He set a guest chair on fire on The Tonight Show, becoming the first guest in the show’s history to face criminal charges. Yet that same chaotic figure is a Sundance-acclaimed director, the beloved voice of children’s cartoon characters, and a man sober since age 19. The spectacle and the reality seem entirely divorced.

This episode goes inside the misunderstood world of Robert “Bobcat” Goldthwait, who pulled off one of Hollywood’s stealthiest reinventions. He operates like a human Trojan horse — luring you in with a raspy voice or a chaotic stunt, then revealing a deeply sensitive, dark, and thoughtful artistic mind.

• How a Syracuse kid told by nuns he wasn’t funny built the loud “Bobcat” persona as a bulletproof shield — a name that began as a sincere tribute to mentor Barry Crimmins
• His friendship with Kurt Cobain, opening for Nirvana’s final North American tour and rappelling naked at the 1993 Oakland Coliseum countdown
• The calculated talk-show meltdowns of 1993–94: trashing Conan’s set, spray-painting “Paramount Sucks” on Arsenio, and the Tonight Show arson
• Voice acting as “witness protection” — Hercules, Skylanders, and more — while blacklisted from network couches
• How shocking premises in Sleeping Dogs Lie and World’s Greatest Dad smuggled profound commentary on honesty, grief, and our obsession with infamy