Gilbert Gottfried mines the warped corners of nostalgia

Explain Gilbert Gottfried any way you see fit. But mail-order monkeys aren’t to blame.

Talk to the comedian because he’s doing stand-up Saturday at the M Resort, and any formal questions soon free-range into the odd corners of nostalgia — punctuated by the unmistakable Gilbert Laugh — fans know from his visits with Howard Stern or, more recently, “Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast.”

You talk about Donald Trump, sort of, and end up reminiscing about the ads for live squirrel monkeys that ran in the back of ’60s comic books and magazines. “I heard people were getting dying or already-dead monkeys in the mail. Some kids were traumatized for life,” he says, chasing it with the Laugh.

Gottfried, 61, is safer in his memories of Famous Monsters magazine and the tantalizing mail-order ads that children of the ’60s still wish they could buy all of.

“As I’m talking to you, I have a poster on my wall I got when I was a kid from Famous Monsters,” he says. “One thing I can’t find, another thing I ordered from the Captain Company, was called Herman the Asiatic Insect.

“In the drawing in the ad you see, an enormous monster leaping out of a box and people screaming and fainting. I ordered it, and it was a little two-inch cheap cardboard box and inside was a stick with some fuzz glued on it and rubber-band antennas.”

The Laugh again.

That one maybe does get closer to the psyche of a comedian equally known for his Bela Lugosi imitation and for warped jokes that get him in trouble for their jaw-dropping wrongness.

The latter made him crucial to “Can We Take a Joke?,” a documentary about instant outrage and its impact on free speech, which is now available digitally after playing colleges and film festivals.

“I guess I’m one of the first names you think about when it comes to people getting in trouble for jokes,” Gottfried says.

Five years after his Twitter jokes about the tsunami in Japan cost him his job as the voice of the Aflac duck, have people forgotten?

“There are certain things in your career and life it just seems like it becomes part of you no matter what you do,” he says.

But he agrees it was a fair question in the short-attention-span era.

“It is a funny thing. I feel like, especially now more than ever, if you die you should die on a slow news day, or else you’re totally pushed out of the headlines,” he says. The uproar about the tsunami finally ended when Chris Brown “got angry and had a tantrum on ‘Good Morning America.’ That was the big news.”

Gottfried says there is “no rhyme or reason to anything in my career,” but his success as a podcaster is still a surprise. “Podcasts I still don’t quite get,” he says. “I never thought it would take off, especially dealing with old Hollywood and a lot of these names nobody knows.”

More often than not, the “Colossal” podcast chats up former stars now in their 70s or 80s, such as cult-favorite character actor Dick Miller or the TV “Batman” Catwoman, Julie Newmar. Character actor Marvin Kaplan died last week at 89, only weeks after submitting to the podcast.

“Some of them die the day before my podcast. I’m like the Grim Reaper,” he says, adding a Gilbert Laugh.

But sometimes he hears from fans “way too young for any of it, and they’ll say, ‘I didn’t know who this person was you were talking to or who you were talking about, but I enjoyed it.’ Those are the ones that really amaze me.”

Perhaps it’s because Gottfried doesn’t self-censor. He will sit back and become the (Laughing) audience of his own show while co-host Frank Santopadre steers the conversation. But he will jump in and render his guests speechless, particularly if there’s a way to bring up recurring topics such as Milton Berle’s legendary anatomical gift or Cesar Romero’s rumored sexual quirks.

“There’s some of these stories that I don’t care (if they’re true). I hear them and they’re true,” he explains.

Can anything redeem Gilbert Gottfried?

Maybe. Another new documentary, “Life, Animated,” is the story of an autistic boy whose father figured out how to communicate with him “by putting on a puppet of the (“Aladdin”) parrot Iago and imitating my voice,” he says.

“That was a pretty amazing thing, that I can do great things as long as I’m not directly involved.”

Read more from Mike Weatherford at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com and follow @Mikeweatherford on Twitter.