Gilbert Gottfried, the perpetually wincing comedian who died Tuesday at 67 after a long battle with muscular dystrophy, left behind a deep archive of recorded material, most of it never seen.
The videos were not taken in the smoky comedy clubs where Gottfried honed his act, but rather in his own bathroom, made one minute at a time.
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That’s because Gottfried was among the biggest earners ever on Cameo — the viral app that sells personalized messages from celebrities to fans, for a fee.
In Gottfried’s case, it hovered around $175 — neither chump change nor an exorbitant amount, but, judging from the scores of five-star reviews left by satisfied customers on his page, well worth the price for the joy the dispatches imparted upon their intended recipients.
Gottfried recorded about 12,000 Cameo messages in all, earning him over $2 million.
“If Cameo had a Mount Rushmore,” says the company’s co-founder and CEO Steven Galanis, “Gilbert would certainly be on it.”
Gottfried was an early adopter to the platform, joining it in late 2018, just two years after its founding. But he was quick to emerge from the pack as one of its most popular requests.
“He had a magic voice,” says Galanis. “That voice worked so well on our medium. And he’d make faces. Every video is iconic. You want to share it.”
Courtesy of Cameo
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in May 2020, Gottfried said he always went the extra mile for his customers.
“I’ll put extra effort into things,” he said. “I’ll look stuff up about what they do for a living and tailor my jokes to that.”
He started each day by checking the app for requests. “Then I lock myself in the bathroom until I finish taping them all,” he said. “It’s become my recording booth.”
That work ethic is what put him in the top tier of Cameo earners, even as the service ballooned from a few hundred to over 50,000 artists vying for customers’ attention.
“He put the work in every day and gave it 110 percent,” says Galanis. “Think in retrospect how sick he was. And yet he left it all out there. Even when he was ill, Cameo was a way for him to earn money for his family and pay his bills.”
Among his many Cameo missions, Gottfried was enlisted to comfort a terrified family awaiting an impending hurricane; put a smile on the face of a terminally ill man; and wish a husband a happy 80th birthday.
“My dad passed away last night,” wrote a grieving daughter in a review on Gottfried’s Cameo page. “I’m devastated, but over the last few months he showed everyone he saw the video that you made. I’m so glad you were able to do the video for him — it brought him so much joy.”
Gottfried’s death comes amid a wave of high-profile comedian deaths, several of whom — Bob Saget and Norm Macdonald, most notably — were regularl fixtures on the platform.
In Saget’s case, a highlight reel of his best Cameo moments was posted to the company’s Instagram account.
But in the case of another 2022 celebrity death, Meat Loaf, the singer’s widow made an unprecedented request: She asked for a copy of the entire Meat Loaf Cameo archive.
All content made on Cameo belongs to the artist. And so the company was more than happy to provide Meat Loaf’s wife a hard drive containing not just Meat Loaf’s Cameos, but any reaction videos submitted by fans.
Galanis says it remains uncertain what will become of the over 200 hours of Gottfried Cameos.
“Nobody posts 10 Instagrams or TikToks a day,” he says. “But for people like Gilbert, this is by far the biggest social channel he’s ever had. The pure volume of content he made is longer than all his recorded hours of stand-up.”
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