Official Book Club Selection

by Kathy Griffin

  I Cher-ed this Bob Mackie outfit for the Kenwood commercial.

  Anyway, I got the gig! I showed up on set, my first really big professional set, and it was huge, meant to look like the ’70s. (Really, it just looked like my high school.) The guys were all in bell bottoms, and they put me in this wild orange jumpsuit that the wardrobe guy told me was a Bob Mackie that Cher actually wore on The Sonny and Cher Show. I was like, “Holy shit!” Chastity was probably conceived five minutes after this outfit fell to the floor.

  The director was a guy named Joe Pytka, and he was the king of big-time national commercials. Chances are everyone in America has done three things: breathed, taken a shit, and watched an ad Joe Pytka directed. His reputation, though, was not so good. I kept hearing, “Look out for this guy. He’s a monster. He fires people all the time. Don’t take it personally.” But I knew if I played my cards right, he could do a lot for me.

  So we start shooting, with the client and my commercial agent there. They cue me, I do what I did in the audition and—whew!—the director’s nice to me. But he was vicious to everybody else. He starts firing people, screaming at them. Then, without notice, he’d leave to go play basketball for an hour, leaving everyone standing there, and come back all sweaty and pick up where he left off. After he launched into another of his tirades, I started talking to somebody about how mortified I was by him, and then a crew member ran up to me and said, “You’re on mike! You’re on mike! Everyone with headphones can hear you!”

  I said, “I don’t care.”

  I then went up to Joe Pytka and said, “Just so you know, you’re a freak, and if you keep screaming and having these fits around me, all that’s going to happen is I’m just going to cry and leave. So really, take it down a few notches.”

  There was this hush. And then Joe said, “I like her!”

  And that was it. I was golden. He was the first powerful person whom I took a risk with by calling him out, and he didn’t penalize me for it. He got my sense of humor, and it made me realize that if I could make that happen with the people in charge in this business, I was home free. He single-handedly gave me a commercials career, and helped me get out of the yearly pittance I was making as a temp, and into a real living. To have Joe Pytka in your corner was fantastic, and he championed me in a way for which I’ll always be grateful. Over the years I’ve done at least seven major commercials with Joe, including some Super Bowl ads.

  But I have to admit, it also gave me a false sense of security about who I could tease. On subsequent shoots with Joe, it was common for me to talk back to him during his fits—which the crew loved—and he’d jokingly say, “Ah, fuck you,” back to me. Or I’d go yell at him during one of his basketball breaks, and he’d laugh. But much later, when I did an elaborate commercial with Joe that starred Shaquille O’Neal, I learned the real pecking order of power. Shaq had to pick me up at one point, and while I was in his arms in between takes I made some inappropriate joke at his expense, and Shaq gave me this death stare, like, “Did you just fuckin’ talk to me?”

  And just like that crew member running up to me years ago when I spoke out of turn about Joe, now it was the seemingly all-powerful Joe Pytka in the damage control position, covering for my big mouth. He had to touch Shaq gently and keep saying, “She’s a comedian! She doesn’t mean it! She’s a comedian!” People really do lose their shit around athletes. So thank you, Joe, for the commercials career, and for preventing me from being tossed like a free throw.

  Shaq’s not going to read this book, is he?

  Shaq! I’m a comedian!

  I was in the Groundlings, I was doing commercials here and there, but it still wasn’t happening for me. What else could I try?

  Commercials are great, but when you’re in the Groundlings, it’s Saturday Night Live you want most. Especially when your classmate Jon Lovitz gets plucked from the main company so fast he leaves a little puff of smoke like in cartoons. The problem was I could never get Lorne Michaels to laugh. I had two private meetings with him that I’m sure he doesn’t remember, but it was the opposite of my success with Joe Pytka: Being myself and trying to shock him into laughter wasn’t working.

