Official Book Club Selection (22 page)

In the summer of 2000, Survivor became the number one show in the country, and rightly so. It was amazing, edge-of-your-seat TV, a competition but also a peek into some quirky personalities. To this day it’s some of the best television I’ve ever seen. A cheap show to make compared to a sitcom, it was pulling viewers and ratings in a way nobody could have imagined. I mean, there was Survivor contestant Jenna Lewis in her bikini on the cover of Time magazine. That first summer of Survivor, your priorities were clear: Thursday night, 8 p.m., CBS, you had to be there.

When reality television became, well, the new reality in television—and all the networks started developing shows to capitalize on it—many of my comedy writer friends got bitter, and understandably so, because fewer scripted shows meant creative people were starting to lose their jobs. There was this sentiment that reality was the enemy. But I was all over it, not only as a fan, but as someone who’s been doing her version of reality for years whenever I got up onstage. Think about it: My act isn’t scripted, and here was this new genre that was all about being unscripted. That was me. If sitcoms didn’t want what I had, then I’d come up with my own way to celebrate reality TV, and give myself a job.

I went to MTV, where I’d had a relationship from years of co-hosting their New Year’s Eve specials or appearing on TRL, and told them I wanted to do a show where I could talk about reality shows, sum them up, interview kicked-off contestants, make fun of them, and just generally tap into this new watercooler TV topic. I said I could do it for almost nothing, I wanted to co-executive produce, and—of course—I wanted my mom and dad on the show, because I thought they were funny.

MTV gave me six episodes that started airing at the beginning of 2001. The show was called Kathy’s So-Called Reality. (My name was in the title! Like a big star!) It only lasted for those six episodes—they didn’t pick it up for more—but I have to say I loved that job. I would start with a monologue, usually about whatever happened in reality TV that week, which was always hard because we taped on a Thursday and therefore couldn’t talk about that week’s Survivor, so by the time my show aired on Sunday, we were a week behind with events. Also, it was impossible to get clips from CBS—even though MTV shared a parent company, Viacom—so I usually corralled my mom and dad into performing Survivor reenactments from transcripts. Then we’d have guests. Eden’s Crush, the manufactured girl group from the WB’s Pop Stars, performed on our show. (I don’t exactly remember you, Nicole Scherzinger, but I’m sure you were very nice.) Elsewhere we had hilarious difficulties booking reality show contestants, an early indication in my mind that these plucked-from-nowhere people were beginning to imagine themselves as A-listers.

Bad ratings got Kathy’s So-Called Reality canceled, but I’d like to think it was ahead of its time in tapping into everyone’s burning desire for this new type of show. Now you have entire networks like Fox Reality devoted to reality TV, and the dude from Jon & Kate Plus 8 on the cover of US Weekly. Well, I was there first, motherfuckers. Not only that, there are elements to Kathy’s So-Called Reality that acted as precursors for The D-List, from featuring my parents to mining humor out of the fact that I’m not a beloved personality. One of my favorite things to do on the MTV show was read aloud my hate mail as a way of doing the opposite of what Oprah would do, offering testimonials as to how some episode she did changed lives. “Dear Big Nose Bitch,” one of my letters read, “get off my TV, I hate you.” Another one I read to my parents aloud on the air: “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Griffin, why aren’t you in a home?” They thought the letters were hysterical. And so did I.

After So-Called Reality, it was back to being in career limbo, not sure of where to go or what to do next. I was in a weird place where I was a little too well known to go sit on folding chairs with totally unknown girls at auditions—and certainly not for two-line parts anymore—but I wasn’t famous or successful enough to be packaged as part of a series.

Me on stage at the Laugh Factory, ready to debrief an enthusiastic crowd about whatever crazy celebrity run-in I’d had that week. (Photo: Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank)

But there was always stand-up. And just like when I devised Hot Cup O’ Talk, if I could find a club and grab their worst time slot—not try to squeeze myself into a high-expectation, traditional Friday or Saturday lineup—then maybe I could come up with another show to make my own. My stand-up agent said, “Try Jamie Masada at the Laugh Factory.”

I called up Jamie, the club’s owner, pitched him, and said, “What’s a time when nobody comes in?”

