There are certain jokes you tell to your friends and others you make public, especially if you’re the voice for a company that prides itself on caring. I’m not going to knock Gilbert Gottfried for having a sick sense of humor, but I will chastise him for being a dumbass and not realizing Aflac wouldn’t share his sentiments. In case you’ve been living under a rock, Japan has been devastated the last few days by a tsunami and a nuclear reactor catastrophe. Thousands are dead, and in the wake of it all, Gilbert Gottfried hit up Twitter to make twelve over the line jokes about Japan’s awful situation. Now he’s unemployed.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the company does nearly seventy-five percent of its business in Japan and has already partnered with the relief effort to donate one hundred million dollars to the cause. They quickly released a statement in response to Gottfried’s actions saying, “Gilbert’s recent comments about the crisis in Japan were lacking in humor and certainly do not represent the thoughts and feelings of anyone at Aflac.” Obviously.
Since it’s creation, the Gottfried-voiced Aflac duck has become a cultural sensation. Parodied on Saturday Night Live and still widely used in marketing today, it’s the embodiment of one of the more successful marketing campaigns in history. The company has no plans on chopping the character because of the shake-up and has already begun a massive casting call to find someone else who can do the voice.