  It was always best, though, if Lorne could come see you perform, and thankfully he decided he was going to see me, Lisa Kudrow, and Julia Sweeney. In my case, I was one of the three because somebody at Brillstein/Grey, a very powerful management company, thought I was worth seeing. I wasn’t represented by them, but I sure wanted to be. My impression is that if I got the job on Saturday Night Live, I would have been represented by them very quickly. So the Groundlings essentially geared the late show so that the three of us rotated scenes: It was all about Julia, Lisa, and me. I remember there was one Groundling girl backstage who wasn’t chosen to audition, and she was throwing costumes into a bag saying, “This is ridiculous! As if you’re any more talented than I am!”

  Lisa Kudrow and me with our old noses.

  I thought, What an awful thing to say to someone before the biggest tryout of their career. But her reaction certainly hit home how important it felt, because that’s what it was: the biggest audition of our lives. I had heard Lorne had a no-Groundlings policy for many years, so we considered this a make-or-break moment.

  Well, sure enough, I had a bad night. My sketches were bombing. I was dead in the water. Especially when the audience—all too aware of the TV starmaker in their midst—held their laughter to see how Lorne reacted, as if they were scared of enjoying the wrong thing. It just stressed the fact that this was a performance for one, not a typical show. Ultimately I failed to do my characters as well as I had hoped that night. Nerves got the better of me. Even Lisa, who before the world knew her from Friends was great with role playing and a true standout at the Groundlings—always doing something off the beaten track, always a little better than everyone else—couldn’t get it together the way she usually did. My dear friend Julia, though, rocked it. She knocked it out of the park with all her characters, including Pat—her soon-to-be-famous gender-nonspecific nerd who she’d developed at the Groundlings—plus her improvisations were amazing. That performance secured her Saturday Night Live gig.

  Meanwhile, I was crushed that I couldn’t make it work. After all I’d done to get some recognition there, it was easy to feel that I’d blown a golden opportunity, that I’d hit a ceiling. But Lisa and Judy Toll felt differently about my abilities, and each one independently told me the things that would help change my life and career for good.

  The late Judy Toll was one of my best friends, and was the only friend of mine who was an actress and a comic, living in those dual worlds. She was always one clique ahead of me, which was kind of good, because while we were pals—getting into misadventures, going to Carl’s Jr. at three in the morning to eat four orders of fries and then compare stomachs: “I’m fatter!” “Shut up! I’m fatter!”—there was always a little part of her that was mentoring me. I used to follow her around to her stand-up gigs, where I got to meet the top comedians of the day, like Richard Lewis and Andrew Dice Clay. She’d finish up at the Groundlings on a weekend night, then say, “I have a fifteen-minute set at 1:40 a.m.,” and run to the Melrose Improv. I’d go and meet the most interesting people at the Improv bar. I even got into a conversation once with playwright Sam Shepard.

  One day Judy said to me, “You know, you should try stand-up. I think you can do it.”

  My first reaction was “No way. I do characters. I can’t tell a joke to save my life. I can’t do what you do. I’d get heckled. At the Groundlings nobody gets up to leave. There’s no dinner served. I could never perform for people who are given drinks. That’s my alcoholic family, bored and wishing they could just eat their food instead.”

  My good friend Judy Toll and me all dolled up.

  She was persistent. “No, this is your thing.”

  Here I was, saying that doing characters was my thing. But Lisa Kudrow gave it to me straight. “You’re okay with characters,” she said. “But you
’re really funny as yourself. When you talk to me as you, you’re funnier than anybody I know.”

  Whoa. Okay. I always enjoyed making my friends laugh by just talking about my day, my parents, some stupid TV show I was watching, something crazy that happened at an audition, or my less than stellar love life. But that certainly wasn’t the stand-up I saw being done on local stages. It was one-liners and screeds about men versus women, or observations about pets and airplanes. But with Judy and Lisa’s encouragement, I convinced the show director at the Groundlings to let me open the late show each week with a monologue, a five-minute story. Which invariably became a twenty-minute story. (The one downside was that everyone in the Groundlings company backstage began to hate me for making the show start so late.) It put me out front in a way that I was comfortable with—in other words, outside of the sketch format where I could start to develop my own persona with my own point of view—and I started to get good feedback.