“Wednesday nights are usually pretty slow,” he said.

Without even waiting for him to accept me, I said, “I’ll take it.”

The Laugh Factory is a castle-shaped comedy club at Sunset Boulevard and Laurel that, like the Improv and the Comedy Store, is one of the premier showcases in Los Angeles for comedians. It was a place that catered to couples and straight guys—not exactly my best crowds—and its roster was heavy on male comics and theme nights like Chocolate Sundays (as in, not for Whitey) or Latino Night. It also has a fantastic L-shaped marquee, one side facing Sunset Boulevard and the other facing the cross street, which means you’d have a hard time not noticing who’s playing there as you drove past or sat at the stoplight nearby. The club itself is pretty standard, but a two-sided marquee on Sunset can fill a room.

If I was going to play there on Wednesday nights, just me, no opener, not part of some lineup so that people coming to see Dane Cook, for example, had to like me, too, then I was going to have to sell the shit out of that show. In addition to the marquee with my name on it, I thought it might be helpful for my assistant and me to stand at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue—tourist central with Grauman’s Chinese Theatre nearby—and hand out flyers personally to people walking by. I was enough of a name to get booked on morning radio shows, but I wasn’t able to land TV appearances. I didn’t have a publicist at the time because they were expensive and I didn’t have a steady job. Instead, Jamie would act as a de facto publicist for those live shows, making calls to the LA Times or anyone who’d take his call to try to get a writeup in print. I’d also call the LA Weekly—so helpful in publicizing the Groundlings shows—and beg to get into their listings calendar. Lastly, there would hopefully be that crucial intangible: good word of mouth.

I also wanted to do something special as an opener for my performance, to make people feel like they were coming to a show. One thing I’d tried at my gigs at the LA Gay and Lesbian Center that seemed to work was showing a five-minute videotaped clip I crudely edited myself of something I thought was particularly funny—Mariah Carey’s insane appearance on Cribs, or an outrageously homoerotic Backstreet Boys video—and playing it to the darkened crowd while I stood at the back with one hand holding the VCR remote and the other holding the microphone. I’d start the tape, pause it, make a funny comment, resume the tape, and if the audience laughed then it soon felt as if we were all in somebody’s living room watching TV and laughing at crazy shit. It was a great way to prime the audience for that feeling I love, which is that we’re all on the same page about what’s funny. And if Mariah Carey talking about her negligee room as if everybody has one, or slinking into a bathtub full of soapy water with her towel still on doesn’t make you giggle like a schoolchild, then Dane Cook comes on in an hour.

I had been used to gay charity events, gay bingo nights, gay bookstore appearances, where this kind of celebrity razzing went over really well. When I started at the Laugh Factory, I’d cross my fingers that there’d be lots of gay guys in the audience, but you’d never know. It’s another reason the video opening worked. If the crowd wasn’t laughing at my rolled-eyes voice-over as they watched footage of a makeup-less Julia Roberts braving Outer Mongolia to show how she likes to keep it real, I knew what kind of crowd I had, and could figure out what stories to tell from there.

But let’s face it, my experiences performing for the unshockable gays helped make those Laugh Factory shows a no-holds-barred outlet for me. Usually there are all kinds of agendas at a standard comedy club: the audience is talking, they’re drunk, they’re bored, they’re trying to out-funny the comedian, the guys are hitting on the girls, the first dates are going badly. But when I’d play at the LA Gay and Lesbian Center’s theater, the crowd has already had their wine in the lobby, and they’re just captive audiences, ready to laugh. There’s nothing like the energy of a gay audience, and what began to happen at the Laugh Factory was that the gays were coming to see me, and then the breeders folded in, and eventually as the show started getting more and more buzz around town, the place filled up regularly. I really believe a lot of couples and straight guys, who normally wouldn’t have given me a chance previously, now came to see what I did as funny. Leave it to the gays to scour a major city like Los Angeles and find the one place they could converge on a Wednesday night and turn it into the place to be. They’ve always had my back. What I love about the gays is that when I’ve been lost, they’ve found me.

