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.”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s really cool. Is Kelsey Grammer going to produce it?”
“Why should I pay him to do it?”
Yes! I’m disputed territory in an NBC war!
Well, we started talking about writers, and then it was all about the script phase. They paired me with a seasoned sitcom writer and we collaborated on a script, but then she got another job. A week went by. Then months. The scripts weren’t getting done, and then when they
did, nobody at NBC would look at them. Then I was back in that situation where calls weren’t being returned, and here I was with an NBC deal and they’re not doing anything with me. It’s called development hell, or as I like to call it, the unemployment line.
Things changed when NBC’s cable division head Jeff Gaspin called me in for a meeting. (The reason I mention him by name, as if you guys give a shit, is because I ran into him recently at a party. First of all, his lovely wife Karen is really why I have a television career. She thinks I’m hysterically funny, and tells Jeff that, as he is not able to figure it out on his own yet. Shout out, Karen!) I, of course, thought the meeting was going to be, “We’re ordering six episodes of your new sit-com!” Instead it was Gaspin being the bearer of bad news from Zucker. The purpose of the meeting was to convince me to let go of my dream of having a million-dollar-an-episode, live-audience, scripted sitcom and consider instead a $200,000-per-episode, unscripted reality show. And could my house be the set for free? “ The Osbournes are really big,” he explained.
Now, I may have been a fan of reality TV and had my brief stint on MTV, but in my head I thought No, I’m a sitcom person. That’s my training. That’s my history. That’s who I am. I should have a scripted show. You don’t need me for a reality show. You can pick any stripper or little person or freaky Christian who wants to have twelve kids and build a reality show. My training is in stand-up comedy specials and situation comedy. You need me because I know how to find good writers and build a cast and think up story arcs. I really thought situation comedy was my wheelhouse. By the way, what the fuck is a wheelhouse? I can’t believe I just used that expression. I am a Hollywood douche bag. I meant to say “Situation comedy is in my wheel-guesthouse.”
“We’re not going to do an expensive sitcom,” NBC said. “We think we can do a show with you where we don’t have to pay writers or have a set.”
“It sounds like you’re just trying to get a really big show for next to nothing,” I said.
They never really answered that, but that’s what it was.
I wanted a show and I wanted to work, so I said, “Okay, let’s do it.”
NBC didn’t do it.
But now I was determined. I had begun thinking about how to do a reality show that wasn’t the lowest common denominator. At one point Carolyn Strauss, who was then head of programming at HBO, said to me, “I really think you could have a show where people follow you around. You say funny stuff all the time, and that could be the basis for a show.”
HBO was never going to give me a reality show, but if someone there was saying it, it must mean NBC’s instincts were good, even if their follow-through wasn’t so commendable. But boy, was I getting frustrated. My stand-up show was doing well, but it wasn’t leading to anything. It was driving me crazy. Then my agents at UTA got bored and wouldn’t take my calls.
I started to think about this bizarre position I was in: a hard worker, a showbiz professional, confident of my ability to entertain, but somebody for whom the spotlight always seemed just out of reach. All around me were people like Paris Hilton who were apparently cover-worthy celebrities, so famous and untalented, and the bane of my existence. Yeah, that’s right, I was bitter. Paris Hilton? Not that funny. And reality TV was turning out people like this all the time. I remember getting invited to a charity event around the time the original Bachelor was airing, and I found myself waiting in line with Lisa Kudrow and Ray Romano to get a chance to talk to the show’s star, Alex Michel. I turned to Ray and said, “What’s happened to us?”
“I promised my wife I’d talk to him,” he said sheepishly.
It felt like a sea change was taking place, where lines were being drawn on who was big and who wasn’t big enough. I remember I got to go to the American Idol finale for the first season, when it was the hottest new show since … well, the first season of Survivor. Anyway, I was famous enough to score tickets to American Idol, but when I got there, I saw Camryn Mannheim and Jenny McCarthy in the first few rows. I was in row twenty-six. “Okay, no biggie,” I told myself. “I have a ticket to the party afterward. I’m in.”
I go to the party, and I run into Jenny and Roseanne Barr, and they’re wearing wristbands. My little freckled wrist is bare.
“What are those?” I ask.
“They’re for the VIP party,” they say.
