Rubber Balls and Liquor Page 12

  I even did a bit on Clerks as Patrick Swayze, only nobody really knew what Patrick Swayze sounded like. They knew he danced nicely and looked good in a leotard, so when they asked me to play him in an episode I didn’t worry too much about my impression. I just read the lines as myself, which worked out fairly well because nobody really knew what I sounded like, either. As long as the character was well drawn, I was ahead of the game. And just to be on the safe side, I wore my very best leotard to the studio that day. In my mind, at least, I was Patrick Swayze. Nobody could tell me any different. And nobody puts this baby in the corner.

  It was such a tragedy when Patrick Swayze died—so young, so soon. But the real tragedy, which went unreported in most of the obituaries I read after his death, was that it now appeared they’d never show this Clerks episode again. And it was such a shame, too, because I’d done some of my best work on that episode.

  Somewhere along the way, I had an opportunity to lend my vocal talents to another wisecracking winged creature. Careful readers will note here that I keep using words like artist and talents to describe my role or my abilities—but be assured, I do not overstate. There is indeed an art to providing just the right nuance in these sorts of voice-over roles. It is indeed a talent. I know this because this is what I keep telling myself. Before my next career-defining turn, however, I lent my vocal talents to several lesser roles. I played a mechanical bird in a cartoon series called Cyberchase. I did the voice of an ant in an insecticide commercial, and the voice of a toaster in a Pop-Tarts commercial. As you can see, I showed a lot of range. And speaking of range, I was once offered the part of a far more major appliance—a gas range, in fact—only I had to turn it down because it felt like too much of a reach. Plus, my gas range had been somewhat handicapped by that childhood poison-sumac-in-my-sphincter incident, so the producers looked to Robert Mitchum instead.

  But my voice-over work didn’t become truly iconic until some advertising agency contacted my agent and asked if I could play the part of a talking duck in a commercial for an insurance company. It sounded like the stupidest campaign in the history of television. Plus, I’d never even heard of the insurance company—which, it turned out, only offered supplemental insurance. My agent mentioned this to me as if I’d have the first fucking clue what the hell he was talking about.

  Still, I was a struggling actor, so I heard him out. Then I asked an important question, the answer to which would have a lot to do with my motivation as a character, and my decision to consider the role. I said, “How much does it pay?”

  The commercial was for a company called Aflac. Like I said, I’d never heard of it—but then, I was just becoming familiar with companies like Nike and Xerox and Coca-Cola, because I’m slow to grasp developing trends. For all my entertainment industry insight and savvy, I don’t exactly have a nose for fads and phenomena. Still, I had to go in and read for the role, even though the “role” was just one word. I always tell people it came down to me and Liam Neeson, and if things had gone another way it could have been Liam Neeson shouting out “Aflac!” in an annoying voice, pretending to be a duck, and me starring in Schindler’s List, merely emoting in an annoying voice, pretending to be a righteous Gentile.

  The idea for the Aflac commercial was that this duck would waddle into all these different scenes, interrupting all these different people wondering where to turn for supplemental insurance. It’s the kind of thing that happens every day, in small towns all across this great land, right? They weren’t very bright, these characters in the commercials. They’d turn around and face the duck, who kept shouting out “Aflac!” in response to their wondering, but they could never quite put two-and-two together. Either they were hard-of-hearing or hard-of-listening or just plain fucking clueless. It must have been very frustrating for the duck—that is, if it had been a real duck, and if it had been able to talk, and if it had actually been trying to be helpful.

  I got the part, but it was a struggle. I could never remember my line. Yes, I know, it was only one word, which I was supposed to deliver with a loud, honking, quacklike voice, but as I have indicated I’m something of a perfectionist. When you work with an accomplished actor like Gilbert Gottfried, everything has to be just so. And so, just to be on the safe side, I kept throwing up my hands in confusion and despair and turning to the script girl and asking, “Line?”

  I never thought it would amount to anything, this little commercial gig. It was a booking, that’s all, something for me to do between summer stock performances of Shakespeare. Even Mr. Aflac wondered what the hell he was doing, spending all that money he’d earned from his clients’ supplemental insurance premiums on such a silly campaign. But the commercials were a big hit. Right after the first one started airing, in 2000, people all over the country started waddling up to perfect strangers—in their local barbershops, their town squares, their mom-and-pop markets—just waiting for someone to ask an innocent question about supplemental insurance, at which point they’d shout, “Aflac!” They’d storm their friends and neighbors by surprise. Usually, this happened to great merriment and good cheer, although occasionally the person doing the shouting would do so in such a startling manner that people were dropping dead from heart attacks—in a sidelong way, reinforcing the need for a good supplemental insurance plan.

  Very quickly, we went back to the studio to record another bunch of spots for the same campaign. Weirdly, perhaps even frighteningly, the ad agency people had me come in and read the line all over again, each time out. I never understood why they couldn’t just use the same recording from the first session, but I never questioned it. I was getting paid, and I had to think these people knew what they were doing. That, or maybe they just figured that as long as they were paying me they might as well bust my balls and make me come in to the studio, but I choose to give them the benefit of the doubt on this. Maybe, just maybe they were looking for some subtle differences in my performances, each time I delivered my line. Maybe, just maybe there was a group of earnest-seeming ad-agency-types, carefully logging each and every take, making meticulous little notes on their yellow legal pads to remind them which readings might work best in each of their different scripted scenarios.