I had a receptive crowd, and my scheduled hour went out the window really fucking fast. I would often do two-and-a-half-hour shows, and that in itself was great for the show’s popularity. People would leave saying, “Wow, I really got my money’s worth!” Then I’d do it again the following week, dressing as appropriately as possible for a sweaty club—tank tops, comfortable shoes—all the while thinking, If this crowd’s with me, they’re going to have to literally give me the hook to get me off this stage. I actually lost weight during that period. If that’s not an exercise regimen, I don’t know what is: standing on stage furiously gesticulating, which is an excellent upper-body workout, and perspiring for two hours or more. Take that, 24-Hour Fitness.

The cocktail waitresses really loved my Wednesday shows. More of me meant more drinks, until the waitresses eventually told me, “I can make my rent because of you.” Plus, they loved serving the gays, because they were well-dressed, respectful, and tipped well. Hell, yeah! The gays are there to laugh, not get in fights and fuck around. (Okay, there was that one time when some drag queens scuffled with a Marine who came with his girlfriend. Obviously, the Marine lost.)

As for my material, that Laugh Factory stint, which ran for over a year past its original limited run, was when I really started to talk lots of shit about celebrities. That was the most liberating thing about that engagement, because I was absolutely under the radar. On one level I was just another comic at a club, but because I had all this pop culture experience under my belt—the sitcom, awards shows, being on Hollywood Squares, my rigorous TV watching from Oprah to every new reality show—it all came out onstage, with new stories all the time. It was ridiculous. Lines were forming around the block to see me, but it never seemed to get out in the press that I was telling tales out of school on a weekly basis—Whitney Houston waving a cracked-out finger at me; Gwyneth looking pissy on the red carpet; getting a sweaty, and I mean buckets of sweat sweaty, hug from Richard Simmons—for anyone who paid $10 and bought two drinks on a Wednesday night. Even if I was asked to do a piece on Extra or Entertainment Tonight, it was usually “Kathy Griffin’s thoughts on plastic surgery!” with no mention about the show.

I was in a strangely great position. I had nothing to lose, and sold-out audiences that couldn’t be shocked were eager to hear me report every week on Hollywood crazy people.

It was during this time that I got my first death threat, though. I guess you know you’ve made it when people literally want to kill you.

Apparently I’d offended someone at one of my performances to the point where a person claiming to be from some Muslim group called the club owner Jamie, who’s Israeli, and started spewing anti-Semitic statements and said they were going to kill me the following Wednesday. The FBI and LAPD were called in to investigate.

Jamie was pretty cool about it. “Buddy,” he said to me, which is what he calls everybody, “I’ve gotten so many death threats. But you don’t have to do the show if you don’t want to. It’s totally up to you.”

I thought about it, and came up with an even crazier idea: go public with it from the stage! But then again, I didn’t really want a Salman Rushdie–style fatwa on my head, so I decided to do the show, but not talk about it.

That lasted about five minutes.

“Hey, everybody, guess what! There’s a death threat tonight, so watch your backs! The bomb-sniffing dogs were here and everything!” I talked about it for three weeks after that, too.

I think the audiences were a little freaked out, but I also sensed that they were enjoying the in-the-moment-ness of it all. You have to say those crowds couldn’t have thought I was some hack. I wasn’t stealing other comedians’ jokes and talking about bad airplane food and asking where everyone’s from. If you’re at my show I don’t want to know where you’re from. Keep that shit to yourself. I have things to talk about, like my very special death threat. And that was a unique topic those particular audiences weren’t going to hear anywhere except from my pretty little mouth.

…

So while some people care enough about me to want to kill me, it still felt as if nobody in power in Hollywood gave two shits. One night, though, my UTA agent Martin Lesak, who really believed in me—he was one of the higher-ups at UTA, but he usually passed me off to a more junior agent who was more concerned with rescuing animals—managed to get Kelsey Grammer and NBC head Jeff Zucker to come to the show. It was a night that changed my life.

These two TV bigwigs stayed only for the first hour, but I had a meeting with Zucker the next day where he said the magic words.

“I think you should have your own sitcom. I think you can drive a show. And I want you to be yourself. I don’t think I should make you a mom. I don’t think I should make you an astronaut. I think the show should be exactly what I saw at that club. You, one hundred percent being you.”