Bringing the A-List to Its Knees
On the Fringes of Celebrity, a Comedian Finds Success and a Following

By BERNARD WEINRAUB

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 25 — Kathy Griffin calls herself a D-list celebrity and is proud of it. Ms. Griffin, a comedian who has a growing audience in clubs, at colleges and on late-night television, said she will probably never rise into the C-list because she offends so many celebrities.
Just listen to her: “Gwyneth Paltrow names her kid Apple. I’m not going to let that stand. Child Services needs to remove that poor child because the kid is marked. This kid is going to be tortured in the schoolyard. I guarantee in three years Gwyneth will be on every talk show asking, ‘Why won’t the press leave my daughter alone?’ Well, you know why. Because she’s named Apple!”
Or Mariah Carey: “I love Mariah Carey. Remember the breakdown? I loved the breakdown. She had that breakdown, and they wheeled her out like Hannibal Lecter to sing at the Super Bowl.”
Ms. Griffin, whose current show on Bravo is even titled “The D-List,” frequently appears to sold-out crowds at The Comedy Club in West Hollywood as well as in colleges, and her comedy has made her one of the more controversial performers working today. Even Howard Stern, the radio shock jock, asked Ms. Griffin how she could still work in Hollywood and how she got away with some of her racier comments about the sex lives, silliness and strange behavior of celebrities like Britney Spears (“She’s our Liza”), Julia Roberts, Angelina Jolie, Celine Dion, Mel Gibson, Barbra Streisand, Clay Aiken, Whitney Houston, the Olsen twins, Oprah Winfrey and Sharon Stone.
Her acid comments — “Have I gone too far?” she repeatedly asks in mock horror — have made her persona non grata with David Letterman, Ellen DeGeneres and Barbara Walters, Ms. Griffin said. But she does not seem worried. She is highly successful on the college circuit. A new DVD, titled “Allegedly,” is being released next month. Later in the year Ms. Griffin is to film another special for Bravo. She is talking to several networks about serving as host to some reality shows and has already agreed to be the host of “Fantastic Voyage,” the first reality show on Logo, the new gay channel, about a gay cruise.
Ms. Griffin said her comments about celebrities mirror what the audience may think but often doesn’t want to acknowledge. “We’re all thinking it,” she said. “It’s like when we watch Halle Berry on ‘Oprah’ or Barbara Walters, and it is so ridiculous. She runs a poor girl over and leaves, and now she’s crying to Barbara Walters, saying, ‘It’s been a tough year for me.’ Well, what about that poor chick who’s walking around with a splint saying, ‘I got my arm hurt’? What about her and her interview?”
Comedians as different as Chris Rock, Roseanne, Joan Rivers and Sandra Bernhard work in the same comic arena as Ms Griffin but her act is entirely devoted to skewering celebrities, including the winners of various prime-time reality shows. Ms. Griffin said Lenny Bruce was probably the first comedian to use stand-up comedy to discomfort audiences by making them laugh about the hypocrisy around them ‘We all bow down to Lenny Bruce,” she said.
Ms. Griffin who is in her 40’s, struggIed for years on the comedy scene in Los Angeles. In the mid-1990’s, she was cast on the NBC sitcom “Suddenly Susan,” playing Brooke Shields’ acerbic friend. She also appeared on “Seinfeld" in the recurring role of Sally Weaver, a comedian with an acid tongue. Initially her act centered on personal stories and jokes was about her life and the men in it, Ms. Griffin said. In recent years, as she began meeting more celebrities, she turned her comedy to the behavior of stars. (She was also married three years ago to Matt Moline, owner of a computer consulting company.)
“They, can get away with such insane and awful behavior,” said Ms. Griffin, seated in her home in the Hollywood Hills. Her act opens with a televised scene in which a celebrity behaves strangely. Currently, Julia Roberts is the victim. A scene from a PBS documentary, “Wild Horses Of Mongolia,’ in which Ms. Roberts spends time with a poor, nomadic family in Mongolia while sharing her passion for horses, is shown to devastating effect. “There’s a great moment when she’s like doing jokes and they are looking at her like she's from Mars and they're thinking, like, ‘Get her out of here." she said.
At other times, Ms. Griffin uses a scene from another documentary: this one involves Meg Ryan, elephants and Thailand. “One night in the campground, and the next day
she is, like, hallucinating,” Ms. Griffin said. “I love when I can find stuff like that. It’s just heaven.”
Ms. Griffin generally avoids politics in her act, but not much else. “I’ve noticed that when I talk negatively about the president, the audience has this weird, awkward silence,” she said. “With Clinton and Monica, they’d roar. Now you mention Bush and it’s quiet. I think since 9/11, the Republicans have tried to equate questioning government with being anti-American. A change has happened.”
But she talks openly about her extensive plastic surgery. “Silliness and vanity,” she said “Do I want to wind up playing Katie Holmes’s great-grandmother in the ‘Dawson’ s
Creek’ reunion?”
Ms. Griffin grew up in Oak Park, Ill., and said she began doing imitations and making friends laugh at her parochial school. At 18 she began working on commercials, and later she moved to Hollywood, where she began writing for the Groundlings comedy troupe, supporting herself as a waitress and office temp.
One of Ms. Griffin’s colleagues at the Groundlings, Judy Toll, a writer and comedian who died two years ago, urged her to try stand-up. Ms. Griffin began appearing at comedy clubs and performing on various television shows and films, including a brief role In “Pulp Fiction,” whose director, Quentin Tarantino, was an old boyfriend. More recently Ms. Griffin has involved herself in reality shows: she was the host of the first season of “Average Joe” on NBC and appeared on the ABC show “Celebrity Mole Hawaii,” where she took in $233,000 In prize money.
Over the years, Ms. Griffin has casually met numerous celebrities, and they’ve probably regretted it. The one exception seems to be Jerry Seinfeld, who was so amused by her caustic comments about him that he cast her in "Seinfeld" as a comedian who makes fun of him. Ms. Griffin now says she adores Mr. Seinfeld.
She said that she has little hope of emerging from her D-list status. “I’m open about it,” Ms. Griffin said, picking at some fruit in the cavernous kitchen of her home. You have the A-list with Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt and Nicole Kidman. The B-list is, like, Ray Romano and Debra Messing. For a while I hovered on the C-List. But then I did ‘Celebrity Mole,’ and I jumped right to D. Once you do ‘Celebrity Mole, there’s no coming back. The D-list is people who have shows on the Animal Planet." Classic D-listers include the model Fabio, Anna Nicole Smith, the bigger-than-life television celebrity, and Darva Conger, who briefly married on “Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire.”
“The beauty about the D-list is that people who are on it probably don’t know they are,” Ms. Griffin said, deadpan. “I do. I embrace it. I’m a D-lister for life: I try to have some shame and dignity. But I don’t have any.”

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