Ms. Palin had been asked what she thought about rumors that Ms. Griffin was going to play a Sarah Palin Tea Party type on an episode of the series “Glee.”
“Come up to Alaska and pick on me,” Ms. Palin continued on camera, addressing Ms. Griffin. “But leave my kids alone.”
Pick on Ms. Palin she will.
“Sarah Palin is a has-been candidate, a has-been governor and a has-been reality TV star, like Kate Gosselin,” Ms. Griffin said Monday over breakfast at the Cafe Edison, the theater district coffee shop. “Actually I’d prefer Kate Gosselin for president. I’ve met her. She’s nice.”
When Ms. Griffin mouths off at Ms. Palin — or , , and others in her constantly updated roster of celebrity targets — it’s with the knowledge that the cracks will only endear her further to her fan base, mostly gay men and straight women who appreciate her persona as an outspoken, suffer-no-fools, pop culture gadfly.
This proudly self-promotional comedian also knows that telling off popular figures will help sell tickets to her shows. After all, she probably offended many viewers with her speech when she accepted an Emmy Award for her Bravo reality series, In response Bill Donohue, the president of the Catholic League, called her remarks “vulgar, in-your-face brand of hate speech.” Ms. Griffin said she was used to being a target of criticism from both celebrities and nonfans, most often via her account.
Ms. Palin’s comments coincide with the moment when Ms. Griffin is taking her latest stand-up show, “Kathy Griffin Wants a Tony,” to Broadway. The 10-performance run begins Friday at the Belasco Theater.
“I’m thrilled,” Ms. Griffin said of Ms. Palin’s remarks. “Can we call it a shout out? For her to know my name is as thrilling as when Spielberg also issued a statement against me, and all I could think of was, ‘He knows my name!’ ” As a teenager growing up outside Chicago, Ms. Griffin caught the stage bug early. She remembers listening to pop music and Broadway show albums that defined a generation that came of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including ’s “Color Me Barbra” and the cast recordings of “West Side Story” and “Gypsy.”
“I wanted to be Momma Rose,” she said. Her parents wanted her to be a dental hygienist.
Eventually she moved with her parents to Los Angeles, where she studied at the theater school. It wasn’t until she began performing with the Groundlings, the improv troupe, that she found her calling as a comedian, with long-form comedy rather than the snappy one-two punch line as her forte. “I’m a storyteller,” she said.
Although live comedy is where Ms. Griffin tracks the most miles, she has made her widest mark in television. She recently ended a six-year run of “My Life on the D-List,” which chronicled her encounters with celebrities, and made a reality television star of her mother, Maggie. She recently taped the episode of “Glee” that Ms. Palin had been asked about, in which she plays, against type, a conservative lawmaker. She will appear in a comedy special on Bravo next Thursday. She said she would like her next television project to be a “hybrid, half-scripted, half-improvised show.”
Ms. Griffin already has two Emmy Awards, two nominations and a best-selling autobiography, “Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin.” Her focus now is on winning a Tony. Her chance of being nominated depends on whether the Tony administration committee determines that she is eligible for an award. She could be nominated if the committee resurrects the special-theatrical-event category, which was discontinued in 2009. If the committee does and she wins, Ms. Griffin said her Tony acceptance speech might be yet another offensive phrase, followed by “thanks.”
Ms. Griffin arrives at the Belasco during a spring theater season when an unusually large number of comedians, including , and , are appearing on Broadway. Though her male counterparts are performing scripted material, Ms. Griffin, the only female comedian of the bunch, chose to make her Broadway debut in a realm in which she’s most comfortable: stand-up.
“It’s just me and a microphone, a cast of two,” she said. “There are no musical numbers. Just shocking, appalling things that hopefully people find amusing.”
Eva Price, one of the show’s producers, said: “The good thing about Kathy is she’s a brand. People know her, they like her, they know what to expect.”
A good walkout can’t hurt either.
“I’m hoping there’s some stuffy Broadway fan that thinks it’s ‘The Lion King’ who walks in because there was inclement weather, and then storms out,” she said. “If it was up to me, I’d have the Tea Party as well as the Jesus people, really anyone, protesting out front.”
Ms. Griffin said her tightly managed schedule prohibited her from catching Broadway shows while in town. But she offered to play any of the characters in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” in which she had appeared in high school as one of the secretaries.
Not that she doesn’t have her finger on the pulse of Broadway.
“ ‘Arcadia’ sounds like a board game, I’m going to be honest,” she said. “I don’t care if has won every award in the book.”
Article source: NYT
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