  As for what I would talk about in those openers, believe it or not, I did no celebrity material back then. My act has pretty much always been retelling whatever happened to me that week in a funny way. I didn’t begin ragging on celebrities until years later when I would actually be in the presence of them, experiencing them firsthand. So I started out mostly talking about my crappy day jobs, some new guy who’d just dumped me, or my family, but celebrity referencing didn’t kick into high gear until I started getting parts on television.

  Meanwhile, Judy was trying like hell to get me sets at the Melrose Improv or the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard. She got me an audition with Mitzi Shore, who ran the Comedy Store (and who birthed Pauly), and the cool thing was I got my first crack on a regular standup night with the other name-brand comics instead of on the night usually reserved for beginners: open mike night. Picture gang members, bigwigs, and banjos.

  My first night at a real comedy club, though, I left out personal stories and the retelling of my week and basically just did my Groundlings act. I went onstage at the Comedy Store and said, “Hi, my name is Kathy Griffin and I’m from the Groundlings!” Then I would turn around, put a wig on, turn back to face the crowd, and then talk as my mom for a minute. Then I’d put on my cat’s-eye glasses and do my old Jewish lady at the Farmer’s Market. Nobody did characters at the Comedy Store. It was completely inappropriate. But I got laughs. Maybe there was something to this!

  Then I bombed for two years.

  Open mike nights categorically sucked, at least for me. The problem was I was doing my act like I was still trying to get on Saturday Night Live. (I’ve still never been asked to host that show, although one of my recurring D-list moments is when people stop me in the airport and tell me they loved me on SNL. I never know if they think I’m Molly Shannon, Cheri Oteri, or Chris Kattan. I just say “Thank you. I’m glad you enjoyed me as Mango.”) But Lisa and Judy continued to encourage me with their support, saying, “Just be yourself. Try to do the stand-up that comes naturally to you, which is more like story-telling.”

  Andy Dick, Janeane, and me at a coffeehouse where we often performed.

  Okay, then. No more doing wacky characters. I’m never going to be on Saturday Night Live. I was going to go up onstage and just talk about the shit that happened to me that day.

  In the early ’90s, stand-up comedy was in a boom time. Stand-up shows were on several cable networks, from MTV to Lifetime to, of course, Comedy Central, and people around the country were getting to know the names Kevin Meaney, Judy Tenuta, Julie Brown, Emo Philips, Bobcat Goldthwait, Richard Jeni, Richard Lewis, Brian Regan, Ray Romano, and Rita Rudner, among many others. When it came to seeing these comics live, all anybody knew were the big-name clubs, and if you wanted to break in as a comedian, those were the places to be. The Improv chain was popular then, and there were so many of them. Open mike night at the Santa Monica Improv was so humiliating, though. You had to go and stand in line in the afternoon and get a number like in a lottery, and then you just went on. I knew I’d hit the stage between the prop comic and the comic who talks about how he wants to kill his wife. Plus, you had maybe five minutes tops, or sometimes only three. Brutal. Really, really short sets. Afterward, you’d get notes from the co-owner of the Improv, Mark Lonow.

  I would go there, talk about whatever happened to me that day, whatever I thought was funny, and of course I’d tank. One time, Mark said to me afterward, “You just talked about what happened to you today. You have to talk about things people can relate to.”

  I remembered that the comic before me had started his act saying, “So, I got a ticket on the way over here!” I was pretty sure that hadn’t happened. So I brought that up. I said to Mark, “When that comedian said that, I as an audience member know he didn’t get a ticket on the way over here.”

  “Well, yeah,” he said, “but you’ve got to make up stuff, make it relatable to people. Tell people you got a ticket on the way here.”

  I said, “But I didn’t get a ticket on the way here. This other funny thing happened, though.”

  “People can’t relate to that. Everybody’s gotten a ticket.”

  “But I fucked a guy in a donut shop. No one’s with me on that?”

  That was a weird conversation, like we were speaking different languages. But it lets you know the problem I have to this day. I’ll sit there and say, “As if I’m the only person who’s fucked five guys from donut shops.” I always think what I’m saying is funny and relatable, but really it’s just funny and not necessarily relatable. And this wasn’t passing muster with two-drink-minimum crowds who want routine jokes from a woman that start with “Men, can’t live with ’em, can’t shoot ’em!”

