Rubber Balls and Liquor (16 page)

After
Aladdin,
I was basically typecast. My agent kept putting me up for other talking-cartoon-animal parts, but nobody would hire me. I was even up for the part of a swine in an animated bestiality musical, but it went to Ron Jeremy. They said he had a better affinity for the material. This was just as well, because Disney wasn't done with me just yet. I played Iago in a sequel called
The Return of Jafar,
and then in a sequel to the sequel called
Aladdin and the King of Thieves.
Then I did his voice in a whole bunch of direct-to-video pieces of crap, and video games, and eventually someone asked me to read some material for an animatronic version of the parrot Disney wanted to add to its Tiki Room attraction in the Magic Kingdom.

At some point, sitting by myself in a nondescript sound studio in Manhattan, wearing shorts and cupping my balls in my hand beneath the table and reading from a script with the Disney logo watermarked onto each page, I had to pinch myself. For the first time in my not-so-long and not-quite-distinguished career, I allowed myself the self-satisfying thought that I had finally arrived as a performer.

At the very least, I had an affinity for the material.

All of which takes me to my all-time favorite Disney joke—another miscommunication, if you ask me. Here again, the joke is not original to me, but if you repeat it to yourself out loud, in your best impression of Iago the Parrot, I believe I can take some credit for it:

A psychiatrist is consulting with Mickey Mouse, after examining Minnie.

The doctor says, “Well, Mickey. I've examined Minnie thoroughly, and I'm afraid she's not crazy, as you have described.”

To which Mickey says, “No, doc. You've misunderstood. I didn't say she was crazy. I said she was fucking Goofy!”

My fantasy is to record that joke during my next ADR session, and have it somehow turn up in Iago's voice at the Tiki Room at the Magic Kingdom. (Now,
that's
entertainment, kids.) But, alas, it's just a fantasy, and as I have demonstrated time and time again over the years, my fantasies have a way of bouncing around in my head, over and over, never bursting forth in any sort of meaningful way, although sometimes there are a few small jets of the stuff that I have to wipe away with some tissues.

Happily, my calling as a voice-over artist did not end with this wisecracking parrot. I even moved up in the cartoon world and started doing voices for actual human characters. I appeared a few times in the animated series,
Clerks,
which was based on the Kevin Smith movie of the same name. It was like an indie-cartoon, which meant that it was smart and subtle and that nobody really watched it. In any case, for a few moments, in a small, meaningless way, I was pretty damn hip. Kevin Smith and his partners got a bunch of celebrities to do cameo appearances as themselves, and when certain celebrities were unavailable or unwilling to stoop to lending their voices to a hardly seen indie-cartoon, they looked to me. For example, they wrote a couple lines for Jerry Seinfeld, but he refused to read them, so the producers got together and thought who they might know who could do an annoying Jerry Seinfeld impression. I was their man—and I nailed it.

I even did a bit on
Clerks
as Patrick Swayze, only nobody really knew what Patrick Swayze sounded like. They knew he danced nicely and looked good in a leotard, so when they asked me to play him in an episode I didn't worry too much about my impression. I just read the lines as myself, which worked out fairly well because nobody really knew what I sounded like, either. As long as the character was well drawn, I was ahead of the game. And just to be on the safe side, I wore my very best leotard to the studio that day. In my mind, at least, I
was
Patrick Swayze. Nobody could tell me any different. And nobody puts this baby in the corner.

It was such a tragedy when Patrick Swayze died—so young, so soon. But the real tragedy, which went unreported in most of the obituaries I read after his death, was that it now appeared they'd never show this
Clerks
episode again. And it was such a shame, too, because I'd done some of my best work on that episode.

