Jimmy Kimmel Remembers the Night Gilbert Gottfried Bombed With a 9/11 Joke—and Then Killed

This week, the celebrated comedian Gilbert Gottfried passed away at the age of 67. The Brooklyn native was known for his booming, grating voice and fearless brand of comedy, as well as his brief stint on SNL, voicing the parrot Iago in Aladdin, playing the shady adoption agent in the Problem Child movies, voicing the Aflac duck, and performing stand-up.

Remembering Gilbert Gottfried’s Iconic ‘Aristocrats’ JokeR.I.P.

Jordan Julian, Marlow Stern

Gottfried’s most renowned stand-up set occurred during the Friar’s Club roast of Hugh Hefner in New York City on Sept. 29, 2001, weeks after the 9/11 attacks. At the roast, hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, Gottfried told a 9/11 joke: “I have to catch a flight to California. I can’t get a direct flight. They said they have to stop at the Empire State Building first.”

He was showered with boos and shouts of “too soon!” from the crowd, later recalling that it was “bigger than anybody has ever lost an audience.”

So in order to win them back, he told a lengthy rendition of The Aristocrats—an age-old joke popular among comics dating back (allegedly) to the days of Vaudeville, involving a family trying to convince an agent to book their stage act that quickly devolves into a symphony of taboos typically incorporating everything from incest to bestiality. The crowd ate it up.

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On Wednesday night, Kimmel recounted that night on Jimmy Kimmel Live!

“I hosted that roast,” he said to guest Bill Maher. “At that time, it was right after 9/11… And no one was obviously joking about it. Gilbert gets on stage and says some of the craziest stuff.”

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“I wish he could hear all these things everyone was saying about him—about how funny [he was]. He was truly one of these guys who was a comedian’s comedian,” Kimmel continued. “When he told that Aristocrats joke—first he told a horrible 9/11 joke, and the audience was booing him, and it was, ‘Oh no, we’re going to have to save Gilbert,’ and then he transitioned into the filthiest joke that was not well-received at all for the first six minutes, and then the final six minutes people were crying.” (It was actually nine minutes and fifty seconds long.)

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