Gilbert's gift
Award season arrives and I’m busy trying to stay culturally-relevant. Though I have not written at all about it, I've watched every episode of 29 different TV shows this year. With films, I wait for the DVD format in nearly every instance (Loving was a recent exception), but I inevitably make it through the extensive list of movies I want to see, and then work again at seeking out the lost classics.
My obsession of late is the Gilbert Gottfried podcast, a once-or-twice-a-week internet release that serves the dual purpose of entertaining me and leading me back into a labyrinth of forgotten showbiz magic and near-magic-- the likes of Boris Karloff, Larry Storch, and Cesar Romero’s orange slices.
Gilbert's program is a charming portrait of a man and a moment, but that moment is long past. Co-hosted by comic writer Frank Santopadre, it is a show decidedly out of the present, a celebration of the arcane and obscure in entertainment history. I dare say that Gilbert is the new, true champion of the young medium. The more celebrated podcast belongs to fellow comic Marc Maron. That program’s attempt at urbanity and its lesser obsession with Danny Thomas’ rumored sexual/scatological kinks (relative to that of the Gilbert show) certainly helped elevate it to its position as Slate’s “greatest podcast of all time” two years ago, and also to attract a current President of the United States to sit for an hour-long interview, but compared to Gilbert, Maron, to me, often seems ill-prepared for his interviews (and I could also do mostly without the pre-interview monologues on each episode).
To hear Maron recently express his unknowing surprise to Alan Alda that Alda’s father was a celebrated actor in his own right-- Gilbert would never err in such a way, enlightened a theory of mine that, during all those years Maron was wasting his free time high on coke during his stand-up career, Gilbert’s hours away from the stage were better spent in front of the TV in countless hotel rooms.
Gilbert’s show is also refreshingly free of self-promotion. To listen to Maron’s podcast is to get a constant reminder from the host of how badly the comic's career needed this break to have come along when it did, but with Gilbert, the whole thing just seems like gravy. He seems singularly interested in resurrecting the profiles of long-forgotten heroes, and he’s performing the additional service of getting many of these elderly entertainers-- Joe Franklin, Marty Allen, Dick Van Dyke, Larry Storch, Ken Berry, Julie Newmar, James Karen, Pat Cooper, Barbara Feldon, and Orson Bean, to name just a small number of many, to get their stories told before they go.
Gilbert Gottfried, that perplexing and controversial comic personality that was famously fired by each one of the entities-- Saturday Night Live, Donald Trump, and Aflac insurance, has finally found the perfect outlet for his talents-- some of which I didn’t even know he possessed. I think “Gilbert” is well on his way now to becoming one of those mononymous personalities, along the lines of Madonna or Beyonce.
posted by CM @ 6:03 PM
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