“I Never Learn My Lesson”: Kathy Griffin Is Back, Again

In the characteristically unreserved way for which she became famous, and later exiled, Kathy Griffin has spent much of her recent press tour talking about her brand-new face (which cost $218,000, by the way). Spend a few minutes with the comedian, however, and you’ll agree that little else has changed. Griffin, now 65 and eight years removed from the political firestorm that ensued when she posted an Instagram photo of what looked like Donald Trump’s bloodied, decapitated head, has a new stand-up special to promote. But let’s be clear: she’s not looking to make amends. “My mother would’ve been happy if I was a clean, non-vulgar kind of comic,” she told me on Zoom earlier this month. “But unfortunately, I can’t stop myself.” If anything has irrevocably changed comedy’s greatest connoisseur of the Hollywood D-List, it was lung cancer, with which Griffin was diagnosed in 2021, and her subsequent divorce from Randy Bick, her husband of four years. With a bit of distance, she’s finding ways to laugh about those things, too. Before setting off on the first leg of her 30-city stand-up tour, she joined us for a wide-ranging conversation about dating, censorship, Jimmy Kimmel, cancel culture, and why—against the advice of her good friend Joan Rivers—she had to make an enemy of the President.

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JAKE NEVINS: It’s a pleasure to see you again, Kathy. And I really enjoyed this new special. Let’s talk about it.

KATHY GRIFFIN: Wait, you watched it? Get out.

NEVINS: I did.

GRIFFIN: Yay, I have a viewer. I love it.

NEVINS: That story about you barging into a naked Sharon Stone’s master bedroom is on a permanent loop.

GRIFFIN: Yeah, she was asleep, naked as a jaybird. And then she woke up for me, which was nice, since we had a date anyway. It was fantastic. Very her.

NEVINS: Well, how are you doing? How does it feel to be back… again?

GRIFFIN: Oh my god. Well, my first show is Saturday in Vegas at Planet Hollywood, so now I have the nerves. But something happens that I am counting on for this Saturday night, which is: I’m nervous, nervous, nervous. Is the material there yet? Do I spin it this way? Do I read the actual email or summarize it? All that stuff. And once again, it’s just based on stuff that’s happened to me. It’s not conceptual. It’s not, “What if Abe Lincoln worked at a mall?” So what happens—and keep your fingers crossed—is somehow when I touch the stage with my Dr. Martens, the muscle memory kicks in and I’ll be more relaxed than I am in my real life. 

NEVINS: I’m curious, if you had to tell someone how Kathy Griffin the comic has evolved in the years since she was put on the No-Fly list by the first Trump administration, what would you say?

GRIFFIN: I think the keyword is evolving. I am absolutely not above evolving and learning, and I’m not one of those asshole Rogan-type comics that’s bitching about the “woke mind virus.” If you have some funny shit, it’s going to be funny. And listen, when I started doing stand-up, I wasn’t on TV yet or anything, so it was primarily about dating and my family. And then when I started working, that’s when it became kind of a peek behind the veil at what Hollywood is really like. And now that I’ve been in a legitimate international political scandal—which I never in a million years thought, as someone who primarily makes fun of the Kardashians, not be on the radar of the U.S. Attorney’s Office—I had to evolve. When the Trump thing happened, my whole life changed. And then a series of other things happened that I knew would only have value if I could turn them into something funny. Hence, the current special, My Life on the PTSD-List, which deals with suicide ideation, addiction, divorce. I just thought, “Well, that’s what I do.” It’s a reflection of whatever is in my zeitgeist. And comedy is the prism it gets put through.

NEVINS: Are the jokes being written as you’re going through it, or does it take a little bit of distance?

GRIFFIN: They’re being written as I’m going through it—and not by choice, by the way. It’s so hardwired for my mind to think like that. When I was going through my divorce—which, like, I had cancer, and the divorce was harder. It just took me out. I was down for the count, and yet I was thinking, “Well, I’m also going through something everyone has gone through at some point in their lives: having their heart broken and all that goes with that.” And there are things that are humorous now that I’m single that I do that I didn’t do before—something around the house, or how I conduct myself out with people or whatever. So immediately I started thinking, “There is certainly nothing funny about this to me right now, but just keep it all up here and get ready to make it funny when you have a little distance.”

NEVINS: Now that you’ve gone through these things—cancer, a divorce, and being sort of excommunicated after the Trump fiasco—does comedy serve a more cathartic purpose than it used to?

GRIFFIN: The name of the game is to have the audience go through a catharsis. That’s what I like. It’s like—

NEVINS: Aristotle.

GRIFFIN: [Laughs] Yeah, right. It means a lot if somebody waits for me at a stage door and says, “I was struggling with suicidal ideation. I’m really glad you brought that up.” I can’t tell you how often that has happened. And a lot of that goes back to advice I got—I’m going to name drop—from Jim Carrey, who called me the day of the Trump photo, when my world was caving in, and said, “Put this through your Kathy Griffin comedy prism, and then something good’s going to come out of this.” And I don’t even really know him, but he found me that day, and I think about that a lot.

