The Vulnerability Displayed By Gilbert Gottfried In His 2017 Documentary ‘Gilbert’ Helped Me Uncover My Own Neurodivergence

Before I watched Neil Berkeley’s 2017 documentary Gilbert, I had only known of Gilbert Gottfried as the voice of Iago the Parrot in Disney’s Aladdin, the voice of that duck on those insurance commercials who lost his job because of some badly-timed cracks about a national disaster, and as an occasional agent of chaos on David Letterman. If I thought of him, I thought of him as I did a Bobcat Goldthwait, or an Emo Philips: stand-ups with what seemed outsized quirks-of-delivery. Performers who seemed at least as much defined by the strangeness of their personae as the pithiness of their material. I don’t know what compelled me to watch Gilbert but doing so changed my life in increasingly meaningful ways. It sounds hyperbolic to say so, and probably it’s just a product of a mid-life crisis, but I’ve encountered so many things in the last few years that I would say the same about: when you’re looking over the edge at what will likely be the last twenty-five years of your life if all goes well, a lot of stuff tends to land differently. But it’s Gilbert and, in particular, what it captured about Gottfried’s relationship with his lovely, effervescent wife Dara Kravitz, that led me down a path of uncovering my own neurodivergence and, possibly, place on the ever-malleable, sometimes subjective autism spectrum.

Being “autistic” was a pejorative for me for most of my life. Tied with Rain Man and “idiot savants” in my limited cultural understanding, I never really challenged the popular conception of the condition as one that was limiting in some way, a consummation to be devoutly wished away and in need of some identification of source and, related to that, a cure. I knew the “vaccine causes autism” contingent was/is a bunch of privileged, ableist empty-headed quacks, but I confess I did wonder if there was a “patient zero” to the disorder and, even now, find it difficult to talk about autism without using terms like “disorder.” I latched onto the introduction of “Aspergers” as a piece of the puzzle; a “missing link” between Dustin Hoffman’s burlesque of “positive” othering and Tom Hulce’s performance of Mozart in Milos Forman’s Amadeus. And I greeted the dissolution of the term with mild curiosity and lazy acceptance when it was judged to have done more harm than good. Worse than ignorant, I was incurious.

There’s something obviously unusual about Gilbert Gottfried. His stage persona is an act, but it doesn’t appear manufactured from whole cloth so much as it’s an amplification of his difference. I wonder if Goldthwait and Philips didn’t use similar amplifications of their difference as a source of power and expression rather than shame and alienation. I’m drawn to Maria Bamford as a performer now, I think, for the same reasons. The man captured by Gilbert in quieter moments is shy, polite, loving; and the man on stage was screaming about the diseases he’d gladly contract in exchange for the opportunity to perform, in response to Michael Douglas’ lunatic claims of contracting cancer from the act of performing cunnilingus on Catherine Zeta Jones. I don’t describe it well, but I haven’t laughed as long or hard at any stand-up routine since.

After watching the documentary through once, I went back and watched it again immediately. Then I asked my wife of 24 years to watch it with me a third time. Gottfried’s wife, Kravitz, is brilliant, gorgeous, and obviously in love with Gottfied. Berkeley interviews a few of Gottfried’s friends and colleagues who, to a one, adore them both but can’t quite put together how it is that someone like Dana could fall for someone like Gilbert. When people meet my wife for the first time after knowing me for any amount of time, the first thing they ask her is how she deals with me.

Defining what, exactly, “someone like Gilbert” is seems impossible to accomplish in detail. Generally, Gilbert is unconventional to the point of strange in his interpersonal interactions. There’s a beautiful moment in Gilbert where Kravitz pulls out a storage plexi full of birthday and anniversary cards he’s sent to her over the course of their relationship. In each, he’s chosen the schmaltziest, most embarrassingly-expressed cards, and added notes like “Fuck You A Million Times.” As she reads each one, she laughs long and hard at the inscriptions. I’m uncomfortable with expressions of love to my wife, too. I say it to my kids often, a skill I had to learn, but with my wife, where love returned isn’t as unconditional as it tends to be with kids when they’re young, the stakes are too high for me. If I tell her I love her, what happens when the day comes that she says she doesn’t love me back anymore? And it’s more than the fear of the loss of someone I adore — it’s the fear that this person I found who found me, too, will finally be incapable of answering the question of why she’s with “someone like Gilbert” — with someone like me. So I tell her I love her in ways that don’t involve the words and I hope she hears me.

