Official Book Club Selection (18 page)

So that’s why I do it, why I’ve been on at least a dozen times. It’s why I take the licks. I never know how it’s going to go—brutal calls and nice Howard, or brutal calls and brutal Howard—and it’s something that can rub my female friends the wrong way. Jenny McCarthy said to me one time, “I told Howard I can’t do it anymore. Those calls are too mean.” During Suddenly Susan, Brooke got mad at me once because she felt I didn’t stick up for her when Howard started baiting me about her. I never threw her under the bus, but I couldn’t spend my entire forty-five minutes on Howard saying that Brooke Shields was a comedic genius. My first job is to be funny.

Going on Howard was a great learning curve for me, and overall I’ve gotten a lot from it. At the end of the day, from being on his show, there’s going to be five more straight guys who’d never heard of me thinking, “Oh, well, if she’s cool enough to be on Howard …”

That’s all I have to say about talk show hosts for now. In the world of celebrity, what makes talk show hosts unique in terms of whom I would put in my act (or my book), is that they’re probably the one area I occasionally have to hold back on. I can make fun of the president and it wouldn’t do anything, but I need talk show hosts more than I need my own boss at the network. Network CEOs come and go, but some of these fuckin’ talk show hosts seem like they’re never going to die.

Andy Dick having boundary issues with me and Sharon Osbourne.

Could I hit the road and make it work? Or would I be roadkill?

That’s what I wondered when I started getting real stand-up offers, as in headlining gigs at places around the country. Even though I was raised in the alternative scene, being a fixture on television meant offers from spots like Caroline’s in New York and all the Improv clubs nationwide.

But would I be able to get laughs anywhere besides coffeehouses and “alternative” showcases? Remember, I hadn’t had such good luck at the Improvs and places like that in the past, whose audiences expected more traditional joke/punchline comedy. Luckily for me, Margaret Cho continued to reassure me that I could do it. It just required adjustments. Change up the material faster. Don’t spend twenty minutes on one story when half the audience is drunk or on a date or trying to impress their boss. Move it along, people.

I was getting asked to play colleges now, too, which was always a good and lucrative gig. I was in my midthirties but a pop culture sponge, so I was still young enough to be able to talk to the eighteen-to-twenty-two-year-olds, for one thing. I remember once going to the MTV awards, and that experience made for great material at a college gig. I could talk about running into Christina Aguilera (teen diva), seeing Whitney (all “sweaty”) and Mariah (hi, crazy!). Margaret was right. It was about knowing what subjects fit with which audience.

So I was now the headlining act, and the stakes were higher. Bombing is a whole different animal when you’re the marquee name who people have paid money to see. In the days when I was the only girl in a lineup of ten comedians at a club, following the prop comic with the bad jokes about hating his wife gives you a little cushion of lowered expectations. And when I was in the Groundlings company and we had a crappy show, we could sit around backstage afterward and commiserate about it and laugh. But as the headliner, a bad night means bombing alone. The blame can’t be shared. I don’t mean to put myself on a watch list, but I became a una-bomber. If only I’d had the hood and sunglasses to hide in. Anyway, my greatest headliner bombing story is as follows:

Year one of Suddenly Susan I got a call from my stand-up agent. He said, “You have an offer for a club in Boston. It’s called the Comedy Stop.”

Boston! I’d never played there before. A city full of drunken micks? I’m gonna kill!

“Or …” he said, “the alternative is this other club in Worcester, Massachusetts, about an hour from Boston, called the Comedy Palace. You’d have to do a show there Thursday, two on Friday, two on Saturday, and one on Sunday. The catch is, they have a sister club that’s a forty-five-minute drive from Worcester, so on Saturday you’d do the early show in Worcester, get in a car, and then you’d be driven to the sister club, perform there, go to bed, then come back on Sunday. But it’s more money.”

It was a heavy workload, and during my week off from Suddenly Susan to boot, but thinking like my mom, I said, “Well, screw Boston’s Comedy Stop. I want to make more money.” We were talking a difference of maybe $2,000 between the Boston club gig and the Worcester venues. But I was the girl who’d happily take that $15,000 to do a horrible corporate gig, knowing full well I was going to bomb, because, you know, how can you turn down money?

