Byline: Christopher Arnott, Hartford Courant, (TNS)
Kathy Griffin hasn’t toured in six years, and we all know why.
“I’ve been out of work since that [expletive] photo.”
You know the one. The social media post showed her brandishing the disembodied head of then-President of the United States Donald Trump. It was hardly her first controversy — she once used an awards show win to hilariously mock those who thank Jesus at such occasions — but the gory Trump image cost her a lot of work, including her longtime CNN New Year’s Eve co-hosting gig, an endorsement deal with Squatty Potty, the tour she had just begun, and more.
“I’ve been digging my way out,” she said, but the rebuilding is taking time.
Her manner of re-emergence is just to continue being herself. And that includes her giving her take on the cultural, social and political madness of the past few years during her national My Life on the PTSD-List tour.
“Tell me you love the title,” she said. The name is an obvious reference to her career-defining reality show that ran from 2005 to 2010, where she ridiculed her own lack of celebrity status. But the tour’s name also refers to the current social and political climate.
“It’s collective PTSD. We’re all having a moment,” Griffin said. She riffs on a series of social upheavals. Among her conclusions? “COVID did not bring out the best in us.”
She rattles off a host of reasons that maybe she should not be touring just now: She just filed for divorce. She was addicted to prescription pills. It’s an election year, with all the anxiety and competitiveness that accompanies that. Yet if you’re Griffin, this may be exactly the time that you should be touring. There’s so much going on, so there’s lots to talk about. “It’s the way my mind works. There’s a burning desire to share.”
Griffin said there is a slight amount of audience interaction on the tour, but it’s of the “Clap if you’ve been touched by cancer in any way” variety, setting up a monologue. At the same time, “This is a relationship. It’s very improvisational. I don’t know what I’m gonna say in Hartford [Connecticut] . I call it taking the audience’s temperature. It can be political, cerebral.”
She asks, “You have a new mayor? What’s he like? Is he a Democrat?”
She knows she’s not like other stand-ups. “Jerry Seinfeld, he’s an American treasure, I love him, but he writes his act on a computer, makes it perfect, then does it for two years. I don’t do that.”
A Griffin performance is so singular, so unpredictable even to her that she doesn’t involve others in setting it up. “I’ve never had a writer. I’ve never had an opener,” she said.
She still gets laughs from her interactions with other celebrities. A highlight of the tour, she said, is “Kathy and Sia go to Mexico. I tell that story for 20 minutes.”
“I’m going to ‘the real America,’ the red states, on this tour,” Griffin said. She recently played Las Vegas, as well as a gay cruise.” I may not even bring up Trump,” she teases, though she is on a daily text chain with the former president’s niece and antagonist, Mary Trump, and the woman to whom he now owes $83 million, E. Jean Carroll.
“She’s a bada–,” Griffin said of Carroll.
Her original career goals were more conventional. “My dream was to be Phyllis or Rhoda (on The Mary Tyler Moore Show), to be the sidekick. I wanted to come in, get the laugh and get out.” She was a member of the Los Angeles sketch comedy troupe The Groundlings, a launching pad for everyone from Laraine Newman to Will Ferrell, and Jennifer Coolidge to Melissa McCarthy. “I wasn’t getting discovered when everyone else around me was. It was Lisa Kudrow who said to me ‘I think you’re funnier as yourself.’ That was instrumental in me doing this. I have this twisted love of stand-up,” Griffin said.
“I have played everywhere. I have been doing this for decades. Touring is my first love. I’ll play anywhere, but I am so [expletive] grateful I get to play theaters. I didn’t headline clubs until I was on a TV show.”
She’s ecstatic to be playing in a grand venue like the Belding Theater in The Bushnell, home of the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. She’s happy to be performing anywhere, actually, because “I’ve been to hell,” she said.
Kathy Griffin performs Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at The Bushnell, 166 Capitol Ave., Hartford, Connecticut. Tickets range from $61-$93. bushnell.org.
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