Somewhere along the way, I had an opportunity to lend my vocal talents to another wisecracking winged creature. Careful readers will note here that I keep using words like
artist
and
talents
to describe my role or my abilities—but be assured, I do not overstate. There is indeed an art to providing just the right nuance in these sorts of voice-over roles. It is indeed a talent. I know this because this is what I keep telling myself. Before my next career-defining turn, however, I lent my vocal talents to several lesser roles. I played a mechanical bird in a cartoon series called
Cyberchase.
I did the voice of an ant in an insecticide commercial, and the voice of a toaster in a Pop-Tarts commercial. As you can see, I showed a lot of range. And speaking of range, I was once offered the part of a far more major appliance—a gas range, in fact—only I had to turn it down because it felt like too much of a reach. Plus, my gas range had been somewhat handicapped by that childhood poison-sumac-in-my-sphincter incident, so the producers looked to Robert Mitchum instead.

But my voice-over work didn't become truly iconic until some advertising agency contacted my agent and asked if I could play the part of a talking duck in a commercial for an insurance company. It sounded like the stupidest campaign in the history of television. Plus, I'd never even heard of the insurance company—which, it turned out, only offered
supplemental
insurance. My agent mentioned this to me as if I'd have the first fucking clue what the hell he was talking about.

Still, I was a struggling actor, so I heard him out. Then I asked an important question, the answer to which would have a lot to do with my motivation as a character, and my decision to consider the role. I said, “How much does it pay?”

The commercial was for a company called Aflac. Like I said, I'd never heard of it—but then, I was just becoming familiar with companies like Nike and Xerox and Coca-Cola, because I'm slow to grasp developing trends. For all my entertainment industry insight and savvy, I don't exactly have a nose for fads and phenomena. Still, I had to go in and read for the role, even though the “role” was just one word. I always tell people it came down to me and Liam Neeson, and if things had gone another way it could have been Liam Neeson shouting out “Aflac!” in an annoying voice, pretending to be a duck, and me starring in
Schindler's List,
merely emoting in an annoying voice, pretending to be a righteous Gentile.

The idea for the Aflac commercial was that this duck would waddle into all these different scenes, interrupting all these different people wondering where to turn for supplemental insurance. It's the kind of thing that happens every day, in small towns all across this great land, right? They weren't very bright, these characters in the commercials. They'd turn around and face the duck, who kept shouting out “Aflac!” in response to their wondering, but they could never quite put two-and-two together. Either they were hard-of-hearing or hard-of-listening or just plain fucking clueless. It must have been very frustrating for the duck—that is, if it had been a real duck, and if it had been able to talk, and if it had actually been trying to be helpful.

I got the part, but it was a struggle. I could never remember my line. Yes, I know, it was only one word, which I was supposed to deliver with a loud, honking, quacklike voice, but as I have indicated I'm something of a perfectionist. When you work with an accomplished actor like Gilbert Gottfried, everything has to be
just so
. And so, just to be on the safe side, I kept throwing up my hands in confusion and despair and turning to the script girl and asking, “Line?”

I never thought it would amount to anything, this little commercial gig. It was a booking, that's all, something for me to do between summer stock performances of Shakespeare. Even Mr. Aflac wondered what the hell he was doing, spending all that money he'd earned from his clients' supplemental insurance premiums on such a silly campaign. But the commercials were a big hit. Right after the first one started airing, in 2000, people all over the country started waddling up to perfect strangers—in their local barbershops, their town squares, their mom-and-pop markets—just waiting for someone to ask an innocent question about supplemental insurance, at which point they'd shout, “Aflac!” They'd storm their friends and neighbors by surprise. Usually, this happened to great merriment and good cheer, although occasionally the person doing the shouting would do so in such a startling manner that people were dropping dead from heart attacks—in a sidelong way, reinforcing the need for a good supplemental insurance plan.

Very quickly, we went back to the studio to record another bunch of spots for the same campaign. Weirdly, perhaps even frighteningly, the ad agency people had me come in and read the line all over again, each time out. I never understood why they couldn't just use the same recording from the first session, but I never questioned it. I was getting paid, and I had to think these people knew what they were doing. That, or maybe they just figured that as long as they were paying me they might as well bust my balls and make me come in to the studio, but I choose to give them the benefit of the doubt on this. Maybe, just maybe they were looking for some subtle differences in my performances, each time I delivered my line. Maybe, just maybe there was a group of earnest-seeming ad-agency-types, carefully logging each and every take, making meticulous little notes on their yellow legal pads to remind them which readings might work best in each of their different scripted scenarios.

