Bert while alive
Bert as a ghost
Bert Benigini is one of Torg's old college friends and an artist with an unhealthy obsession with crotches. Bert was one of the quirkier characters, largely due to his limited verbal range (often using just the words "bah!" and "crotch" to represent entire sentences), but he also had a very low alcohol tolerance, severe misogyny, and precognitive powers. Bert has had few shining moments — initially part of the original trip taken down to the backwater town of Wispydale, he was one of the five characters to survive the B-horror parody K I T T E N, although at the price of his crotch (which got replaced with a baboon crotch transplant). He would later be possessed by the ghost of Brie Meighsaton, a long-dead bridge and co-owner of the house Bert shared with Torg, Riff, Sasha, and Angela.
Bert met his untimely demise in a return to Wispydale, where he was kidnaped by the Arny, a group of faux-soldiers bent on controlling the satanic kittens. K I T T E N I I saw Bert die via decapitation when one of the kittens leaped at his head, knocking it clean off. His dying cry was "VIVA LA CROTCH!". Bert made a post-mortem return, coming back to the Meighsaton House as a ghost so that he could convince Torg to finish his masterpiece, a picture whose only missing part was "an irregularly shaped inverted triangly-thingy". Torg completes the painting at an arm's length, with his eyes closed, which grants Bert his final passage, but before he can rise up to heaven, he starts sinking into the kitchen floor. Bert spends most of the Kesandru's Well storyline stuck in the floor, and is almost saved by Sam and Beth from being sucked into the well itself as it teleports to the Never, but he slipped out of Beth's grasp. When a hole opened from the Never to heaven, allowing the ghosts to go free, Bert rose up from the well and was the last to leave alongside Beth. Cloaked like Obi-Wan Kenobi, his final words were "May the crotch be with you, always."
Bert's first appearance was on April 30, 1999. He died on December 7, 2002. His non-corporeal spirit was last seen on June 11, 2003.