Rubber Balls and Liquor Page 11

  Sandra Bullock: “Honey, take your tattooed biker dick out of that stripper’s pussy and help me find a place on the shelf for my Oscar!”

  Now, another thing they teach you in comedy graduate school is the big finish, and I’m way ahead of you here. As you can see, I’ve built up this literary impression routine in such a way that we’re now in the middle of a rollicking crescendo, which really is the best kind of crescendo, and headed for a grand finale, where I intend to leave you rolling in the aisles. Hopefully, wherever you’re reading this, in whatever format, there will be some sort of aisle nearby. I’ve set it up so you now have no choice but to appreciate my ability to cross genders and genres with my impressions, so you’re ready for anything. You are fairly helpless against my powers as an entertainer.

  But wait. Before my boffo close, I believe it’s important to point out my disinterest in the scene I am about to reinterpret. In fact, I am one of the only people in my acquaintance (and I happen to be one of my very closest acquaintances) who didn’t laugh at Meg Ryan’s famous climactic scene in When Harry Met Sally. I didn’t even crack a knowing smile. It really didn’t do anything for me, that scene. I just didn’t get it—but that didn’t make it any less memorable.

  And so, in rousing conclusion, I offer my virtuoso Meg Ryan impression:

  “Oh, oh, oh, oh … Mmmmmm … Oh, oh, oh, oh … Oh Jesus God, no … I mean, Oh Jesus God, yes … Yes, yes, yes, yes … Oh, oh, oh, oh … Yes, yes, yes, yes…”

  And so on. And so forth. And so help me. And, with a little bit of an exclamation point in the form of me pounding my fist on the table in front of me, for emphasis.

  Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I should probably mention here that I am physically incapable of faking an orgasm. I know this because I’ve tried, on many occasions. I haven’t had a lot of practice, mind you, but I’ve made the most of my opportunities. In fact, the few times I’ve gotten lucky in my life, I was always made to feel it was because God had somehow stopped paying attention. It’s like He had to leave the room to go to take a leak, and the world tilted on its axis in such a way that my pants fell to my ankles and the girl I was with at the time didn’t run from the room in horror. Either way, God or no God, it hasn’t come up all that often, but I’m pretty sure I can’t fake an orgasm.

  Women seem to have no problem in this area, especially around me. Sometimes, they’re so disinterested, they don’t even bother faking. They just tell me to go away. Me, I can fake an erection, but for some reason my orgasms are almost always authentic, and the “impersonation” of Meg Ryan’s fake orgasm in a Jewish deli that you just enjoyed a brief moment ago falls into the authentic category, I’m afraid. Yes, that was really me, coming. All over the place, I was coming, which probably makes this the first time in recent publishing history when it was a good thing to be reading a book in one of those newfangled digital formats, because as far as I know it’s impossible for my ejaculate to travel from my own handheld device to yours.

  Lucky for you, the technology isn’t quite there yet. But it will be, soon. And when it is, I’ll be all over it. Or, I should say, I’ll be all over you.

  7

  Adventures in Animation

  Okay, so that pretty much covers the front end of my career. It’s the rear end that gives me trouble.

  Let’s just say my career has walked a tightrope between early-morning children’s programming and hardcore porn. I remarked on this once in an interview, in an offhanded way, which is how I do most of my remarking when I give interviews. But then I realized that many a truth is said in jest, sometimes in an offhanded way. I know this because I read it in a fortune cookie.

  Say what you will about my career (and, frankly, I’m satisfied when someone says anything about my career), there’s no denying that sometime after those first few movies and those early fits and starts I came to occupy a creepy place on the spectrum of mildly popular culture. How this happened—or, when; or, why—I’ve got no idea, only that it seems to have been a happy accident, because I’m quite certain I never dreamed of a career in show business that walked a tightrope between early-morning children’s programming and hardcore porn. It just worked out that way. You see, it turned out that I have a face for voice-overs. That line is not original to me, of course. Every schmuck who’s ever worked in radio has used a version of that line to appear self-deprecating and humble, but I’m borrowing it here because I really do have a face for voice-overs.

