Gilbert Gottfried's Horrible Experience on SNL

Well, which Saturday Night Live was the first time of... Oh, I also did... I did a pilot. I was out in L.A. to audition for one pilot. I didn't get... And then a friend of mine, a comic, said, I'm in this pilot. You want to come and audition with me for it? I'm already in it. And I got that. Never. It was terrible. And that one was called The Adventures of Wally Brown. And one of the actors just died recently, Peter Scolari. Oh, the guy from Bus and Buddies. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, wow. And so he was one of the stars of that. Wow. And... But that was my first time of... I don't remember how much I got, but getting a check and going, wow, this is actual money. So was SNL before or after that? That was... SNL was after. And you said SNL was terrible? Yeah. Well, the season I was on, like the original... Well, Lorne Michaels left and the original cast left. Oh, really? So people hated the show before it even got on the end. Lorne Michaels left at one point? Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah. Then he came back? Yeah. Then they got in. Dick Ebersole was the next one. And... Well, no. Dick Ebersole. Dick Ebersole was after my season. My season was Jean Dominion. And... But the idea back then of Saturday Night Live with different cast members, that just wasn't... Now it's like the cast changes every five minutes. Right. But back then it was like, no, it would be like saying, like in the middle of Beatlemania that, oh, we're getting four of the guys to be the Beatles. Right. Or when Friends was on, we're recasting Friends, but just watch it the same way. And so there were news stories and articles saying, how dare they? This was sacrilege. So that's funny. So you were like the second cast? Yeah. We were the second cast and it's like... And everybody left? Yeah. Yeah. All the original people were gone. And it was like... See, you don't want to be the replacement. You want to be the replacement of the replacement. Because then you get one guy, that's the sacrificial lamb that they throw onto the fire. And then next it's like, oh, well, it's better than that other guy. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Then you come in after you and then you can actually be accepted. Yeah. Slightly. God damn. Did you enjoy the process at all? No. Not really. And I was... Nothing new. I was always weird. When I was auditioning, there were a few auditions. Some at a comedy club, others in their office, and there would be lots of people there. And I would hear other people who auditioned who would say, oh, they were so hateful of everybody else who was against them in there. And I remember just out of weirdness, not courage, out of weirdness, I didn't take auditioning for Saturday Night Live as something important. I don't know why. I just didn't. And I would go there and do bits and everything. And when I was on it, I didn't feel like... Well, I mean, there was a reason I didn't feel like I could start there because everyone was going to shreds in the press. But then when I got fired from it, I thought, okay. Oh, the way I got fired from Saturday Night Live, there used to be a table there that they would throw fan letters, one that was such thing as fan letters. Now it's, you know, who writes a fan letter anymore? It's all, you know, e-mails and stuff. And that they... So I was waiting. They had fired the producer, and Dick Ebersole came in. He said, all right, well, we're just going to make changes here and there. Nothing major. Come in next week and we'll discuss it. And they were taking people in one by one, and I'm waiting there. And killing time, I see a girl writes a fan letter to me from like Omaha or whatever. And I open it up before I even get into the office. I open the letter and it starts off, dear Gilbert, I'm so sorry about what happened to you. So I found out from a fan letter from some 15 year old girl. How did she find it? Yeah. I don't know, but she knew more than... Maybe she saw it coming. Yeah. Maybe she started writing it after the first episode. Oh, the writing's on the wall. Yeah. This guy sucks. Was it the same kind of environment? Because the thing about Saturday Night Live that I keep hearing from former cast members is that it was like a dog-eat-dog world over there. And people would be backstabbing people and stealing their ideas for sketches. Jim Brewer had a horrible time there. Yeah. I remember... Well, I remember, like I didn't like the writers and the writers hated me. And so one time to prove it, how much they hated me, they wrote a funeral sketch where I was the dead body. So I just had to lie there in the coffin. That's it? Yeah. Wow. Just to fuck you. Yeah. Yeah. The environment, Phil Hartman said the same thing. He said the environment over there was just toxic. Like everybody was like at each other's throats and just wasn't fun. They were always like just hamstringing each other. Yeah. Always trying to fuck each other over and ruin each other's sketches, not laughing at each other's sketches with a laying them out, that kind of thing. Yeah. That there was like a lot of politics over there and you had to learn the politics. He hated it. So did Jim Brewer. Yeah. I think... Yeah. I didn't have a great time there at all. So those sketch shows are just so different than Stand Up. Yeah. Watch the entire episode for free only on Spotify.