“I think the duck sounds so sweet and vulnerable in Take 612,” one of the Aflac ad guys might have said. “Let's go with that one.”

“Oh, but Take 1,343 is so much funnier,” another ad guy might have said. “Gilbert was really feeling it that day.”

And on and on.

Now here we are, ten years and probably a million takes later, and they're still making those Aflac commercials. They're still calling me in, asking me to reread my line, and each time I try to bring something new to my interpretation because, as I have written, I'm a real professional. (Also, as I have written, they continue to pay me, and I wasn't raised to accept handouts.) I'm always careful when I talk about that campaign, not to make too much fun of it, or to criticize the good people behind it, or to look such a transparent gift duck in the mouth in any way, because I know it's only a matter of time before someone at the ad agency will look up from his sheaf of yellow legal pages and say, “Wait a minute, screw Gilbert, we can just get an actual duck for this.”

Curiously, they even ran this campaign in Japan, but over there they found my voice too abrasive. These are people who have had their villages attacked by Godzilla, so that's saying something, that I come across as too abrasive. It always reminds me how you sometimes hear two people arguing, and one of them says, “Well, I can't speak for the Japanese.” In my case, I
legally
can't speak for the Japanese.

One of the great side benefits to being involved in such a long-running campaign is the way it's brought my work to the attention of some of the hottest young starlets in show business. That duck is like catnip to beautiful women, I've learned. For a long time, I was told, Jennifer Lopez used to shout out, “Aflac!” whenever she had sex. I could only assume that she was so drawn to my work that she dreamed constantly of fucking me, even as she was fucking someone else.

After that, my sources told me, Jennifer Garner started doing the same thing. She'd make love to her husband and scream, “Aflac!” Thinking of me, of course—just one of the many burdens of the vast and intimidating nature of my celebrity, and the depth of my fully realized performance. I was only too happy to take one for the Aflac team in this regard.

Another great benefit was the chance to make advertising history. Or, at least, to make the single worst entrance in advertising history. Not too long ago, the Aflac duck was inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame, along with dozens of other popular commercial characters. Speedy, the Alka-Seltzer tablet. Tony the Tiger. The California Raisins. Mr. Peanut. The Pillsbury Doughboy—or, Poppin' Fresh, as he is known to his professional colleagues. Snap, Crackle and Pop. All these great characters, going back fifty years, and someone in charge thought to include the Aflac duck, even though we'd only been doing the campaign for about five years at that point.

It was a great honor. I know this because that's what I was told. Anyway, it was an honor. Besides, I'd never been inducted into anything, so I was only too happy to show up for a parade to mark the occasion. I'd never been in a parade, either, so this was shaping up to be a big day for me. It never occurred to me that I might look a little foolish, straddling the backseat of a convertible as it snaked its way up Madison Avenue to the induction ceremony. Even if it did, it would never have occurred to me to mind, because I was used to looking a little foolish. (Foolish and me, we had a history.) Anyway, it wasn't like one of those ticker-tape parades the city throws for the Yankees when they win the World Series. I wasn't riding in any kind of classic car, or sticking my head through the roof of a limousine. I was just sitting uncomfortably on the headrest of some guy's Hyundai convertible, throwing stuffed ducks to the parade-goers we passed on our way. And it's not like the streets were lined with throngs of people. In fact, I don't think I saw a single throng along the entire route. There was more like a smattering of people, every here and there, usually waiting for the light to turn at a crosswalk.

Some of the other characters, representing some of the bigger brands, were paraded around on elaborate floats, but there was no such star treatment for me and the duck. Oh, did I mention that I was joined on the backseat of that Hyundai by a giant inflatable duck? Funny, how that little detail almost escaped my retelling … but there he was, soaking up the small sliver of limelight that should have been just for me, flapping in the breeze like one of those low-rent inflatable stick figures you sometimes see on used car lots.