  (For what it’s worth, and it’s probably not much, I tend to avoid self-deprecation and humility, unless they involve some form of direct compensation.)

  I know this because some Disney executive once told me it wouldn’t be such a good idea to show my face in public at a Disney event or to appear at one of their theme parks because I might frighten small children. This was discussed at the corporate level, apparently, and there was General Consensus—and who am I to question General Consensus? Up and down the chain of command, it’s a different story. Corporal Punishment? Him I can second-guess. Private Parts? Also, open to scrutiny. Major Disappointment? Ah, this fellow keeps turning up, without fail, every time I speak into a microphone, and of course I can’t be expected to keep from questioning him. But General Consensus? No, he knows his stuff.

  Not to mention Sergeant Flea Collar …

  (By the way, what the hell kind of phrase is not to mention? Think about it: those words never appear in a sentence unless whatever it is that’s not quite worthy of mention is in fact being mentioned. But it’s a resilient little phrase. You can be on the lookout for it, and guarding against it, and it can still sneak its way into your sentences when you’re looking the other way—as I have apparently been doing here. I can’t tell you how broken up I am about this.)

  Back to that thing I wasn’t about to mention: Sergeant Flea Collar, for those of you too young or too disinterested to remember, was a promotional character developed by the Sergeant line of pet products, and it’s hardly worth mentioning here except that it amuses me to do so. My thinking here is, To hell with you, dear reader, if you choose not to join me in my amusement. But that’s entirely up to you.

  Actually, now that I’ve gone and not-about-to-mentioned it, I’m a little fuzzy on this one. Let’s just say I think Sergeant Flea Collar was a promotional character, but I can’t be certain. If it wasn’t, it should have been. At the very least, if it wasn’t, those Sergeant people really missed out on an opportunity—and I could have made a buck doing the voice-over.

  If memory serves—and here I am almost certain that it does; not only that, it also cleans up after itself—the first voice-over role I ever auditioned for was the part of the wisecracking parrot Iago in the animated Disney feature Aladdin. I was born to play that role, it turns out. To this day, it stands as one of the defining moments of my career, which even I have to admit is somewhat sad.

  (Check that: I don’t have to admit it, but I believe that doing so makes me somewhat more attractive to women—or, at least, to the sort of women who might not find the idea of a short, foul-mouthed Jewish comedian admitting to a slight professional regret to be not too terribly repulsive.)

  One thing led to another, and after that toward some other thing that was neither here nor there, and after that I was headed off on this whole new career path that would never have presented itself if I hadn’t gotten this Disney job. Now all these years later I’m known for playing this wisecracking parrot, and for telling the world’s filthiest joke—two crowning achievements, to which I must also add the appearance of my bald, misshapen head bursting through my mother’s vagina during childbirth (technically speaking, my first crowning achievement, according to official records). Not incidentally, it was at just this moment, family historians have noted, that I uttered my first word—“Aflac!”—which came out sounding like a whiny, nasally honk, and after that the OB-GYN turned to my mother and said, “I think you might have something here!”

  I can no longer recall with any reliable de
gree of certainty if I knew I was reading for the role of a cartoon character when I went out on that Aladdin audition. It’s possible that I asked my agent what I should wear, but I don’t think so. If you’ve seen my wardrobe, you’ll know there’s no point in even asking.

  (“Oh, pants? You think?”)

  But it became apparent to me soon enough that I was reading for the voice of a cartoon parrot. Certainly, by the second act. Afterward, I heard one of the Disney executives who’d been sitting in on my audition turn to one of his colleagues and say, “Gilbert Gottfried? I don’t know. He always struck me as a little one-dimensional.”

  Really.

  I could only imagine at the time who I was up against for the role—De Niro? Duvall?—but it appeared that they weren’t born to it the way I had been born to it. I later learned that it came down to me, Joe Pesci and Danny DeVito. Apparently, the call was out in Hollywood for short, unattractive Jews and Italians. Eventually the part went to me, and once it did I was determined to do a good job with it.

  (Years later, I heard it on good authority that the producers had originally offered the part of Iago to Warren Beatty, who turned it down because the thought of playing a parrot in the desert reminded him of his role in Ishtar. I have no idea if this is true, but I was raised to believe that a book of comic reminiscences is incomplete without at least one Ishtar reference, even if it appears in a parenthetical aside.)

