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But Mr. Gottfried, 58, the veteran comedian, is hardly ashamed of awkward subjects, whether he is cracking wise about his goofy looks and short stature ("In real life I'm a tall, blond Christian") or his frugality ("I would show up at a party for Al Qaeda if you said there's going to be a dinner").

"I love to go where it's a dark area," he said recently, sitting at a dining table in his Chelsea apartment. "You never know what people will choose to be offended by."

Yet there are ways of rendering Mr. Gottfried speechless. For example ask him, in the presence of Dara Gottfried, his wife of six years and the mother of their two children, how they first met or how he summoned the strength to ask for her phone number.

In response this loquacious comic lowered his gaze and began murmuring quietly.

"Open up a little, Gil!" said Ms. Gottfried, 43, an enthusiastic woman about the same height as her diminutive husband.

To the world Mr. Gottfried is known for his deliberately abrasive stage presence and seemingly bottomless vocabulary of vulgar words. (See his notorious performance of the dirtiest joke ever told in "The Aristocrats.")

But to Ms. Gottfried, who appears with him on Tuesday's episode of the ABC reality series "Celebrity Wife Swap," he is her "gentle genius": an endearing bundle of tics and peccadilloes who, despite a fundamental shyness, proves there really is someone for everyone.

"I knew I'd never find anyone else like him," she said affectionately.

To which Mr. Gottfried added, "Most people are hoping that they never find anyone like me."

Putting on an exaggeratedly shrill voice Mr. Gottfried, a native New Yorker who is much calmer and more soft-spoken in person than onstage, has built a lengthy résumé of stand-up shows, celebrity roasts and voice-over work (like playing the parrot Iago in Disney's "Aladdin" movies).

But a wife and a family did not seem to be his destiny. The illusionist Penn Jillette, who has known Mr. Gottfried since the 1980s, said that back then "there were navigation issues in keeping close to him."

"He had a great deal of eccentricity and was closed up," added Mr. Jillette, who made "The Aristocrats" with Paul Provenza. "But those are qualities I enjoy. A lack of ease is something I find pleasant and interesting."

That changed in the late 1990s, when Ms. Gottfried, then Dara Kravitz and a music industry executive, met Mr. Gottfried at a Grammy Awards party at Tavern on the Green.

She said she had dropped food on a table, when "Gilbert picked it up and put it on his plate."

"I looked at him, like, 'Who is this guy?' " she continued. "He looked sad and lost and childlike. I thought he was adorable."

A first date followed, and many more after that, but only Mr. Gottfried's closest confidants knew that he was in a relationship. The couple wed in 2007 and have two children, Lily, 5, and Max, 3.

Mr. Gottfried could not entirely explain why he does not readily volunteer intimate details about himself, whether with friends or with a reporter.

"The public wants to know your bank account number, your Social Security and PIN code too," he said. "I can't peek my head into a women's changing room and go, 'Well, I want to know, and I'm curious about this.' "

Richard Belzer, the comedian and "Law & Order: SVU" cast member who has known Mr. Gottfried for nearly 40 years, theorized that his efforts to protect his personal life were actually a defense of his stage persona.

Mr. Belzer said that Mr. Gottfried's frantic one-man act, with its stream-of-conscious riffs and obscure celebrity impersonations, was already a running commentary on itself, like "two characters in a Beckett play, waiting for a Jewish Godot." ("Waiting for Godotowitz," he added.)

"If people knew he had a girlfriend or was married," Mr. Belzer said, "it might dilute the world's perception of him."

While Mr. Gottfried was reluctant to participate in "Celebrity Wife Swap" (on which he and Ms. Gottfried trade partners with Alan Thicke and his wife, Tanya Callau) he conceded that reality TV has become a necessary evil for maintaining a showbiz career.

"To the public," Mr. Gottfried said, "Kim Kardashian is a much bigger name than Robert De Niro."

Mr. Thicke, who once employed Mr. Gottfried as a regular on his short-lived talk show, "Thicke of the Night," said that the "Celebrity Wife Swap" experience offered Ms. Gottfried "relief from Gilbert and the two children, which makes for a total of three children."

But Ms. Callau said she was sorry to part ways with Mr. Gottfried when the show was over. "I got a little teary-eyed when I had to say goodbye to him," she said, "because I missed him."

Ms. Gottfried said that being married to an outspoken comedian presented its challenges, as in 2011, when Mr. Gottfried was fired as the voice of the Aflac duck after being criticized for posting jokes on his Twitter account about the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

(In one of the least inappropriate posts he wrote that in Japan, "They don't go to the beach. The beach comes to them.") "It was so hard," Ms. Gottfried said of that controversy. "I just wanted to yell out to everybody, 'My husband's a good man!' He didn't mean any harm."

Mr. Gottfried, who also received supportive Twitter messages from fans, shrugged off the incident.

"It gives me a sentimental feeling about the old lynch mobs," he said. "At least they were social."

Ms. Gottfried also praised her husband — who can be seen around their apartment in photographs where he, Max and Lily are wearing underwear on their heads — as a father who would sooner spend time with his children than with other adults.

Mr. Gottfried semi-verbally acknowledged that becoming a father had frightened him. But he was pleased that he and Max were bonding over their shared love of classic movie monsters.

"He goes: 'Why is he turning into the Wolf Man? Why doesn't Frankenstein turn into the Wolf Man?' " Mr. Gottfried said. "After a while I've got to say, 'Look, I know that this makes no sense whatsoever.'"

Also, Mr. Gilbert said of his children, as a mischievous grin crept across his face, "I only beat them when I'm on crystal meth. I'm proud of that."

His wife said, "Gilbert!," scolding him but laughing too.