Rubber Balls and Liquor
By Gilbert Gottfried (2011)

I gave up waiting for the library to stock this, and bought it on Kindle with a gift certificate I’d gotten from my mother-in-law. I did buy it, but I didn’t pay much. I think that’s the way Gilbert Gottfried would like it. This is the most self-deprecating, self-pitying, purposefully clueless and relentlessly cheap celebrity autobiography ever penned.

Turns out I already knew all the major turning points in Gilbert Gottfried’s career: Saturday Night Live during the show’s early ‘80s nadir (though he describes the present-day SNL as having transcended the need for quality comedy and is now simply “a restaurant in a good location”); Hollywood Squares (where he was the required square in what became the longest round in the show’s history, an experience he savors most for the opportunity to continually scream “You fool!” at the hapless contestants); playing a parrot in the Aladdin film and its spin-offs; doing a routine about masturbation at the Emmy Awards (where, if memory serves, he also impersonated the event’s host, Jerry Seinfeld, though Gottfried doesn’t mention that); doing a Sept. 11 joke at a Friar’s Month, in the same month as Sept. 11, and—when confronted with pained silence and cries of “Too soon!”—he launched into a telling of the classic joke “The Aristocrats” which became the centerpiece of the movie of the same name.
There’s a photo in the book of Gottfried from when he worked on the 90-minute late-night talk show hosted by Alan Thicke in 1983. I remember this show vividly. It was so hard up for material that occasionally Thicke would bring out his writers, supporting players and sidekick Richard Belzer and ask them what was on their minds. I remember Gilbert Gottfried absolutely killing in this fraught, halfbaked arena. He had his co-stars on the floor, the audience gasping. Other than that photo caption, Gottfried doesn’t mention Thicke of the Night, but I remember it as the period when the squinting, yelling persona we now associate him with first asserted itself on the small screen. (His SNL sketches

Rubber Balls and Liquor is sly, selfless and crude. It’s padded with “clip-out jokes,” one-page faux-perforated retellings of surefire classic comic stories, delivered in a literary style unlike that which Gottfried would ever use live. The main narrative, happily, is very firmly in his accustomed raspy, impatient and impassioned voice. You can hear his intonation in the text without having to pop for the audiobook. (Or hire him to read it to you; considering his opinion of his career prospects, he’d probably take the gig.) The only time it diverges from his signature yowling is when he indulges in parenthetical remarks about all the literary clichés he’s accessing in his writing. It’s the

Nearly all Gottfried’s anecdotes about his life and work have to do with him being humiliated or embarrassed. Considering that he’s been in show business for over 30 years, it’s amazing (or intentionally understated) that some of the biggest names he quotes in relation to himself come from hearsay. He tells of someone telling him that Woody Allen viewed his audition tape and asked if Gottfried was a Navajo Indian. He’s patted down at customs and is told that Julie Andrews got the same airport treatment a day earlier.

These are the anecdotes, folks! As for details about his life, all you really learn of his childhood is that he masturbated a lot and watched lots of old movies on television, usually at the same time. You don’t even know until the closing thank-yous section of the book that Gottfried is married.

Does this make Rubber Balls and Liquor a bad book? No, its very slothfulness and silliness and insipid second-classness makes it sensational. It’s celebrity pulp fiction. It’s zany and unpredictable as Gottfried wrestles with the prospect of putting into perspective a career that he’s never quite mastered.

The funniest part? This book was released just before Gottfried got fired from his gig voicing the duck in Aflac commercials, for texting jokes about the tsunami in Japan. That’s a whole chapter he didn’t get to write right there.