, 1955, in Brooklyn. His family lived above a hardware store run by his father, Max, and Max’s brother Seymour. (In his book, he claimed it was called “Gilbert’s Father’s Hardware Store.”) His mother, Lillian (Zimmerman) Gottfried, was a homemaker.
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