The Last Thing Standing Between Kathy Griffin and a Real Comeback

Seven years after the infamous photo, and a dump truck’s worth of drama later, the celebrity-skewering comic is back in at least half of the country’s good graces… now, if she could only sell her damn comedy special.

Kathy Griffin breaks her silence just once during the hourlong flight. “So far,” the redhead whispers, “it’s just a lot about food.”

Earbuds back in, she returns to the source of her frustration: hour 23 of Barbra Streisand’s 48-hour audiobook memoir. The comedian enters a semi-meditative state, eyes closed and left hand on Elliot Stabler, the vibrating chihuahua mutt who’s as much her emotional support animal as she is his. Griffin has a few reasons for wanting quiet on our June trip from Los Angeles to her San Jose tour stop, but the one that matters most right now is that she footed the bill for this chartered jet. The five other passengers, all but two of us on her payroll, oblige her wish. My first time flying private is at the behest of a self-identifying fourth-tier celebrity who spent two months of 2017 on the No Fly List.

For those who stopped paying attention to Griffin after that photo — the one she posted of herself holding the bloodied likeness of Donald Trump’s severed head that left her unemployed, ostracized and in hot water with the Feds — things got a hell of a lot worse from there. Though she ultimately was never charged with conspiracy to assassinate the president, she says the ordeal cost her more than $1 million in legal fees. She became addicted to pills, primarily OxyContin and benzodiazepines. She attempted suicide. She was diagnosed with lung cancer. She lost use of a vocal cord after an operation to arrest that cancer. And, in December, her relationship of more than a decade dissolved when she filed for divorce from her husband. Griffin calls it “the laundry list.” This flight is as much about shushing those demons as it is ensuring she’ll still be able to speak after the two-plus-hour set puts her battered larynx through the wringer.

“I’ve never met anyone as interested in performing as Kathy,” says Rosie O’Donnell, a longtime Griffin confidant who has a home near Griffin’s brightly modernist Malibu house. “And she’s performing this act with a new vulnerability and honesty that I think helps audiences have a better understanding of who she is. She’s not just making fun of celebrities.”

Oh, she’s still making fun of celebrities. My Life on the PTSD-List, the comic’s first tour since 2018, contains revealing tales about Paris Hilton, Sharon Stone and Khloé Kardashian. And while it is not exactly Nanette, she unpacks a lot of baggage onstage, too. Ticket sales are strong. She walks out to standing ovations. She’s set to play Carnegie Hall for a record sixth time in October. The career she lost appears, mostly, within her grasp — with one nagging caveat. The final shows are ticking down and she’s yet to parlay her comeback into a comedy special.

“It does make me feel that, in Hollywood, I’m still canceled if I can’t make a deal for a special,” Griffin tells me once we’re off the plane, in a strained voice that’s only recognizable because of regular injections to her paralyzed vocal cord. Then, she amends her use of the C-word. “People tell me that the same thing happened to me and Gina Carano,” scoffs Griffin. “Please don’t liken Kathy Griffin taking a protest photo to a Holocaust denier. I did not whip out my penis like Louis C.K.. I wasn’t canceled. I was investigated by the Department of Justice for something I don’t regret.”

***

Get Griffin going on Trump, one-on-one, and it’s hard to stop her. But aside from displaying the photo during the show’s introductory video and one well-timed punchline, both of which will draw screams of approval from her San Jose crowd, the villain of her story goes largely ignored in the new material. Still, that near-career-ending episode levied a heavy tax on Griffin’s seemingly unshakable bravado.

Diagnosed with PTSD from the harassment and death threats she faced after the photo, the 63-year-old suffers frequent anxiety attacks. It’s why she and Elliot will get right back on the Van Nuys-bound plane after the show, drive to her $8.8 million home and crawl into bed with Griffin’s three other dogs. “I joke that I’m losing money on this tour because of the jet,” she says. “I know it’s spoiled, but it’s worth it. I get to sleep with my babies and avoid the airport, where a lot of Trumpers still feel the need to come up to me and tell me how horrible I am.”