  (Moreover, if the parenthetical Ishtar reference appears in a stand-alone paragraph, I’m told it can be especially funny.)

  I kept asking the Aladdin director to help me with my motivation. I wanted to know everything I could about my character, just like they tell you to do in those Method acting classes. This would be my method, I decided, now that I was finally working in a major role, in a major release, from a major studio. It didn’t matter that it was a cartoon. It didn’t matter that it was a supporting role. At least, I told myself these things didn’t matter. In truth, they mattered a great deal. The entire business was like dreaming of being a ballplayer and waking up one day with your balls cupped in your hand and thinking you’d somehow arrived. Still, this was my big break, and I wasn’t about to fuck it up. Not if I could help it. Some people might say I was a perfectionist, but that’s just me. (Meaning, of course, that it would just be me, saying I was a perfectionist.) At one point, I think I even threw up my hands, and the pages of my script went flying all over the place, and I stormed off the soundstage screaming, “My character would never say such a thing!”

  At some other point, immediately following, I think I heard someone ask if Joe Pesci might still be available.

  The thing about voice-overs is you’re never made to feel like you’re working on a movie. You’re just standing in a room, reading your lines into a microphone. It’s like having a telephone conversation, with a group of earnest people with stopwatches looking on, and no one on the other end of the line. There’s no interaction with the other actors, reading the other voices. There’s no dressing room, because of course there’s no dressing. There’s no fancy catering truck, or craft services table filled with good things to eat. There’s no syncing of your voice to the action on the screen. That’s all done later, in post. In fact, if I had a dollar for every time I heard some middle-aged techie-type tell me something would be done later, in post, I’d have a lot of dollars—enough, certainly, to eat off the McDonald’s “Dollar Value” menu for quite some time, which in turn would probably eliminate the need for the fancy catering truck.

  Sometimes, the postproduction stage continues long after the movie has been in theaters. Once, after Aladdin had become so ridiculously and unaccountably successful it had spawned a couple sequels and a theme park attraction and a Disney Channel cartoon series, I was called back to the studio to redub a scene. In voice-overs, they call this procedure an ADR, which stands for Automated Dialogue Replacement. For years, I thought it stood for Another Disney Requirement, but I was mistaken. Apparently, that was just the way these Disney executives had been trained to make us voice actors feel, like we were beholden to them for our very existence. And, in many ways, we were.

  Here, they wanted me to replace one word in a scene from the cartoon series, after it had already aired. In the scene, Iago the parrot was being chased by a tiger, so he quite reasonably exclaimed, “Let’s get out of here! That cat is looking at us like we’re kitty chow!”

  Now, in the Gilbert Gottfried Method School of Voice-Over Acting, this surely counted as something my character might have said, in just such a situation, but apparently there was a woman somewhere in Middle America who begged to differ. Either she didn’t understand Iago’s motivation, as the cartoon drama was unfolding, or she was just a complete fucking idiot. I tended to lean toward the latter. What happened, best I could tell, was that this complete fucking idiot was watching the cartoon with her children one afternoon, and misheard my character’s line. That’s all. She thought I said that the cat was looking at us like we were “titty chow.” This was troubling, she wrote in a heated letter to the appropriate Disney executive, because it was potentially confusing to her young children, who might have taken Iago’s comment as an offhanded endorsement of a popular product developed for people who kept women’s breasts as household pets.

  Such is the power of a Middle American woman who believes she and her children have been wronged. And so it fell to yours truly, as a caretaker of the Disney brand, to race back to the studio to redub the scene in such a way that even a stupid person with a hearing problem could take no offense.

  The human ear can certainly play tricks on us, and I am reminded here of an amusing miscommunication with a woman I was thinking of hiring to clean my house. At least, I found it amusing, and this is the most important thing. The woman was British, with the unlikely name of Cunt. I think she spelled it with a “K,” but it felt unnatural to me, so I insisted on spelling it with a “C.” After all, we were in America, where we can call a Cunt a Cunt, without fear of reprisal.

