The Voice of the Aflac Duck Fired

Gibert Gottfried, the voice of the Aflac duck (and btw) one of my favorite commercials, has been fired.
apparently, he was found tweeting about the Japanese tragedy in a lighthearted manner.

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/BUSINESS/03/14/georgia.aflac.duck/

Aflac is sending out a casting call for a new duck.

It seems to me that the internet is so pervasive, that a person has to be very careful about what he writes there, even in jest.

What do you think? Should Gottfried have been fired? Are you careful about what you write in Facebook, or on Twitter?

It probably won't faze him to have lost this gig for him

One, is it silly that he was fired for making jokes, since he is a comedian anyways? What do people expect? Most comedians take a bad situation and try to make light of it through humor, but most people can't figure that out.

Another thing I really wonder about is how much the japanese would care.

Too soon. After sending out a series of jokes about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami on his Twitter feed, comic Gilbert Gottfried has been roundly excoriated for his poor judgment, and on Monday, he lost his gig as the voice of the Aflac duck. Though he's since deleted the offending gags, nothing ever goes away on the Internet. Buzzfeed compiled 10 of the more outrageous ones -- a relentless string that included the observation that "I was talking to my Japanese real estate agent. I said 'is there a school in this area.' She said 'not now but just wait'" and "I asked a Japanese girl to sleep with me. She said 'okay, but you'll have to sleep in the wet spot.'" Aflac, the No. 1 insurance company in Japan, said in a statement that the comments "were lacking in humor and certainly do not represent the thoughts and feelings of anyone at Aflac."

Gottfried isn't the first person in history, or indeed, even this week, to bomb. Michael Sorrentino, better known as The Situation, drew boos a few days ago at the Donald Trump roast for his crass, racist remarks. Do you know how hard it is to offend at a roast? For Donald Trump? And the always willing to say the wrong thing 50 Cent tweeted this weekend that "Its all good Till b*tches see there christian louboutins floating down da street **** gone get crazy" and "Look this is very serious people I had to evacuate all my hoe's from LA, Hawaii and Japan."

But the distinction between The Situation and 50 Cent and Gilbert Gottfried is that when The Situation and 50 Cent fall flat in their jokes, it's because they aren't comedians. There's something that rings especially offensive when someone unskilled in the craft of humor attempts it and flubs -- it's like listening to Pierce Brosnan sing. Gottfried, on the other hand, may not be your cup of comedy tea, but he hasn't been at this for over 30 years for nothing. And he's been shocking people just as long.

Gottfried is known for a variety of things: the voice of the parrot in "Aladdin," that Aflac duck, one of the millions of veterans of "Saturday Night Live." He's also the man who, nearly 10 years ago, introduced us formally to the concept of "Too soon!" At a Friar's roast for Hugh Hefner just two weeks after 9/11, Gottfried got up and quipped that he was trying to get a flight to Los Angeles, but "they said they have to connect with the Empire State Building first," inspiring that now-famous cry for comedic restraint in the face of disaster. Gottfried went on to win back the crowd by delivering a stunning version of the classic "aristocrats" gag -- and Frank Rich later called the performance, 9/11 bit and all, "greatest dirty joke ever told." "At a terrible time it was an incongruous but welcome gift," he wrote. "He was inviting us to once again let loose."

Of course, Gottfried was letting loose within the very culture that had suffered a blow. He wasn't an outsider halfway around the world. And two weeks after 9/11, the smoke had mostly cleared and the dead were largely accounted for. Japan is still very much under siege. They say comedy is tragedy plus time, but how much time, exactly? Heard any good Katrina jokes lately? When was the last time somebody really killed on Conan with a routine about Darfur? And even when the cathartic power of humor finds its way into a harrowing story, there's still a different level of acceptance for finding the funny in a movie clip about Hitler's last days and out and out riffing on the Holocaust.

Was it insensitive for Gottfried to make light of human tragedy -- and foolish to bite the quacking hand that feeds him? Absolutely. But what is a comic but another word for a fool? He was clumsy and tasteless, that's why he removed the posts. He told the Hollywood Reporter Tuesday, "I sincerely apologize to anyone who was offended by my attempt at humor regarding the tragedy in Japan. I meant no disrespect, and my thoughts are with the victims and their families." But relatively speaking, Gottfried's ill-considered attempt at levity at a horrible moment still seems considerably less stupid than Glenn Beck's cackling speculation that the earthquake was "a message" from God to follow the Ten Commandments. At least Gottfried knew what he was saying was over-the-top and ridiculous. He intended it to be so.

In the wake of unsurpassed devastation, it's hard to find anything to smile about. Gottfried's instincts were a comic's: to look at catastrophe and try to attack it with the main weapon in his arsenal. In the worst moments of life, humor can be a potent force for healing (think of The Onion's brilliant post-9/11 coverage) -- or salt in a still bleeding wound. Gottfried was likely trying to lash out at the horror of the quake itself, but the barbs fell too close to its victims. And while timing is everything in comedy, for one comic, never might be too soon to start joking about this as-yet-unfathomable disaster.

In the end, I think humor is perception, or at least can be.

The biggest tactical mistake Gottfried made was not writing these jokes or even telling them. As I've illustrated above, sick jokes follow disasters like autumn follows summer, and there's always an appreciative audience with ears open wide to receive them. Had Gottfried introduced any of his Japan jokes in his comedy club routine, I doubt that any patron would have winced at his crudeness or insensitivity, let alone walked out. After all, Gottfried is known transgressor. He's the comic who, when lightly booed for telling a 9/11 joke at a Friars Club roast for Hugh Hefner three weeks after the attacks, segued into a triumphant, wildly obscene telling of the famous joke that's chronicled in the 2005 film The Aristocrats. The mystery to me is not why did Aflac sack him, but why did they hire him in the first place?
Gottfried's "mistake," if you want to call it that, was to tell his vile and timely jokes in a venue that he thought was as safe as a dinner party with a friend. Before posting, Gottfried must have thought, Who but a lover of daring comedy would follow me on Twitter? But he was wrong. The new rules have made everybody—including edgy comedians—accountable in the public sphere for the things they says "privately" in social media spaces. (See also the school teacher who gets fired because somebody finds a Facebook page of her chugging from a bottle of vodka.) Would Michael Richards have suffered the same universal shaming if his off-the-wheels racist attack on a heckler at an L.A. comedy club hadn't been videotaped and posted to the Web?

Simply management saying "We don't AFLAC associated with this in any way,
shape or form."

. . . That explanation does not wash.

Sure it does. The disaster is huge and horrifying. AFLAC wants no part, even
by association, of seeming to demean it.

....dont you see a little problem with your logic??