I don’t get access to the party within the party? Ugh. I literally had a conversation with Camryn where we were on two sides of the rope. Trying to save the day, she said to me, “Hey, I’ll distract the security guy and you can sneak in.”
“Uh, no,” I said. “I don’t want to sneak in like some no-name gate crasher to the wristband party. I’m okay out here.”
It was experiences like this (and too many others to tell here) that helped me realize what exactly I was, the insider as outsider. I could get invited to celebrity parties, but not to the VIP circle within those parties. I got invited to red carpet events, but I’d get there early, when the photographers first arrive, in order to get my photo taken. I had an agent who didn’t return my calls, but who was happy to send me e-mails hoping I’d rescue a one-legged blind dog. “I have two dogs already,” I’d write her back. “But I do need a job.”
It was an A-list world, and my life was the D-list.
And then it dawned on me: That’s the show!
My husband Matt and assistant Jessica were two people who understood “Lights, camera, be yourself!” (Photo: Michael Grecco/Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank)
So get this, back in 2004 I was so D-list that I couldn’t even get my then agents to go to pitch meetings with me to sell a show about how I was on the D-list.
Isn’t that a catch-22? Isn’t it ironic? Like that traffic jam when I’m already late? Or ten thousand spoons when all I need is a knife? Whatever, Alanis.
Apparently, I wasn’t what they call “an earner.” You know how on The Sopranos the wiseguys talk about who’s an “earner,” how they can’t kill somebody if he’s an “earner,” how they’re debating whether or not to put up with an “earner”? Let’s face it, the big agencies have giant movie stars like Julia Roberts, Denzel Washington, and Will Smith, clients pulling in $40 million a year, and their agents get 10 percent of that. I wasn’t pulling in even $1 million a year. No agent wanted to waste their time with me when they could be going to a Scientology retreat with Tom Cruise and John Travolta. (Or Will Smith, if he’s been recruited by now!)
Anyway, armed with what I thought was a great idea for a reality show, I was only able to get three pitch meetings: with TBS, VH1, and Bravo. TBS and VH1 weren’t too impressed with me being by myself and not dragging either an agent or a big-time producer to the meeting, so they passed. I finally got my agent to come with me to the Bravo meeting, but only because he knew the cable channel’s president, Lauren Zalaznick. And what do you know? The show, which we eventually called Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List, got signed that day.
It’s tough sometimes for me to justify the 10 percent I have to pay an agent. They certainly don’t do 10 percent of my job. They don’t do a quarter of 1 percent. But they’re a necessary evil, and if that agent had not been with me at that meeting, I don’t know that I would have sold the show. He didn’t even say anything, either. He just sat there. Nice work if you can get it. In fact, that guy’s not even an agent anymore. Fuck him, I’m with William Morris now. I hear this William Morris character is in it for the long haul. I haven’t gotten him on the phone yet, though.
Well, I went home and found my assistant Jessica and my husband Matt in the office they shared and broke the news. “Get ready to put on mic packs,” I said, “because you’re gonna be on a reality show.”
Wait, I’m married? I’ll get to that story in the next chapter. Stay focused, people.
Basically, I was offering myself up to be followed night and day by cameras. I hooked up with a production company called Picture This, run by a guy named Bryan Scott and a woman named Marcia Mulé. They’re both gay. Check
, and check. They weren’t the most experienced producers in the world, but I figured what they lacked in experience, they could make up in gayness. And their idea was that naturally funny things seemed to happen to me because I gravitated toward bizarre D-list situations. We arranged it so that they’d shadow me for six months, which would be edited down to six episodes. That comes out to a month of taping, and taping, and taping, for every forty-four minutes of content. To put this in perspective, I believe Sober House, which is nine episodes long, shoots for a whopping fifteen days. My next show, incidentally, will be called Kittens Purring, and I will shoot forty episodes in two days at a local pet store. Stay tuned.
…
I did have a template in my mind for how I wanted the show to be: Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica. That MTV series was a big deal at the time, and I knew Jessica Simpson a little from the D-list circuit, meaning we’d see each other at charity events where we both performed. What I liked about Newlyweds was that it seemed to accurately portray how the couple really was, capturing what was genuinely funny about her—this affable girl who said ridiculous things—and charming about him. It was driven by their personalities, by them doing what came naturally as opposed to putting up a front of how they thought they should act.
Official Book Club Selection Page 18