I didn’t wonder if I was autistic until I watched Gilbert and saw similarities between his wife and my wife. If you know my wife Carolyn, you might wonder what she could ever see in me — just like Gottfried’s pals wonder what it is that Dana saw in Gilbert. The thing is, all of them also agree that they’re wonderful together. Gottfried appears to be more comfortable with his children than others he interacts with, and I wondered if that’s because children spend a such a long time with their parents before they have comparison points to other parents (thereby being poisoned by the concept of “normal”). They accept him. My kids accept me. They know I’m different now because their friends’ parents aren’t like me at all, but I’m the baseline. That’ll probably change one day. I don’t know what will happen when it does.

I reached out to a friend of mine who had told me years ago that he was autistic and asked him if the reason he gravitated towards me was that he saw in me a complementary divergence. He said that was very likely, and recommended a library of reading materials that helped him self-diagnose. I read them all. I told my wife a couple years ago that I thought I might be on the spectrum and, after doing some research herself, she agreed. As I continue to “come out” to my friends I’ve been a little stunned to discover that I’m possibly the last to come to this realization. My life hasn’t changed substantially in a day-to-day way, but what coming to understand myself as neurodivergent has done is allowed me to forgive myself for being a “failure,” a “weirdo,” for sabotaging relationships and opportunities when I couldn’t cope with the noise in my head anymore. Of course I bear responsibility for my actions, but this shame about how hard things are for me sometimes is tempered now a little by knowing how I’m wired better. It’s allowed me to hate myself less.

Which is to say that Gilbert Gottfried’s and Dana Kravitz’s transparency and vulnerability in opening up their lives, not in spite of but because of their uniqueness, in this most public of ways, is a gift. It’s an act of extraordinary generosity that I’m hoping to pay forward upon learning of his Gottfried’s untimely death at the age of 67.

“Gilbert Gottfried’s and Dana Kravitz’s transparency and vulnerability in opening up their lives, not in spite of but because of their uniqueness, is a gift. It’s an act of extraordinary generosity that I’m hoping to pay forward.”

Another moment from Gilbert: he performs at a trade show after which a couple of guys dressed as Nazis want to take a picture with the very Jewish Gottfried who’s stayed after to sell his merchandise on a foldout table. He laughs at the absurdity of it, at the embarrassment of the idiots all Hitler’d up, and as the camera clicks, he snaps a “zeig heil” and throws out the salute. This is the essence of Gottfried’s genius, this self-effacing introspection where he can find the most offensive possible way to make himself the victim of the joke.

There’s talk in the film about how hard he works, the time he spends traveling and the humility involved in selling his stuff himself, how he can’t bear to throw things away, and how Dana gets that and lets him hold on to junk because she doesn’t want to make him “uncomfortable.” But it’s not that he’s a workaholic that drove him, I think, but a fear that one day his difference won’t be acceptable anymore to audiences and he’ll be left alone again, the weird kid who runs from kind words and other intense social interactions. He spent his life making the thing that set him apart into the thing that sets him apart; crafting value from his pain and in the process of it, allowing — it can’t be only me — me to see myself differently. To see myself not as an accident, valueless and despised, but as a positive influence for people who thought they were unique in a terrible way when really they are unique in a wonderful way. And loved, above all, loved. Gottfried was beloved not for trying to be something he was not, but for being exactly who he was, loudly, defiantly, and rising above all that, courageously. Of all the things he probably didn’t think he was, he is, more than anything else for me, an inspiration. I never reached out to Gottfried and Kravitz to tell them about what their story meant to me, and he’s gone now and I let the chance go by. But I want you to know. You have value; and you are loved, not in spite of your difference, but because of it. There’s power in knowing that. Go be powerful.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for pre-order. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.