  This was where the amusing miscommunication came into play, because I suppose it’s possible that with her British accent the cleaning lady’s name wasn’t really Cunt at all. Rather—or, rawther, as the Brits were wont to say (and you’ll notice here that I’ve slipped in another Brit-seeming word, wont, to suggest that I have an ear for accents and dialects and regional phrasing)—it might have been Kant or Kaunt or Kauliflower, and my ears were just playing tricks on me. Either way, this would-be cleaning lady wasn’t particularly qualified for the job, but I ended up hiring her anyway, mostly for the opportunity to chase after her all day and say, “Hey, Cunt, dust that cabinet over there!” Or, “Hey, Cunt, you didn’t do such a good job mopping my floor!” Or, “Hey, Cunt, I thought I told you to look me in the eye when I talk to you!”

  It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—for me, of course, and not necessarily for that Cunt—although looking back I’m a little ashamed of my behavior. Some people might say I was a real prick about it, but I prefer to think of myself as more of an asshole. In my defense, my actions came from an honest mistake. I kept hearing one thing, while my hardly qualified cleaning lady kept saying another. After a while, the poor woman couldn’t stand it anymore. She didn’t want to give up the job, so she changed her name. I think her name was Jane Cunt, so she changed it to Susan Cunt, and after that there was no longer any confusion.

  After Aladdin, I was basically typecast. My agent kept putting me up for other talking-cartoon-animal parts, but nobody would hire me. I was even up for the part of a swine in an animated bestiality musical, but it went to Ron Jeremy. They said he had a better affinity for the material. This was just as well, because Disney wasn’t done with me just yet. I played Iago in a sequel called The Return of Jafar, and then in a sequel to the sequel called Aladdin and the King of Thieves. Then I did his voice in a whole bunch of direct-to-video pieces of crap, and video games, and eventually someone asked me to read some material for an animatronic version of the parrot Disn
ey wanted to add to its Tiki Room attraction in the Magic Kingdom.

  At some point, sitting by myself in a nondescript sound studio in Manhattan, wearing shorts and cupping my balls in my hand beneath the table and reading from a script with the Disney logo watermarked onto each page, I had to pinch myself. For the first time in my not-so-long and not-quite-distinguished career, I allowed myself the self-satisfying thought that I had finally arrived as a performer.

  At the very least, I had an affinity for the material.

  All of which takes me to my all-time favorite Disney joke—another miscommunication, if you ask me. Here again, the joke is not original to me, but if you repeat it to yourself out loud, in your best impression of Iago the Parrot, I believe I can take some credit for it:

  A psychiatrist is consulting with Mickey Mouse, after examining Minnie.

  The doctor says, “Well, Mickey. I’ve examined Minnie thoroughly, and I’m afraid she’s not crazy, as you have described.”

  To which Mickey says, “No, doc. You’ve misunderstood. I didn’t say she was crazy. I said she was fucking Goofy!”

  My fantasy is to record that joke during my next ADR session, and have it somehow turn up in Iago’s voice at the Tiki Room at the Magic Kingdom. (Now, that’s entertainment, kids.) But, alas, it’s just a fantasy, and as I have demonstrated time and time again over the years, my fantasies have a way of bouncing around in my head, over and over, never bursting forth in any sort of meaningful way, although sometimes there are a few small jets of the stuff that I have to wipe away with some tissues.

  Happily, my calling as a voice-over artist did not end with this wisecracking parrot. I even moved up in the cartoon world and started doing voices for actual human characters. I appeared a few times in the animated series, Clerks, which was based on the Kevin Smith movie of the same name. It was like an indie-cartoon, which meant that it was smart and subtle and that nobody really watched it. In any case, for a few moments, in a small, meaningless way, I was pretty damn hip. Kevin Smith and his partners got a bunch of celebrities to do cameo appearances as themselves, and when certain celebrities were unavailable or unwilling to stoop to lending their voices to a hardly seen indie-cartoon, they looked to me. For example, they wrote a couple lines for Jerry Seinfeld, but he refused to read them, so the producers got together and thought who they might know who could do an annoying Jerry Seinfeld impression. I was their man—and I nailed it.