You might have known both, one, or niether of the following two things. 1.) Gilbert Gottfried is the voice of the Aflac Duck. 2.) Gilbert Gottfried really likes to Tweet earthquake and tsunami jokes about Japan immediately after Japan suffers from earthquakes and tsunamis. It turns out the second thing made it so the first thing isn’t true anymore.
From The Hollywood Reporter:
Aflac Inc. has severed ties with comic Gilbert Gottfried, the longtime voice of the insurer’s duck mascot, after he made a series of crude jokes about the Japan earthquake and tsunami via Twitter.
“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,” Aflac Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Michael Zuna said in a statement Monday, reports TMZ. “There is no place for anything but compassion and concern during these difficult times.”
In case you were wondering what the Tweets were, they were all along these lines:
I was going to explain a whole thing here about why Gilbert Gottfriend shouldn’t have been fired, but then this following Gchat conversation happened when another blogger messaged me. This is a verbatim transcript. (Punctuation has been corrected.)
Other Blogger: So, I wrote a thing about Gottfried getting fired from Aflac for making sh*tty Japan jokes, and my take is yes, he should have shown better judgment and not made those jokes, but Aflac can’t hire an infamously raunchy roast comic and then fire him for being an infamously raunchy roast comic. Does that make sense?
Me: Uhhhhh, yes. And I was literally writing that same post.
