Gilbert Gottfried Pokes Fun at His Japanese Tsunami Controversy on Posthumous New Album

Comedian Gilbert Gottfried’s hilarious career featured multiple instances of the comic sticking his foot in his mouth. He practically invented “too soon!” comedy with his 9/11 jokes at Hugh Hefner’s roast only three weeks after September 11th. That got him in hot water, but the jokes that really cost him money came in 2011 after an earthquake disaster in Japan.

Twitter was still relatively new then, and Gottfried took to the platform to share 12 jaw-dropping jokes in the aftermath of the tragic tsunami. He shocked social media with punchlines like: 

• “Japan is really advanced. They don’t go to the beach. The beach comes to them.”
• “Japan called me. They said ‘Maybe those jokes are a hit in the US, but over here, they’re all sinking.’” 

The scandalous punchlines didn’t sit well with Aflac, the company that employed Gottfried as the voice of its duck mascot. Consider that 75 percent of Aflac’s business came from Japan and you’ll understand why the company fired Gottfried from the job. The comic later apologized — “I meant no disrespect, and my thoughts are with the victims and their families,” he said in a statement — but he would quack no more for Aflac.

This week, Clown Jewels released Still Screaming, a new double-album of original Gottfried stand-up material. As always, the comic doesn’t turn away from controversy. On Still Screaming’s second track, “Weather Problems,” Gottfried deals with the aftermath of his social-media upheaval.

“Nothing happened in Japan today, did it?” he begins, setting the crowd into nervous laughter. “I just like to be extra careful. Anything at all, even a light drizzle, I don’t want to talk about it. If someone’s sink overflows, I’m not going to mention it.”

Not a lot of people know this, he jokes, but when the tsunami hit, it sent Japanese people running — not for safety but to their laptops to check the comic’s Twitter account. “With 10,000-foot waves coming at them, they were over there going, ‘How do you spell Gottfried?’”

Even while their houses were being pulled into the ocean, the Japanese weren’t worried about the tsunami — it was “this Jewnami” that represented the real danger. In fact, Gottfried jokes, he was the worst thing to happen to Japan since Godzilla. 

Karma got its revenge on Gottfried when Hurricane Sandy hit New York, he tells the crowd. News reports about the incoming storm were overblown, he figured, until he watched live footage of entire Long Island communities being upended by the maelstrom. “I couldn’t believe what I was watching,” he exclaims. Then his TV went out. The lights turned off. Gottfried looked out his window and saw the entirety of New York City plunged into a mass blackout. In the dark, with his heart pounding, Gottfried’s phone rang with a call from the Prime Minister of Japan: “Oh, not so funny now, huh?”

Gottfried passed away in 2022 from ventricular tachycardia caused by Myotonic Dystrophy Type 2. In conjunction with the release of Still Screaming, the comic’s family and friends are asking fans to support Myotonic Dystrophy Type 2 research by making a gift to the Gilbert Gottfried Myotonic Dystrophy Type 2 Research Fund.