NEVINS: It was a real scandal. And correct me if I’m wrong, but I’d be surprised if I heard you say that it has caused you in any way to filter or rein in your work.

GRIFFIN: Not one bit. [Laughs] I mean, go harder. I can just hear Don Rickles and Joan Rivers in my head—who I knew and were my mentors and friends— saying, “Go harder.” Because I would ask them. I mean, if you have the fortune to be able to be a comic and talk to the likes of Don Rickles and Joan Rivers, eventually I got up the nerve to ask Don. I said, “What do you do, for example, when these celebrities get mad at you?” And in his day, he said Gregory Peck, the big movie star, was mad at him and confronted him at a party and asked him to not say certain stuff. And he goes, “You go harder.” But look, I wish I could be Rita Rudner. I would be a much happier person. My mother would’ve been happy if I was a clean, non-vulgar kind of comic. But unfortunately, I can’t stop myself. I never learn my lesson.

NEVINS: Right. I remember being pretty floored by the Laugh Your Head Off set and the way you met the crisis of the political moment so admirably. Now we’re in a second Trump term and things are, by most accounts, even worse. I’m curious if you think your fellow comics are going hard enough.

GRIFFIN: Well, I don’t think that my contemporaries are going as far as they could. I won’t say who, because I respect them very much, but I did have a very well-known, household name comedian call me and say, “I just felt compelled to tell you this, but I just taped my special, and I did the Trump chunk live, and it killed—but I consciously took it out of the special because I didn’t want to get Kathy Griffin’d.” And I said to this person, “I don’t blame you.” That was a horrible situation. My First Amendment rights were violated—on the no-fly list, Interpol list, all that stuff—and the legal bills were in the millions. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. And by that I mean Ellen. [Laughs] I’m kidding.

But I think everybody is scared. Look at the mergers. Look at law firms caving. As far as I have seen, the only person who’s really put it on the line is Jimmy Kimmel, because I’m fucking scared of Bob Iger and Dana Walden. I don’t know about you, but I read that Kim Masters article in Puck about how Jimmy sat in that room, looked at Bob Iger, and just said, “No, I’m not going soft on him.” I want to see everybody do that. And I can’t help but wonder if Stephen Colbert kind of was a little too quick, AI Gore-style, to concede. Because it did work with Jimmy.

One thing I try to tell people about Donald, because I’ve known him for so long, is that he will back down. Like any bully, he backs down, and really quickly and easily. So my mistake was that I had a publicist talk me into making an apology video. I should have just said, “No, this photo is covered by the First Amendment.” But now, I really think we’re Germany in the ‘30s, and we’re the frogs and the pot is boiling. I’ll tell you one thing: all my comedian friends have a plan B. They may not all be going for Trump hard, but they all have a country they’re going to go to, and some of them are looking at property, and some of them have purchased property. So in the comedy community, the comedians are taking it very seriously that this administration can do really outrageous, illegal, and unconstitutional things to a comedian. Maybe a big comedian, or even a D-lister like myself.

NEVINS: Did your old friend Joan Rivers ever tell you anything that rings particularly true now?

GRIFFIN: Oh, yeah. She told me one time at dinner, “Don’t ever make an enemy of Donald.” [Laughs] Because I was making fun of Donald for some reason. I’d seen him at some charity thing he didn’t give money to, ‘cause he was always doing shit like that. And Joan felt a bit of an affiliation to him because she won The Celebrity Apprentice, and she felt like that was a springboard for her to relaunch Fashion Police, which she then put on the map and basically turned into The Joan Rivers Show. So she felt a bit fealty to him. But yeah, she did give me the advice not to make an enemy of Donald. And I don’t have the best history of taking good advice.

NEVINS: [Laughs] Right. Well, shifting gears a bit, I want to ask you about being funny in the year 2025. Because I’m sure you’ll recall that, maybe five years ago, there was this sort of tiresome tendency among comics to drone on and on about how cancel culture had put them in a straitjacket, how you can’t say anything funny anymore, and I—

GRIFFIN: Oh my God, I love you. You are preaching to the choir. First of all, the nerve of them to say that shit to me. I actually was fucking canceled. I was investigated by the Department of Justice, so quit your bitching.

NEVINS: I thought you might have strong feelings.

GRIFFIN: I feel like Katt Williams and I are the only ones out there saying, “Well, write funnier shit. Stop complaining about cancel culture, ‘cause you can be funny and not get canceled.” What happened to me was an outlier. My situation was personal, and it’s because I knew him and all this other stuff. But I find it extremely tiresome when comedians complain about cancel culture.

NEVINS: It seems like that’s kind of receding now.

GRIFFIN: I went to a comedy club for the first time about a month ago. I haven’t set foot in an actual club in probably two decades. But can I just tell you, multiple comedians were on the stage just saying the R-word. And I don’t mean to be Little Miss Prude, but my jaw was on the fucking floor. And I feel like those are the comics that would complain about the woke mind virus, so then they want to use the R-word. But it’s just not necessary. You don’t need that word. There’s words that are vulgar that I love. “Fuck” is irreplaceable. Some things are just fucking this or fucking that, and you can’t talk me off the ledge. But I don’t need to say the R-word. So just, use your words.

