When you talk to some comedians, their responses are so humourless that you often wonder how they ever decided to get into the business. And then there's Gilbert Gottfried, whose first instinct is to toss out a smart-aleck response to any question.

The comic, known for his grating delivery””be it on the standup stage or as Iago the parrot in Aladdin or the Aflac Insurance duck (“I seem to be specializing in birds,” he says)””gives his voice a rest when he's not working, but not his comedic mind. (“Off-stage,” he notes, “I sound like a Bing Crosby Christmas special.”) In fact, it's hard to get a straight answer out of the guy, who appears at Vancouver's Funny Bone Thursday through Saturday night (October 12 to 14).

Gottfried came to national attention in 1980 when he was selected, along with Eddie Murphy, Joe Piscopo, Gail Matthius, Charles Rocket, Denny Dillon, and Ann Risley, to replace the original cast of Saturday Night Live.

“Yes, don't remind me,” he says on the phone from his home in New York City. His one season is considered to be among the show's worst ever, if not the worst. Those too young to remember might find that hard to believe, given the SNL's recent years. “It's funny, when we were on it we were, like, the bad season. Now the bad season of Saturday Night Live is like saying the issue of Playboy with the naked girl in it.”

Although that year was, indeed, horrible, it was no doubt made worse by the fact Gottfried and his costars had to follow the legends of the original Not Ready for Primetime Players. “Back then, the idea of a new cast for Saturday Night Live was like sacrilege,” he says. “They were attacking the show before it even got on the air. There were articles being written every day saying what a horrible idea this is. And, granted, when the show did go on, the show did suck. But that's another story.”

Lately, Gottfried has been riding the wave of positive reviews that followed his film appearance in The Aristocrats, which documented 101 comedians telling or deconstructing the world's filthiest joke. He's parlayed that notoriety into a CD and DVD called Dirty Jokes.

“It was the most surprising press that I've ever gotten out of a movie,” he says, “because first of all, I didn't think the movie was going anywhere. I thought it was a nice little home movie that they were making. And then when it came out, I seem to have gotten the lion's share of the press. And, oddly enough, it was the most respectable press I've gotten and it [the movie] was obscene and demented.”

It almost makes up for being named the unsexiest man in the world earlier this year by the on-line magazine Phoenix. “I found out about it while I was ringing a bell at Notre Dame,” the comic jokes. But as they say, there's no such thing as bad publicity. “I was getting lots of letters from women saying that they didn't agree with it,” he says. “So I wish they would print me as the unsexiest man every year.”