  “I think the duck sounds so sweet and vulnerable in Take 612,” one of the Aflac ad guys might have said. “Let’s go with that one.”

  “Oh, but Take 1,343 is so much funnier,” another ad guy might have said. “Gilbert was really feeling it that day.”

  And on and on.

  Now here we are, ten years and probably a million takes later, and they’re still making those Aflac commercials. They’re still calling me in, asking me to reread my line, and each time I try to bring something new to my interpretation because, as I have written, I’m a real professional. (Also, as I have written, they continue to pay me, and I wasn’t raised to accept handouts.) I’m always careful when I talk about that campaign, not to make too much fun of it, or to criticize the good people behind it, or to look such a transparent gift duck in the mouth in any way, because I know it’s only a matter of time before someone at the ad agency will look up from his sheaf of yellow legal pages and say, “Wait a minute, screw Gilbert, we can just get an actual duck for this.”

  Curiously, they even ran this campaign in Japan, but over there they found my voice too abrasive. These are people who have had their villages attacked by Godzilla, so that’s saying something, that I come across as too abrasive. It always reminds me how you sometimes hear two people arguing, and one of them says, “Well, I can’t speak for the Japanese.” In my case, I legally can’t speak for the Japanese.

  One of the great side benefits to being involved in such a long-running campaign is the way it’s brought my work to the attention of some of the hottest young starlets in show business. That duck is like catnip to beautiful women, I’ve learned. For a long time, I was told, Jennifer Lopez used to shout out, “Aflac!” whenever she had sex. I could only assume that she was so drawn to my work that she dreamed
constantly of fucking me, even as she was fucking someone else.

  After that, my sources told me, Jennifer Garner started doing the same thing. She’d make love to her husband and scream, “Aflac!” Thinking of me, of course—just one of the many burdens of the vast and intimidating nature of my celebrity, and the depth of my fully realized performance. I was only too happy to take one for the Aflac team in this regard.

  Another great benefit was the chance to make advertising history. Or, at least, to make the single worst entrance in advertising history. Not too long ago, the Aflac duck was inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame, along with dozens of other popular commercial characters. Speedy, the Alka-Seltzer tablet. Tony the Tiger. The California Raisins. Mr. Peanut. The Pillsbury Doughboy—or, Poppin’ Fresh, as he is known to his professional colleagues. Snap, Crackle and Pop. All these great characters, going back fifty years, and someone in charge thought to include the Aflac duck, even though we’d only been doing the campaign for about five years at that point.

  It was a great honor. I know this because that’s what I was told. Anyway, it was an honor. Besides, I’d never been inducted into anything, so I was only too happy to show up for a parade to mark the occasion. I’d never been in a parade, either, so this was shaping up to be a big day for me. It never occurred to me that I might look a little foolish, straddling the backseat of a convertible as it snaked its way up Madison Avenue to the induction ceremony. Even if it did, it would never have occurred to me to mind, because I was used to looking a little foolish. (Foolish and me, we had a history.) Anyway, it wasn’t like one of those ticker-tape parades the city throws for the Yankees when they win the World Series. I wasn’t riding in any kind of classic car, or sticking my head through the roof of a limousine. I was just sitting uncomfortably on the headrest of some guy’s Hyundai convertible, throwing stuffed ducks to the parade-goers we passed on our way. And it’s not like the streets were lined with throngs of people. In fact, I don’t think I saw a single throng along the entire route. There was more like a smattering of people, every here and there, usually waiting for the light to turn at a crosswalk.

  Some of the other characters, representing some of the bigger brands, were paraded around on elaborate floats, but there was no such star treatment for me and the duck. Oh, did I mention that I was joined on the backseat of that Hyundai by a giant inflatable duck? Funny, how that little detail almost escaped my retelling … but there he was, soaking up the small sliver of limelight that should have been just for me, flapping in the breeze like one of those low-rent inflatable stick figures you sometimes see on used car lots.

  It really was quite a moment, stuck somewhere between a thrill and a humiliation. As a matter of fact, it was the humiliation part that got me into some trouble, because I kept putting my head down, hoping no one would recognize me. When we started out, our car was sandwiched between the Planters Peanut float in front, and the Poppin’ Fresh float just behind us, but I looked up from my embarrassment at one point and couldn’t spot any trace of a parade. Suddenly, there was a city bus in front of us, and a cab stuck in traffic right behind us, and my idiot driver had somehow taken a bunch of wrong turns and was now inching down Ninth Avenue in bumper-to-bumper traffic. People were looking at me, sitting on the backseat of this cheap convertible, next to a giant stuffed duck, wondering what the fuck I was doing. And the worst part was I was all out of stuffed ducks to throw at people, so it’s not like I was armed or able to defend myself.