The fish rots from the head, and I think Trump’s manner and tenor and the way he is would somehow end up with comedians feeling like, “Well, if the president can say the R-word, then I can,” or something equally offensive. But comedians have become divided just like Americans. I have comedy friends that are Trumpers and they hate me, man. They’re all about owning the libs. Their whole act is about owning the libs. They have to play areas where they know the audience will agree with them, so it’s really changed their whole lives—like, the geography of their day-to-day lives.

NEVINS: Earlier you described your comedy as a sort of look behind the curtain of Hollywood, sending up all the jostling and pageantry of the entertainment industry as someone who was sort of one foot in, one foot out. The state of celebrity culture is much, much different now. I mean, you bring up James Charles in your new special. So obviously, being a celebrity today is an entirely different business than it was when My Life on the D-List first aired.

GRIFFIN: There wouldn’t be just a guy making makeup who becomes a celebrity.

NEVINS: Right. So how do you decide who’s even worth making fun of anymore?

GRIFFIN: What’s funny now is that half the audience is either a celebrity themselves or working on being a celebrity. As someone who’s a little older, I do get a kick out of that. We act like Alex Cooper is, like, real. This is a pretty blonde girl. There’s a lot of pretty blonde girls running around. And then she has a show called Call Her Daddy where she just asks really awkward questions, and now she’s this giant star at the Cannes Film Festival. And I’m just kind of laughing because I come from a world where celebrities were artisans—they were real movie stars. I mean, of course I get a kick out of influencers and stuff, but the Kardashians kind of flipped that game. First of all, they did the smartest thing ever, which is they always laughed at my shit, and now we’re all friends. But Kim started out as the talentless closet organizer, influencer-turned-reality star, and now she’s freaking starring in Ryan Murphy projects with Glenn fucking Close. So I told Kim she’s back on the table. She’s fair game. I kind of took her off the table, because I think Kanye treated her so terribly that I didn’t want to make fun of her for other shit, but now she’s acting with Glenn Close. So I’ve got to try to keep up.

NEVINS: Sure, but some of these people are really low-hanging fruit.

GRIFFIN: You know what I love? When influencers or reality people come up to me and they go, “I don’t want to be in your act.” I go, “I don’t even know your fucking name!” I mean, what good would it do for me to mention someone who’s so little known that the whole audience wouldn’t get the joke? You’re not worthy of being in the act yet, so relax. Whenever I would spend time with Rickles or Joan, I fully expected anything that I said would be fair game. And by the way, Don would do that. It would be a dinner party, and at the next dinner party, you always ask him to do a toast, and he would just rake me over the coals. By the way, it was dreamy and it was heaven. But I do find—I will make a generalization I shouldn’t—that the newly famous, the influencers, do tend to have the worst sense of humor.

NEVINS: Well, since we’re up to our necks in the dumbest shit, what amuses you these days?

GRIFFIN: Well, I like real stuff. I like real people. I like stuff that’s legit. I tend to not make fun of people that already have a great sense of humor about themselves, because there’s nothing there. And I admit, I do willingly throw myself into situations where I could end up with material, like joining dating apps. I mean, that’s ridiculous—Kathy Griffin on a dating app. The guy can find out anything about me online, and I know nothing about this fucking guy. I’m just meeting him somewhere for a Diet Coke and hoping he doesn’t kill me. Did I do that to get material? Yes. Would I have liked to fall in love? Sure, of course. But I will put myself in those situations hoping I find some funny stuff, and usually I do.

NEVINS: Well, who are you dating then?

GRIFFIN: Get this—I’m dating myself.

NEVINS: There you go.

GRIFFIN: That feels very A-list to me. It feels very Jane Fonda, very Sharon Stone. I’m done with men. I’ve had the best and the brightest. And now I’m dating myself.

NEVINS: How decadent. 

GRIFFIN: It is. Indulgent.

NEVINS: You told Chelsea Handler you read a ton of books while recovering from your face lift, but you didn’t specify which ones. Give me the exclusive.

GRIFFIN: Well, I do three books a week, and I mostly—

NEVINS: That’s a lot.

GRIFFIN: I like law textbooks, and then I’ll throw in Down the Drain by Julia Fox, which I loved. I had no idea she did that much heroin. I mean, half of the book is her doing heroin, but I think she’s great and very smart and a true feminist. But I’ll also say: Middlemarch by George Eliot, Pride and Prejudice. I went back and did some of the classics—East of Eden, The Great Gatsby. Right now I’m reading 1776 by David McCullough. And when I’m done with that, he wrote a fucking book about the Panama Canal, how it started and shit, and that fascinates me. And I’ll do some fiction now and again, too.

NEVINS: Well, Kathy, I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me. I think you’re a legend, and now you’re back.

GRIFFIN: Goddammit, I’m back. Jake, honey, you’re a doll, and it’s great to meet you. 

NEVINS: You too.