The insurance company Alfac didn’t think comedian Gilbert Gottfried’s wise quacks on Twitter about the Japan earthquake and tsunami were just ducky. So they’ve cooked his goose: they fired him.
Gottfried thus becomes the latest talented show biz type who for about branding (and good taste, although that matters little in today’s comedy). You can’t just wing it on Twitter and not expect it’ll get on the web.
The notoriously nasal comedian has been fired from his gig as the voice of the Aflac duck after the insurance company got wind of some tweets posted by the comedian making light of the ongoing earthquake disaster in Japan.
So apparently there is a limit to how annoying the Aflac duck can be…
“Gilbert’s recent comments about the crisis in Japan were lacking in humor and certainly do not represent the thoughts and feelings of anyone at Aflac,” the company, which does a huge amount of business in the earthquake-ravaged nation, said in a statement. “There is no place for anything but compassion and concern during these difficult times.”
Here are two of his jokes:
“I was talking to my Japanese real estate agent,” went one of Gottfried’s dozen cyber cracks that began Saturday. “I said, ‘Is there a school is this area?’ She said, ‘Not now, but just wait.’ ”
And this: “Japan is really advanced. They don’t go to the beach. The beach comes to them.”
But Gottfried isn’t alone in the dark humor department, notes the Chicago Times’ Mike Thomas:
Gottfried, though, isn’t the only showbiz type making light of an increasingly dire situation that has most offering prayers and drumming up financial support.
Here’s “Family Guy” writer Alec Sulkin, also on Twitter, when the number of reported casualties still hovered in the hundreds: “If you wanna feel better about this earthquake in Japan, google ‘Pearl Harbor death toll.’ ”
Sulkin apologized soon after and deleted his comment.
Before imploring followers to “pray for anyone who has lost someone,” Rapper 50 Cent got quippy with it, too, tweeting. “This is very serious, people. I had to evacuate all my hoe’s from LA, Hawaii and Japan. I had to do it. Lol.”
In reality, this kind of humor is not new. When I lived in Spain they called it “black humor” and there were all kinds of jokes during the Franco years (I was there 1975-1978) about terrorists attacks and Franco’s seemingly-forever death throes.
The difference here is that Gottfried is associated with a corporation and involved in part of the millions they spend on creating an image. There is a line celebrities and others can cross.
To compound the problem for Gottfried: as the death toll rises; the videos are more shocking tragic, and downright, sickening — and the tragedy now takes on a nuclear power peril twist — his Tweets posted at specific times increasingly worse as time goes on.
They also stand out because the vast majority of people have better taste than to post similar ones.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.