As she hams it up in her dressing room for a group of visitors that includes former assistant (and co-star of her late reality show, My Life on the D-List) Tiffany Helzer, reconnaissance is taking place in the California Theatre lobby. Lara, Griffin’s friend and my fellow passenger, returns with pictures of fans in homemade merch and a report on the audience size (full) and composition (very gay). This is the hype Griffin needs.

There’s a Lara at every show on the schedule — “a babysitter,” says Griffin — filling the vacancy left by Griffin’s former tour manager and estranged husband, Randy Bick. It’s been an eclectic mix, a revolving door of Griffin associates that’s included Stormy Daniels, E. Jean Carroll and Sia. The latter doesn’t mind that the show contains a protracted tale about how her and Kathy’s trip to Mexico went off the rails while they were both recovering from cosmetic surgery. “She modifies stuff so that it keeps me clean, artistic license,” says the singer-songwriter, who has been close pals with Griffin for more than a decade. “But the truth is that she can tell any story about me that she wants. I’m at her service, and I trust her to not make me look like a fuckwit.”

Others grant less leniency. O’Donnell wasn’t pleased by Griffin’s pearl-clutching characterization of her response to the Trump photo in one older bit. O’Donnell was one of the first to ask Griffin to take the photo down, calling it insensitive in light of the 2002 beheading of journalist Daniel Pearl at the hands of Pakistani terrorists. Griffin’s retelling involved O’Donnell getting worked up about QAnon. “To take a real moment, twist it and make yourself the hero of the story, I was like, ‘I want to kill that woman,’ ” recalls O’Donnell, “But she apologized. I think she understands those things a lot more than she used to.”

Sanctioned or not, each celebrity anecdote and morsel of Hollywood gossip at Griffin’s San Jose show is received like free swag getting lobbed into the cheap seats by a T-shirt gun. No name is too minor to elicit squeals of recognition. Watching this artist-audience relationship play out, it’s easy to understand why she harbors an open distaste for Andy Cohen — a man she’s said “treated her like a dog.” The Bravo personality, who produced Griffin’s reality show back when he was still a cable executive, didn’t just take her New Year’s Eve gig when CNN axed Griffin over the photo. He kind of took her s -

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htick: famous enough to dish on boldfaced names but not too famous to serve as a relatable stand-in for the folks watching at home.

When her set briefly dips into darker material, Griffin gives her account of the June 2020 suicide attempt. She was alone in her former Bel Air residence and took a cocktail of pills that left her lucid enough to come to her senses — but not smart enough to question the decision to drive herself to Cedars-Sinai. She was placed on an involuntary psychiatric hold, began attending regular AA meetings (for pills, not alcohol, she clarifies) and has been sober ever since. Hearing this, the audience becomes an 1,100-seat support group. “I lost 75 percent of my friends,” Griffin says at one point, to which a man in the audience screams, “We’re your friends, Kathy!”

Griffin beams for a good 20 minutes after she walks off the stage. But when talk in the SUV heading to the tarmac turns to the elusive special, her mood darkens. “There’s not going to be a special,” she says. “Everyone’s passed.”

No one has actually passed, her manager clarifies. No buyer has even attended the show, and comedy specials, albeit not 125-minute ones, remain a hot commodity for streamers. When it’s proposed by someone else in the entourage that perhaps Kathy cut down the runtime or reconceive the format, Griffin’s publicist suggests this maybe isn’t the ideal discussion to have in front of a journalist.

“I don’t care,” counters Griffin, shrugging.

Never one to play it cool, Griffin shares her aspirations without regard for any embarrassment that might come with not achieving them. After My Life on the D-List won her the first of two Emmys for outstanding reality show, she launched a public campaign for a Grammy — going so far as to title a 2008 comedy album For Your Consideration. (She was nominated but lost to the late George Carlin.)

