“I hate saying my age,” says comedian Gilbert Gottfried. “It’s too depressing.”
The Internet says he was born in 1955. You do the math — no matter what, he’s old enough to know better.
Last spring, he made headlines — and lost a very well-paying job as the duck on the Aflac commercials — making jokes on Twitter about the Japanese tsunami.
“Funny thing about that incident,” he told The Post the other day. “The company fires me, and I became a bigger tragedy and accident than the actual tsunami.
“According to the media, I caused it.”
Media is funny that way. The thing most people remember six years later about Hurricane Katrina is that it’s the first time they noticed Anderson Cooper.
“I still do [Twitter],” Gottfried says, “I’m waiting for it to kill my career for good.”
After eight months in show-biz study hall detention, the comedian is back on TV this week — guest starring in an episode of “Law & Order SVU” (Wednesday at 10) in a part that may or may not become steady.
“I’m like a computer geek for the department who helps them with numbers and information,” he says.
And he is still getting in trouble.
“When I shot the first scene, I was doing it funny,” he explains. “People are laughing, and I was doing more and more schtick.
“And the director walked over to me and said, ‘Could you pull it back a little? This scene is about a missing little boy.’
“So I said: ‘I guess.’ Shows how I study a script.”
Gottfried still talks to reporters and still tweets, at least in part to show that the tsunami is not going to define him.
“Funny thing about what happened,” he says. “There were people who said, ‘Oh, his career is totally over’ — which I love.
“Whenever TV shows, newspapers, magazines do their top story on how your career is over, well — if my career was over, I wouldn’t be the top story.”
Now, in fact, he gets a lot of his news from Twitter.
“I know about anyone dying or a disaster hitting some place because I get like a million twitters going: ‘Hey, come on. What’s taking you so long with a joke?’ ”