Gilbert Gottfried Doesn’t Know Why He’s Famous
‘Gilbert’ documentary director Neil Berkeley on the imposter syndrome lurking behind the shouty standup persona
When director Neil Berkeley first showed up at Gilbert Gottfried’s Manhattan apartment to begin filming for Gilbert, the fascinating and utterly unexpected documentary about the notoriously shouty stand-up that premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival this Thursday, he found the comic unencumbered and unclothed, padding about his home in nothing but a bathrobe. Berkeley introduced himself and asked the comedian if he knew he was coming, to which Gottfried simply replied “no” before turning around and shuffling back into his apartment. But he didn’t shut the door.
“He had no idea who I was,” Berkeley told Tribeca Shortlist of their first meeting. But Gottfried’s wife Dara had thought a documentary might be good for him, despite the fact that the man himself “doesn’t want to do them ‘cause he thinks docs should be about dead people and people who cure polio,” and had told Berkeley to go ahead and “come out to New York with your camera and maybe he won’t notice.”
Thus it is fitting that two years later, the 62-year-old shock comic appears again in his bathrobe in both the film’s poster and its opening scene, with his famously squinted eyes opened wide and his face ever-so-slightly unshaven. Here, the man that once famously voiced the Aflac duck (and then famously didn’t) lets down his guard, giving Berkeley, and now all of us, a surprisingly sincere and even at times “unexpectedly touching” — ahem, the good kind of touching, Twitter— glimpse into his everyday existence, which includes a close family, rather doting wife, and two well-adjusted (and sure, adorable) seeming children. But here’s the thing: Gottfried is as surprised about his apparent normalcy as we are.
“Quite often, I look at my life as a Twilight Zone episode, like those episodes where a guy wakes up and he’s in this totally different world, totally different life,” Gilbert confesses during one of many revealing interviews captured for the film. “I wake up and I go ‘what are these other clothes hanging here, and what is this weird apartment…’” (Cue the Talking Heads, please.) “I don’t think I could have imagined it and I wish I could enjoy things fully, but I feel like I still haven’t, uhhh, woken up and said ‘oh, this is my life.’”
His life, it turns out, is far removed from the loud jokes and crude Howard Stern stories that are often most readily associated with him — and that is fully intentional. Gilbert the comedian is an entity removed from Gilbert the husband and father, primarily because when it comes to revealing his authentic self to an audience, “I’m afraid they won’t like what they see,” he surmises. “It’s like from The Wizard of Oz: don’t look at that man behind the curtain. You don’t know how they’ll react to you after that.”
“There is an anxiety with him that these wonderful things are not well deserved,” Berkeley sums up. And that feeling — that pesky, pervasive feeling of needing to maintain a particular public persona lest risk being exposed as a fraud — permeates the entertainment industry in general. “I have yet to meet someone in entertainment that doesn’t feel like they’re faking it,” he explains. “A lot of people in entertainment have this weird feeling that they snuck into the party and someone is going to walk up with a clipboard and say ‘wait, you’re not supposed to be here.’ I have that — someone is going to walk up and say, ‘hey you’ve been faking it, you’re not supposed to be here. The ones who don’t say that, it’s just puffed up bravado.”
Gilbert, for the record, clearly deserves to be here, on the strength of his resume alone. We all know him as Berkeley did — before filming began, of course. “I knew him as [the parrot in] Aladdin, I knew him as a stand-up comic, from Problem Child, Beverly Hills Cop,” Berkeley says. “Just as a caricature: he was just the loud screechy profane stand-up comic. [Cough, The Aristocrats, cough.] Everyone did or could do an impression of him. But I kind of knew that there had to be more. I had heard that he was actually sort of a shy person, and that just got me more curious.” Curious enough to crash on a friend’s couch for seven months in order to be a simple subway ride away from his subject’s home base. Curious enough to to follow said subject to Toronto, Mexico, France, and 15 different American cities (often on a Megabus no less, because surprise: Mr. Gottfried is apparently a proud penny pincher and hotel soap hoarder) in a quest to chronicle the real deal behind the really lewd funnyman.
