Better than: Finally finding the needle goddamn in the haystack.
Kathy Griffin brought her saucy one-woman act to the Hard Rock Live this Saturday night. We brought you an inside look at Griffin's life in an interview last week on County Grind, and figured you'd want more. The gigantic stadium that is the Hard Rock Live was packed to the brim with the all-but-expected crowd of gays, groups of "ladies night" cougars, women-who-dragged-their-husbands, and grandparent-aged patrons... And us. Griffin wore a fierce leopard print wrap dress and crocs. Yeah, crocs.
The show started around 8:30 and ended around 10, opening with a montage of Griffin's career. She started out as part of the infamous comedy troupe The Groundlings in the early 1980s. There were snippits and scenes from controversial talk-show appearances (i.e. The View), her appearance in Eminem's 2000 hit single "The Real Slim Shady", and gay jokes thrown at Anderson Cooper during the pair's co-hosting of CNN's New Years Ever Broadcasts from 2009 to 2011.
Griffin came out, guns blazing. The comedienne pleasantly surprised the crowd within the first five minutes by bringing friend and South Florida-native Gloria Estefan onstage to perform what Griffin referred to as a "Miami dance remix" of The Kathy Show theme song. The two, who are also close friends, joked with one another casually. From there on out, the ambiguous fourth wall was broken down -- Kathy (yeah, we're on a first-name basis, no big deal) was part of the audience, not a isolated celebrity.
And the bath salt jokes, yep, they were there! "Please don't eat my fucking face off," Griffin boomed over the mic, and the crowd roared. "Yeah, I went there," Griffin said, "Too soon? Fuck that!" and the audience lost it again, and never really seemed to get it back together.
Soon after the zombie drug joke -- now synonymously associated with every South Floridian -- Griffin took it yet another step further by flashing her white granny panties to the crowd. No one was shocked, but all laughed regardless, as the red-headed mistress of raunchy humor continued her set, which included a variety of vagina jokes, jabs at the tea party -- who seemed to have missed the invitation to the show -- and a letter written to the comedienne by a fan in prison, delivered not to Griffin's fan mail address, but to her home.
"The guy knows where I live!" Griffin told the audience, "He laid tile when the house was being built." The audience was half-horrified and half-thankful at her expense -- one of those if-you-can't-make-fun-of-yourself deals. Let's all collectively hope that the anonymous jailbird stays far, far away from our beloved Kathy.
Here-and-there the foul-mouthed "honorary gay" got off track, digressing from one topic or another to bash the Florida city of Clearwater, which has recently been taken over by the Church of Scientology. The crowd ate up everything Griffin was dishing out, even when a first-row audience member's cell phone rang. Yeah, that guy (WTF, dude?!) But Griffin didn't let it slide, no, no, no. "They're not dead!" she bellowed. He's lucky Griffin didn't get a taste of their face herself. Looked like she left her bath salts in L.A.
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