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April 14 (UPI) — Bill Maher gave his thoughts on the death of Gilbert Gottfried and discussed his friendship with the comedian while appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live.
Maher said on Wednesday that he knew Gottfried for 40 years but that he was a hard guy to get to know well. Maher said that was going to try to use his annual New Year’s show in Hawaii to try and get to know Gottfried on a more personal level.
“He was so funny and so always on. I spent, I don’t know, hundreds of hours with the guy but it was always sort of like, joking,” Maher said.
“It always made me feel kind odd when I would ask him a question and he never would give you a real answer and in a way it felt like the message was, why would I answer this seriously when I can be funny right now,” Kimmel added.
The pair also looked back on Gottfried’s infamous jokes at a roast of Hugh Hefner in 2001. Gottfried had mentioned 9/11, soon after the incident took place.
“He was the king of too soon,” Maher said.
“I wanted to come up with some really inappropriate thought or something to say about him dying because that’s how we would want us to handle it. I felt that I really let him down by not being able to come up with something totally inappropriate,” he continued.
Gottfried died Tuesday at the age of 67 following a long illness.
Maher has a new stand-up comedy special titled Adulting that is coming to HBO Max on Friday.