Well, it turns out that there were some big differences between a Boston institution like the Comedy Stop, and a Worcester noninstitution like the Comedy Palace.

I showed up at the Comedy Palace alone, which right off the bat was just a stupid thing to do. I mean, I wasn’t famous, but I was on an NBC show in a big Thursday night lineup, and I just shouldn’t have been traveling by myself. I should have dragged a friend with me. Thinking cheap and convenient, I booked myself into a Days Inn a block from the Comedy Palace and headed over to the club. The guy running the club was like a Jewish goombah, with a really big, boisterous personality. The tickets were going fast because people knew me from television, so that seemed to bode well. I went onstage, and the crowd was tough. We’re talking crispy bangs, mall perms, hardcore eyeliner. That kind of crowd. They looked like they weren’t even there to laugh, but instead were waiting to be provoked.

I did my act, stories about Andre Agassi’s house, an episode of Frontline I found particularly amusing, and I closed with an hil-a-a-arious anecdote about how I had attended the trial of a serial killer and accidentally spoke to one of the jurors. Silence. Deafening silence. My opening act, a local comedian, had killed. And now me, the headliner, was bombing badly. This was a club where the front row is three feet from you, and the bachelorette party of twelve with their cardboard tiaras weren’t having my la-di-da tennis player/PBS show/courtroom shit for one second. There was no air-conditioning, either, so I’ve got the ass-crack sweat and the flopsweat and all I can do is think, the contract says an hour and ten minutes. I don’t get paid unless I do my time, so even if I just stand there and read the phone book, I’ve got to do my contractual time.

Meanwhile, the girls in the audience are vicious. “HEY, AW THERE ANY JOKES IN THEAH?” “YOAH NAWT EVEN FUNNY” “WHERE’S THE PAHT WHERE I STAHT LAUGHIN’?”

After the show, however, the oddest thing happened. I was trying to slink out the side door without being noticed, like a criminal, but in fact my crispy-banged hecklers were now crowding around me. Was I gonna get jumped now? Girlfight-style? Should I have brought my shiv?

When you’re doing clubs, it’s two shows a night, sometimes three.

No, they were actually standing in a line. “TAKE A PICK-SHUH! TAKE A PICK-SHUH!” That was surreal, the notion that these people wanted snapshots of themselves with anybody from TV, even somebody they’d just finished razzing for giving them a shitty night out.

The next night, I bombed again. Bombed. Not even with the same material. I changed my act as much as possible trying to figure out what they were into. You know what they were into? Heckling, and then having their photos taken. Then I had to get in a car and drive forty-five minutes to the sister club in Saugus, which—no joke—was a Chinese restaurant that one night a week put a cardboard sign that said COMEDY PALACE in its banquet room. I’m on a riser with a microphone with another hour and ten to get through, and I am bombing. The set ends, and I go back to the Days Inn to recover and lick my wounds. But instead the phone in my room rings constantly with harassing “fans” calling me, saying, “Are you Kathy Griffin from TV?” I can’t even get a minute’s peace at the fucking Days Inn, and now I’m sobbing hysterically because I have one more night of this misery.

To top everything off, the owner of the club calls me and says, “I want you to give some of the money back. That’s how bad you were.”

So I head to his office, thinking, if nothing else, I am not giving any goddamn money back. And I tell him this, all while trying not to cry in front of him. I mean, I took a picture with every single person in that line after those shows.

If you’re going to try to get my money, I thought, you better have a fucking gun, pal.

At the time, I knew one person in Boston: Jonathan Katz, a wonderful, droll comic and writer who did the hilarious Comedy Central show Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist, which featured funny recorded exchanges between Jonathan and comedians playing themselves, that were then animated. I was a giant fan of that series, and he had always wanted me to do the show, but the only way you could do it in those days was go to Boston, where Jonathan lives. Somehow I got his number, and because I desperately needed a friend, I called him. And I barely knew the guy.

Through a wall of tears I told him what was going on. “I’m playing at this place called the Comedy Palace … [sob] … and I’m bombing every night … [sniffle] … and the guy yelled at me in his office … [sniffle, sob] … and he wants his money back … [sob, sniffle] … and I have to take pictures with people who are heckling me …”

There’s this pause, and Jonathan says, completely deadpan, “Well, first of all, I could have told you, it’s not an actual palace.”