  It was during this time that I was struggling with the club scene when Judy said, “I have this girlfriend who does exactly what you do. Her name is Janeane Garofalo, and I want you to meet her.”

  Judy was set to perform a set at a bookstore on Beverly called Big & Tall Books, and she asked me to do a set as well. This was the furthest thing from a comedy club. There were maybe seven people in the audience, and two of those were comics: Colin Quinn and Janeane. The latte machine kept drowning us out, and there was a guy with a bunch of books and papers splayed out in front of him because he was studying for the bar exam, and he would keep looking up at us like, “Ugh, why are you bothering me?”

  But it felt right. It was a casual setting where we each took turns doing about fifteen minutes of new material, sometimes looking down at our notes, simply trying to tell a story and make it as funny as possible. Janeane came up to me afterward. Five foot two, jet black hair, Doc Martens, tattoos, and thick black eyeliner. She kind of looked like a gothic gang member. She was so cute! “Don’t change one thing about what you do,” she said. “Don’t try to be a joke teller. Stop going to the Improv. You’re not going to do well at the Improv. You need to perform at alternative spaces.”

  That’s when I said, “If I can get theater space, would you do shows with me and Judy?”

  She said yes.

  And by the way, I still don’t think that comedian got a ticket on his way to the Improv. He was just making that shit up.

  My good friend Margaret Cho, who was a big supporter of my efforts at stand-up.

  When I got into stand-up in the early ’90s, it was a time when the brick wall era of comedy—named after the backdrop always used for comedy clubs—was so prevalent that for certain audiences, that style of rigidly formatted joke telling had become dull. People were beginning to feel they’d heard all the differences between New Yorkers and LA people, between men and women, between cats and dogs, and all the setup/punchline combos as well. Plus, the scene was a breeding ground for hackery. I knew people who would scrape together ten, fifteen minutes of material, do it over and over from club to club, and get a million-dollar television development deal.

  I didn’t know how to write a one-liner to save my life. I still don’t.

  The scene Judy, Janeane, and I were a part of, though, felt like something special. I
wanted to take advantage of this emerging buzz for what was being called alternative comedy that was happening at bookstores and coffeehouses and showcases like Un-Cabaret, which comedian Beth Lapides would set up from week to week in a different place. It was a niche market waiting to be tapped. Taking a cue from my mother’s scholarship-hunting abilities, I found a loophole in the Groundlings membership book that said a member in current good standing could have the theater for free on Mondays—when there were no classes or show—“if no one else has used it for any other reason.”

  I booked the theater for every Monday in July. Judy and I made flyers, copied them at Kinko’s, and called our night Hot Cup O’ Talk.

  The setup was four comics: me, Judy, Janeane, and one other person. We tried to make it all girls—Margaret Cho, Laura Kightlinger, if they could—but occasionally it’d be guys like Dana Gould or Taylor Negron, who were always welcome. We charged a dollar at the door, because we were convinced nobody would come if we asked for two. We also hoped that being scheduled on a weeknight might make it easier for industry people to show up.

  The concept I came up with for the show was that I would go on stage first with an egg timer and set it for fifteen minutes. I’d tell the crowd, “When the bell goes off, I’m bringing out the next comic.” Then it was a baton pass, with the next comic doing fifteen minutes and bringing out the one after her or him. This way, people knew that it would literally take only an hour of their time. (Industry people loved that. And it only made them one hour late for their lap dances.)

  The rules for performing at Hot Cup O’ Talk were that if you had a forty-five-minute set that killed at the comedy club, you were not allowed to perform anything from it. People like Janeane were stoked: “Awesome,” she said. “I don’t have a comedy club set.” But even comedians from the conventional circuit said, “Great.” Guys like Dana and Andy Kindler enjoyed it because they had other material bubbling up inside them that just didn’t work at the Improv or the Comedy Store or the Laugh Factory. They wanted a safe place to try something new. Another rule we had was, you could never repeat material. Ever! You had to have a new fifteen-minute set every time. I would usually tell one long story, but someone else might do a bunch of little bits, or a character. Sometimes somebody would have a guitar.