Super Festivals from Ft. Lauderdale, USA · CC BY 2.0

Turned a piercing, sandpaper voice and a willingness to say the unsayable into a comedy career, most visibly as the fast-talking parrot Iago in Disney's Aladdin and, for two decades, as the squawking Aflac duck — a job he lost in 2011 after joking about the Japanese tsunami on Twitter. Later in life he hosted a long-running podcast built around interviews with veteran entertainers, and the 2017 documentary Gilbert revealed a private, unexpectedly gentle family man behind the shrieking public persona.