I laughed, for the first time all weekend. It felt great.

“You shouldn’t be staying in Worcester, you should be staying in Boston,” he continued. “So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to send a car for you, you’re going to come to my house, we’re going to record an episode of Dr. Katz, I’m going to make you laugh, we’re going to have fun, you’ll have a nice meal, I’m going to book you into a hotel in Boston, you’re going to do your show, and then you’re going to get a good night’s sleep.”

He was absolutely my Prince Charming. He had a car come get me, we went to his studio and recorded the Dr. Katz, and then he picked out a nice hotel for me, asking me if I could afford it, and I said yes. Because it never occurred to me that if I’m doing stand-up far from home—with bombing being a distinct possibility—I should make sure I’m as comfortable as possible. As far as the club owner wanting his money back goes, they sold tickets, and they sold drinks. So why would I need to give money back? Fuck him.

Performing at the state pen. I love a captive audience! (Photo: Jake Johnson/ Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank)

Well, I’d been such a disaster that the Comedy Palace club owner bumped me out of the main room for the last night. My replacement? A woman called “The R-Rated Hypnotist.” Her big closer was hypnotizing a guy to give a blow job to a banana. Naturally, it killed. And like a kid sent to the corner in class, the owner told me I had to do my final Sunday show in the diner next to the club. Fine, I thought. I’ll play in the fucking hallway to get the fuck away from you.

But wouldn’t you know it, even though that diner had maybe fifty seats, the people who showed up came to see me. Worcester’s gays were there in force, the setting was intimate, and it was like doing my thing at the coffeehouse. No two-drink minimum, nobody screaming, just me telling my little stories and making jokes about people getting comedy with their tuna melts.

Thank you, Worcester, Massachusetts, for making the tuna melt my favorite sandwich.

My best college gig story is really an Andy Dick story.

The University of North Florida in Jacksonville wanted me and Andy as a double bill for a show in early 1999. They probably wanted us together because we were both on NBC sitcoms, and although I’d performed with Andy many, many times on the alternative circuit—where we both had fifteen minutes in a lineup of a half dozen comedians and performance artists—we’d never double-billed a college. This was a high-paying gig. Plus, the college said to me, “We’d like you to go second, because we consider you to be the headliner.”

“I’m flattered,” I told them, “but I will not follow Andy Dick, because you never know if that crazy crackhead is going to show up or not.” FYI, I have a no–Macy Gray policy as well. Check my rider. One time I was supposed to open for her at a charity event, and I got a call from someone saying Macy was missing and they couldn’t get ahold of her. I said, “I’ll wait for somebody who’s stuck in traffic, but not somebody who’s just missing.” That’s just a recipe for me doing four hours of stand-up in a row.

Everybody in the comedy world who knew Andy knew he fought his demons. I’ve seen him do brilliant sets, and sets where he was so messed up on drugs I felt it was the last day I’d ever see him alive. We’re talking an admitted serious, serious drug addict and alcoholic.

Also, content-wise, I knew what Jacksonville might be in for, and it’s not an easy thing to follow. If I’m inappropriate for colleges, Andy is Larry Flynt at a Cub Scout meeting. At the time Andy would travel with his band The Bitches of the Century, and they’d play ironic songs and do bits that were really, really out there. For example, they sang one song called “Little Brown Ring,” about licking assholes. Andy sings it in a kind of falsetto voice, over and over and over, about his little brown ring. Or your little brown ring. I’m not sure whose little brown ring anymore, but he’s very fixated on someone’s little brown ring.

So I fly into Jacksonville a day early, because I’m always too nervous to fly the day of a gig, and as colleges usually do, they make a student my babysitter. I love that—some kid from the drama department coming out to get you and drive you to the hotel. I can’t tell you how many young men have outed themselves to me on that ride from the airport. There’s also usually an excited offer to take you to dinner, which is hard for me because I don’t drink and I would find myself inevitably stuck at a Señor Frog’s at two in the morning hoping for more fried zucchini zircles. College gigs are quirky that way.

Well, for some reason, the college had hired two stretch limos for us. I’m not really a stretch limo gal, but there it was the day of the show waiting outside my hotel, and when I got to the university, I asked, “So how’s Andy doing?” I never say, “Where’s Andy?” I just start in with a broad question about his state of mind.