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_ Magician and actor Penn Jillette says he spoke with Gilbert Gottfried 20 minutes before his death. Jillette tells the New York Post that his wife, Emily, was in the hospital room with Gottfried and his wife, Dara, and she held a phone to Gottfried’s ear so the two comedians could have one last conversation. Jillette says: “Twenty minutes before he was officially dead, when they were going to pull the ventilator off of Gilbert, I spoke with him. I tried to make a few jokes. Then I fell apart and said, ‘I love you.’ That was it.”
… Jillette also shared that, very close to the end, “doctors wanted to see if there was brain damage. They asked him to do arithmetic to show he was lucid. Instead, he sang the theme song to Car 54, Where are You?”