Her desire for this special, however, is different. Griffin holds the record for most televised stand-up comedy specials by one artist, a fact she’s quick to repeat. There have been 21 to date. And when her last tour, 2018’s Trump-centric A Hell of a Story, never sold, she self-financed a documentary and released it in select theaters — spending $1 million of her own money in the process. The results now stream on YouTube and Freevee. She expresses no interest in going down that road again. “I’m dying for a special,” she says. “There are so many platforms out there, and Peacock can’t be off the table just because of Andy, right?”

Like any self-aware adult, Griffin realizes she should put less stock into what others think of her — a lesson reinforced during a visit to Sia’s San Fernando Valley home. “She comes over once or twice a week,” explains Sia. “She takes her pants off and gets into bed with me and watches TV in her underwear.”

On one recent hang, Sia left to run an errand and asked Kathy (pants on) to entertain her house guest, R&B legend Chaka Khan. “So I go into Chaka’s room,” says Griffin, “and she tells me, ‘I’ve been watching you for a long time, and your whole thing is, like, you don’t give a fuck. But until you really don’t give a fuck, you won’t be free.’ And Chaka’s right. Shit still bothers me.”

Multiple conversations suggest what bothers Griffin the most.

There’s the ongoing divorce, a particularly weird one that required her to hire a private investigator just to locate Bick and serve him papers. “My heart is broken,” she says, declining to elaborate before it’s finalized. “I am waiting for the relief stage to kick in.”

There’s also a sinking feeling that her allyship with the queer community isn’t always reciprocated. Griffin’s latest legal battle with the far right involves a Tennessee man named Samuel Johnson. After a 2021 video in which Johnson appears to harass a teen boy for wearing a dress to prom went viral, Griffin reposted it and tagged Johnson’s employer. He lost his job and is suing Griffin for interference with his employment and infliction of emotional distress. Griffin doesn’t feel her fans have acknowledged the hardship. “I’m happy to pay for the suit because fuck this guy,” she explains, “but I wish the community would be vocal. It would’ve been nice if some gay folks showed up at hearings in support.”

More than all of that, Griffin laments the loss of her old voice.

***

When we catch up a couple of months after San Jose, Griffin practically shouts into the phone. Over the summer, she had an implant placed in her paralyzed vocal cord. Her surgeon says that it’s restored her voice to roughly 75 percent of its previous strength and that she’ll no longer need those regular injections. So when I ask her if she’s given any thought to tweaking her tour material in the wake of the July shooting attempt on Trump’s life, her response is loud and clear. “No, and I can’t believe that fucking dude missed,” she says. “I mentioned it at two shows. I just said, ‘We were this close!’ People cheered and laughed, and I moved on.”

The news cycle also seems to have moved on. But when I counter that similar comments by Tenacious D singer-comic Kyle Gass — “Don’t miss Trump next time,” he said, before blowing out birthday candles onstage at an Australian concert — cost him his agent and his tour and earned a public admonishment from longtime creative partner Jack Black, all reminiscent of what happened to Griffin over the photo, she balks. “It’s absolutely fair game, just because of the cosmic comedy in it,” she says, “and trust me, those two will be back together.”

Griffin still has bad days, but the return of her voice has her in high spirits. She’s back to hosting her famous salons, intimate gatherings of notables from the worlds of politics, entertainment, media and tech that have a strict dress code and quirky rules like “no crosstalk.” (Attendees include Monica Lewinsky, Aimee Mann, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie and all of her aforementioned “babysitters.”) And though a deal for a comedy special has yet to come through — she now actively campaigns for one on her confessional social media feeds — she no longer sounds defeated about it. Buyers from Hulu, Netflix and other streamers suggest they’ll attend upcoming shows at The Wiltern in L.A. and Carnegie Hall in New York. Griffin has even softened to Streisand’s memoir, which she’s still trudging through.

“I’ve got three hours and seven minutes to go,” says Griffin, claiming to have eyes on Babs’ estate from her own Malibu deck. “It just proves how full of shit I am. I make fun of how ridiculous this stuff is, but I love every minute of it. I don’t want it to end.”

This story first appeared in the Sept. 11 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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