  For the life of me, I couldn’t imagine how we had drifted all the way to Ninth Avenue, headed downtown, when we should have been headed uptown on Madison. It’s like we were in two different boroughs. By this point, the rest of the Hall of Fame characters had made it to the end of the route, where they were supposed to be honored in a special ceremony. They had bleachers set up, in case anyone wanted to sit down and watch, and a podium so some hot-shit executive could make a speech, but no one could figure out what had happened to me and the duck, and the people in charge didn’t want to begin their presentation until I arrived on the scene.

  Snap and Pop were particularly put out by the delay, I was later told. Crackle, it turned out, was struggling through the first steps of a 12-step program for saccharine addiction, so he had to drop from the route at some point with an artificially induced case of sugar shock. But every other character had made it to the ceremony. Every other character made an appropriate, timely entrance. Even the M&M boys were on hand, refusing to melt in the heat of what was turning out to be a tense professional moment.

  (I heard that and thought, Good for them. They’re regular troupers, those M&M boys…)

  In the end, it took almost two hours for my idiot driver to finally get me and the duck to the closing ceremony, after giving me a tour of Manhattan I didn’t particularly need, and the whole way over I kept thinking of ways to explain our disappearance. In my defense, I was in character, and ducks are not known for their sense of direction, so I decided to go with that.

  8

  Gag Reflex

  Originally, the title of this chapter was going to be the title of the whole book, but then I went away to one of those writer’s retreats and came up with the title Rubber Balls and Liquor, which I liked a lot better.

  However, that left me with the problem of what to do with my original title. I hated to see it go to waste, so I decided to use it as a chapter title instead. But that only created another problem, because it had nothing to do with any of the chapters I planned to write, even though it’s the only title I could think of that has something to do with eating disorders, blow jobs and offensive comedy—three things I especially enjoy. Other than Gone with the Wind, of course, but that one’s already taken.

  I suppose I could have come up with an entirely new chapter, one I hadn’t planned to write, but that would have meant more work for me so I figured I would just use the title. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t go with anything. But I went to all that trouble coming up with it.

  Now, before you go telling your friends and relations that Gilbert Gottfried is a lazy, no-account Jew who can’t be bothered to write fresh, new material on every page of his side-splittingly hilarious and thought-provoking new book, hear me out. And, don’t be so quick to judge. I sincerely meant to write an entire chapter, to go along with my achingly clever chapter title, but I had a previous commitment. I’m a busy man. At least I give the appearance of being busy, which is close enough to the same thing. No, I’m not busy like James Brown, who for the longest time was known as the hardest-working man in show business. Certainly, he’s slowed down a bit since his death, but he’s got a long way to go before he slows all the way down to my level. Me, I like to think I’m the hardliest-working man in show business. It’s what I aspire to. As a matter of fact, I’m thinking of trademarking the phrase, and putting it on T-shirts, and possibly developing it into a theme song or maybe even a line of adult diapers, but I’m afraid this would require too much effort and possibly contradict the nickname.

  And yet despite my lackluster work ethic I sometimes have a conflict on my schedule, which appears to be the case here with this nonchapter. I won’t trouble you with the details of this conflict, because it’s probably better if you don’t know. Suffice it to say that it involves lunch meat. And caulk.

  So what do you say we just sit back and enjoy this clever title, shall we?

  9

  Circle Gets the Square

  I watched a lot of television as a kid. We’ve covered that, but I want to emphasize the point. In all fairness to me—and it’s my book, so from this point on all fairness to me should just be assumed—it’s not like I could have put my time to more productive use on the Internet. I couldn’t play Pong or do a Rubik’s Cube, because those things hadn’t been invented yet. I couldn’t run for office or start a movement, because I preferred my pursuits to be a lot more trivial. I suppose I could have hung out with my friends, but I didn’t have any, so that pretty much left televisi
on.

  You have to realize, I wasn’t exactly like the other kids in the neighborhood, or even the other kids in my family. (Well, you don’t have to come to this realization, but I believe it helps.) I couldn’t study to be a doctor or a lawyer. It’s not like I had any interests, beyond movie monsters and jerking off. What was my poor mother supposed to say each afternoon when I came home from school?

  Gilbert, try jerking off to Betty once in a while! That Veronica gets all the attention!

  Gilbert, go to your room and study to be a filthy, degenerate, moderately successful comedian!

  She couldn’t even send me to my room, because I didn’t have one. It was a small apartment, so I slept in the living room, which worked out well because that’s where we kept the television. Lucky for me, it was the golden age of afternoon television. There were Superman reruns, and game shows like Password and What’s My Line? where you’d see celebrities who were famous for being on game shows. Hey, it was New York City, the throbbing, pulsing center of the media, and anytime you get to use words like throbbing and pulsing to describe whatever it is you’re in the center of, it’s probably a good place to be. Even if you’re just off to the side, where I usually liked to stand, chances are it’s not so bad. Throbbing and pulsing media center or not, we only had a few channels, but there was plenty to watch, believe me.