Gilbert is Berkeley’s third documentary feature. His first, Beauty is Embarrassing, offers an in-depth look at the life and work of artist Wayne White, aka, the creative design force behind Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, and White, for what it’s worth, is a fan of his documentarian. “Fifteen years ago I met Neil when he was an intern at a company I was working at, that was around 2001,” White told Tribeca Shortlist back in February. Fast forward eight years to 2009, and “that company that I’d met Neil [Berkeley] as an intern at, it was now his company. That’s the kind of ambitious guy Neil is … he’s an amazing talent.”
A talent whose particular niche appears to lie in depicting the humanity behind the hurrah. “Everyone has pain, everyone feels suffering, everyone has great moments and low moments,” Berkeley says when asked to explain the connection between his chosen subjects. “That’s the thing I was glad that Gilbert finally opened up about: he does have remorse about his father and pain about his mother and real intense moments with his sister, and that’s the thru line. For all of us — nurses, doctors, firefighters, ditch diggers — we all suffer the same things. Just while we suffer them, some of us go stand on stage behind a microphone.”
“There’s something about people who are artists, there is this thing in all artists, this extreme duality, where we want people to look at us, to like us, though we’re not supposed to say that out loud,” Berkeley continued. “We’re always auditioning, We’re always trying to get the gig.”
Gilbert proves that all too often, when we get it, we still don’t necessarily believe it — even 46 successful years in. “And now, when I’m about to go on, there’s a part of me going ‘can I still do this, I don’t know how to do this,’” Gottfried admits at one point. And Berkeley tells us that he once asked the funny man, in an off-camera moment before filming began, if he still likes doing comedy. Gilbert’s answer was short, sweet, and eminently revealing: “No, I hate it — the worst thirty seconds of my life is the thirty seconds before I go on stage.” But he still goes on, of course. Only now, we know what he does before and after.
Ready to Watch?
Gilbert may be on the festival circuit, but you can still get your documentary fix right here, right now. We asked Berkeley to sort through our list of titles streaming on Tribeca Shortlist this April and May and pick three of his favorite documentaries — check them out now.
Exit Through the Gift Shop
“This came out about the time as my first movie about an artist, [Beauty is Embarrassing], and I’m one of those people that’s not convinced it’s necessarily real. Banksy is one of those people who is so good and so self aware about what he does, or what they do, that part of me thinks it’s part of a big project. Whether it’s real or not, the sad reality is that like lemmings, people are just so open to accepting what they’re told is good, what they’re told is creative. And it’s a good thing to create something so provocative that people question its honesty — and it didn’t take away from the movie for me. Instead, it was one of the few movies where I left and would ask people to talk to me about it afterwards. ”
Grizzly Man
“I just love this one. We’re all becoming very very curious about Werner Herzog. [Editor’s note: Us included.] He’s really out there now, he’s becoming very public, but he hasn’t lost what keeps him interesting — that he’s kooky, and outlandish, and talks about attacking life with vigor. [As for Grizzly Man specifically], despite it’s grizzly ending, it has a tongue-in-cheekness to it. When you hear Herzog’s voiceover, it’s very sincere, and I think it’s him winking at us, saying ‘I know what you think of me and my work.’ All the way up to the tragic ending, there are twists and turns and I think it’s Herzog saying ‘I’m aware, I know who I am,’ and I really love that about it. It’s just a really good, interesting, funny, twisting story.”
“I watched this movie initially because I wanted to see how it handles re-enactments, and found them really impressive. Overall, it’s really impressive that they just took interviews with these three guys, added really impressive re-enactments, and ended up with a really good 90 minutes. On a personal level, I had a really bad accident earlier this year and became fascinated with how much pain your body can really go through. As people, we’ll have the memory of it, but we don’t have the actual feeling. You can give it all the adjectives you want, but the realness of that pain can never be really there — so again, in this case, the re-enactments were really helpful because they were so well done. Overall, it’s just shockingly honest, really truthful, and really impressive.”
