AFLAC fires Gilbert Gottfried For Being A Jerk
AFLAC and Gilbert Gottfried Part Ways
Gilbert Gottfried got fired by AFLAC today. It was a case of having your head up your behind and not thinking. How could you be that stupid to make the comments that he did about the tragedy in Japan. Making a comment about “Why don’t the Japanese go to the beach?… Because the beach will come to you” is about as insensitive as you can be. He joins a long list of stupid celebrities who made monumental gaffes and ended up suffering some serious damage to their professional careers.
Now the one positive is that he did apologize but AFLAC is not having any parts of it. They fired him anyway. One interesting thing that did come out of this is a little known fact that a significant piece of AFLAC’s business comes from the Japanese. They got their start in the 1970s by my writing life insurance policies for Japanese families. The AFLAC management is stating that they don’t expect a significant impact to their earnings due to the earthquake and tsunami that occurred this week. That might be wishful thinking on their part because the market makers really downgraded their stock primarily because they think that they’re going to be paying lots of claims in Japan. They lost almost 7% of the stock’s value today.
Getting back to Gilbert Gottfried, ….he has his supporters. Howard Stern doesn’t think that he should have been fired. He thinks that AFLAC overreacted and that there was no reason for him to be fired. Now you really have to consider the source of this comment. Here’s a guy who was known for his tasteless viewpoints and jokes defending a guy who got fired for having a tasteless viewpoint by putting his stupid jokes on Twitter. If this is not the pot calling the kettle black I don’t know what is. He said they should of known what they were getting when they hired him he’s made a living on offensive jokes. They may have a point but you have to screw your head on sometimes and in this case he should’ve thought about it.