Gilbert Gottfried and Artie Lange Do an Hour of Bits That Would Get a Network Fired

There is no guest. Gilbert Gottfried showed up late, and for the first several minutes Artie Lange just starts anyway, doing riffs about Magic Johnson’s HIV status, William Shatner’s dead wife, and Paul Lynde’s alleged proclivities on a children’s television program. Nobody seems to mind. This is the show. The show is two guys who have collectively absorbed every bad-taste comedy record from 1960 to 1990 sitting in a room and free-associating until someone has to read an ad for a Blu-ray discount site. It is, genuinely, hilarious. It is also completely unbroadcastable everywhere except exactly where it is.

When Gilbert does arrive, the energy doesn’t change so much as compress. Artie does big, sprawling, heavily punctuated bits. Gilbert does something weirder: he picks up one thread, pulls it sideways, drops it, and wanders off toward a joke about Lou Costello’s son drowning in a backyard pool. The rhythm between them is that of two people who have been doing this long enough that neither needs to finish a sentence. At one point they spend what feels like four minutes on a William Shatner fan event in New Jersey where the unsold tickets are described as Shatner’s remaining dignity, rendered as a seating chart.

if I had reduced Gilbert to a pretty girl I’m dating he goes are you dying of the AIDS virus I love what a great compliment pretty ask me if I’m dying of the AIDS virus

The Liberace Problem

A significant portion of this episode is occupied by Old Hollywood closet cases, and the guys treat the subject the way a dog treats a chew toy: enthusiastically, without a plan, until something more interesting comes along. Liberace leads to Rock Hudson leads to Kirk Douglas leads to Michael Douglas portraying Liberace in the HBO film ‘Behind the Candelabra’, which Artie describes as single-handedly erasing every macho role Douglas ever played. The bit lands. It lands because the underlying observation is actually true: watching a guy who was Gordon Gekko simulate a Las Vegas piano-man seduction is genuinely destabilizing, and Artie rides that discomfort until it becomes something else entirely.

all right you’re fucking him in the ass good go to China Syndrome goes every episode of Streets of San Francisco slow it down god this is what gave Douglas the stroke suddenly understand

Gilbert, for his part, drifts into a Paul Lynde-as-children’s-entertainer routine that starts as a Hollywood Squares observation and ends somewhere considerably darker, with Gilbert playing Lynde hosting a kids’ show while visibly suffering. It is the kind of bit that would require three separate meetings to get approved anywhere with an HR department, and it is also, structurally, a pretty precise piece of character comedy. The joke is not just that Lynde was gay. The joke is the agony of a man who had to be funny for children on Sunday mornings when he did not want to be anywhere near children on Sunday mornings.

Bob McCallister was just some weird guy and he would smoke cigarettes and hate his life and then every Sunday for what seemed like eight hours he had to entertain these little snotty shits from Long Island and Jersey

The Sponsored Content Section, God Help Everyone

There is a mid-show ad read for a Blu-ray discount website that goes on for approximately the length of a short film, during which both men make it as difficult as possible to actually communicate the URL. They succeed in naming Kingpin, Randy Quaid, and Martin Luther King Jr. in consecutive sentences. The sponsor is thanked. Artie declares himself exhausted after what he describes as a tough eight-hour week, then corrects it to seven. The episode ends there, which is the right call. You don’t need a conclusion when you’ve already done a Paul Lynde children’s television bit. You just stop.

that that my work ethic specially cut down to seven