Kathy Griffin apologizes in advance for all the noise. On the day we connected by phone, she expected a lot of activity in her Malibu home, including air-conditioning repairers and the usual four or five yapping dogs. “It’s mayhem,” she said.
We’ve all been there. Regular viewers of her YouTube series, “Talk Your Head Off with Kathy Griffin,” can actually picture it, since every episode is shot in her home, on her couch, with Griffin and that week’s guest snuggled up to a pooch pile.
“It’s the cutest thing: they see the lights being put up and then they just take the seat on the couch,” she said.
Team Griffin, she says, is a very bare-bones operation. When Griffin decided to jump into the video talk show arena, she initially thought she’d need a whole shiny studio before shooting the first episode in her living room. People like it, she says, because they feel like they’ve been invited over to her house. And it’s catching on.
“The only way I know that is it doesn’t get like a gazillion views, but I’m in the Daily Mail and Page Six pretty much every two weeks,” she noted. “It’s funny, they finally figured out that if they want to get me in trouble and keep bringing me up about how, you know, anti-Trump I am … all they have to do is watch the half-hour YouTube show, and they can get all the sound bites.”
Since we’re talking to and about Kathy Griffin, we can’t rightly quote the old saying that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Nine years ago, the bad press about a photo of Griffin holding a mask made to look like the bloodied head of Donald Trump nearly ended her.
Overnight, the “My Life on the D-List” and “Fashion Police” star transformed into a national traitor.
While it would be terrific to liken her fate to that of Deborah Vance on “Hacks,” at least Jean Smart’s diva got a Vegas rebirth. Griffin, the woman who played Carnegie Hall five times, couldn’t book a show anywhere. That meant going for eight years without income, dropping from the D-list to a comedy blacklist and, as she confessed in her 2024 comeback show “My Life on the PTSD List,” a suicide attempt.
What I’m saying is, do not whine to Kathy Griffin about cancel culture. She’s lived through it, not the version stand-up bros claim to have suffered during their latest Netflix specials.
(Rick Kern/Getty Images) Comedian Kathy Griffin performs on stage during Moontower Comedy Festival at The Paramount Theatre on April 16, 2024 in Austin, Texas.
That makes her unique among all those commenting on the Macklemore and Ed Sheeran situation. When we spoke, the news had recently broken that billionaire stadium owner Robert Kraft pressured Sheeran to cut Macklemore from his tour following a performance of his protest anthem “Hind’s Hall,” punctuated with a “Free Palestine” declaration.
And Griffin didn’t mince words. “I am just a D-lister . . . but I have been under more pressure than Ed Sheeran,” she said. “I know what it’s like to be pressured by authorities to change something you’re doing in your art or what you do for a living.
“If I can stand up to the president of the United States and the Department of Justice and the Attorney General of the United States, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and the Secret Service, and say ‘No, I’m doing what I want,’” Griffin offered, then so can everyone else.
“It’s time that all public people with a platform grow some balls, because I had to in 2017,” she added. “And let me tell you, the cheese stood alone.”
That crucible reforged Griffin into a political phoenix. She’s hitting 50 cities on her “New Face, New Tour” circuit and has a Palm Springs residency set for early 2027.
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Griffin still has plenty of stories about her run-ins with Hollywood names. But her foray into topical talk has lit a fire in her spirit. Of course, while that territory is relatively new to her, Griffin’s male peers have been welding their routines to politics for years now without being ruined by the resulting blowback. Dave Chappelle’s anti-trans punchlines, for example, played a role in emboldening politicians to enact discriminatory policies against that community. Griffin called Chappelle’s case a tricky one because while she doesn’t love his views, she still considers him to be a friend. Besides, “He got like ‘fake canceled,’ but he didn’t get Kathy Griffin-ed, which is the ultimate.”
No question that on every level, stand-up comedy has gotten meaner over the last decade. Perhaps that’s changing, I suggested to Griffin. She agreed, to a point. The appeal of slinging around epithets for shock value is waning, but the country is still very divided.
“I feel like a lot of these Joe Rogan-type bros are really fighting actual evolution and progress,” she said. “Comedy is a fluid art, and I really believe strongly you have to change along with it; you’ve got to go with it. And in my case, I try to drive it in my little storytelling way. … I don’t tell hacky one-liners that their buddies wrote for them backstage. I write all my own material. It all comes out of my life. I tell stories that are all true.
Griffin continued, “So I think these comics that are complaining about use of language or where to try to sneak in this naughty word – that’s just childlike behavior or, like, trying to get away with something to see if you can. And there’s a place for that where you don’t have to use words that were used during the murder of people that came before you to have the privilege of even standing onstage.”
Then she pauses. “Listen to me, all angry today!” Griffin joked.
But she didn’t sound angry, simply real.
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Honesty has always been Griffin’s superpower, and in this new chapter it lends her the air of a happy warrior. When Griffin speaks with “Talk Your Head Off” guests about, for instance, the effects of media consolidation or what a political candidate stands for, she takes pains to pause and make sure her audience knows the who, what and why of it all.
Griffin can’t assume the average “Talk Your Head Off” viewer thinks the old guys running it all have the same level of celebrity as, say, her friend Cher. And yet she has a gift for making politics relatable without enraging rhetoric since, as she points out, political figures are celebrities too.
As for the residual costs of exercising her right to offend back in 2017, Griffin confirmed that some of her shows still draw protesters. But these days they’re less of a threat than just material.
“They’re so pitiful because they’re usually just, like, 20 people,” she said, “and they’ve detailed their car where there’s a picture of Trump, but he looks like Rambo. They’ve painted it on their actual vehicle.
“I mean, they’re always fun to film,” she added, “so please watch my socials.”
“Kathy Griffin: My Life on the PTSD List” is available to stream on YouTube.
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