During an appearance Wednesday night on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” comedian Bill Maher revealed that Gilbert Gottfried, who died a day earlier, had been booked to join him on his next tour of Hawaii.
Maher has been coming to Hawaii to ring in the New Year for the past 11 years, missing only 2021 due to the pandemic. For several years now, Maher has brought guest comics with him, most recently Nikki Glaser and Christopher “Kid” Reid, for the shows at the Blaisdell Concert Hall and Maui Arts & Cultural Center.
Maher said he didn’t know Gottfried well, considering they’d run in the same circles for 40 years.
“He was a hard guy to get to know well,” Maher said. “He was so funny and so always on. I spent, I don’t know, hundreds of hours with the guy, but it was always … joking.
“There are people I know an hour that I feel like I knew better than I knew Gilbert,” the “Real Time” host continued. “But I thought, here’s the time, that’s what that Hawaii trip is for.”
Maher said grief spread throughout the stand-up community for Gottfried, who voiced Iago the parrot in the Disney film “Aladdin.”
“We’re all sending messages to each other about it.”
As a comic who views himself as “politically incorrect,” Maher sympathized with Gottfried losing a national commercial gig as the voice of the AFLAC duck because he made a 9/11 joke while taping a Hugh Hefner roast for Comedy Central shortly after the terrorist attack on the United States.
“He was the king of ‘too soon,’” Maher said. “I wanted to come up with some really inappropriate thought or something to say about him dying because that’s how he would want us to handle it. And I thought, I really let him down by not being able to come up with something totally inappropriate.”
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