Kathy Griffin is feeling triumphant.
Her naysayers thought she would never work again, but at age 64, the Emmy and Grammy Award-winning comedian is on the final leg of a stand-up comedy tour of more than 70 cities in the U.S. and Canada, her first since 2018. With her show at New York City’s Carnegie Hall in October, she broke the venue’s record for solo female comedians, previously held by the late Joan Rivers, by performing there for the sixth time.
Titled “Kathy Griffin: My Life on the PTSD-List,” the tour comes to the Chicago Theatre on New Year’s Eve. Although it’s not her first time performing at the venue — she filmed a special there in 2007 — this appearance will be a special homecoming for Griffin, who grew up in Forest Park and Oak Park. It marks her first New Year’s Eve show since being fired in 2017 from CNN, where she used to host an annual broadcast with Anderson Cooper.
Getting “(expletive)-canned” from CNN, as she puts it, was just one part of the professional and personal fallout she experienced after posting a photo of herself holding a mask that resembled the bloody, severed head of President Donald Trump in May 2017. Although she initially apologized, Griffin now stands by what she considers to be “a protest photo.” “I wanted it to be very graphic because I felt like people were not understanding how dangerous he is,” she told the Tribune in a recent interview. The incident led to a flurry of canceled gigs, death threats, a Department of Justice investigation, being placed on the no-fly list and “losing like 75% of my friends,” she said.
In the years that followed, things only got worse in her personal life. What Griffin calls “the laundry list” includes the death of her mother, pill addiction, a suicide attempt, a lung cancer diagnosis (although she’s never been a smoker), the removal of half a lung, vocal cord damage that required an implant, and a divorce.
“I just realized, as one of these things after another were stacking up, the only way to get through them was to laugh at and with them,” she said. Hence the title of her tour, a play on her former reality TV series “My Life on the D-List” and a nod to her actual PTSD diagnosis.
She doesn’t dwell on “the Trump thing” in her current tour — she already covered that ground in her 2019 film, “Kathy Griffin: A Hell of a Story,” available on Amazon Prime Video — but everything else is fair game.
“I deal with all of it — the painful stuff that I actually think people relate to,” she said. “Look, I wouldn’t do it if people weren’t laughing, so I really put this show together in a way that I will change anything if people aren’t laughing or if they’re too freaked out.”
She assures fans that they can also expect plenty of the “juicy celebrity gossip” that she’s known for, teasing mentions of Sharon Stone and Jane Fonda. Chicagoans might get a brand-new story, too, about the time Griffin had to evacuate from a wildfire that threatened her Malibu home in the middle of the night and took her Zoom calls from the singer Sia’s closet the next day. (One of those interviews was with the Tribune.)
Griffin hopes her show gives people a chance to “just relax and blow off some steam” in the midst of whatever they’re struggling with. “I do feel like, because of the political climate, we all have a little bit of collective PTSD,” she said. Under no illusions about winning over Trump’s supporters — some of whom have protested outside her shows — she acknowledged, “Even if you’re a Trumper, you still dealt with COVID and we’re still dealing with that fallout.”
“What I try to bring to the show (is) a sense that no matter what — life, death, near death, the political landscape we’re in, families that are divided — the one thing we have in common is laughter,” she elaborated.
Before the end of the interview, we had to ask an all-important Chicago question: Is she for deep-dish or tavern-style pizza? “I’m deep-dish,” Griffin immediately replied. “I’m unapologetic; don’t you come at me.”
And a final thought about the city she’s proud to come from: “I think it’s time I get a Chicago sponsorship of some kind. Look: ‘Garrett’s Popcorn Presents Kathy Griffin,’” she proposed. “I know I sound like a tourist, but when I go home, I really do hit all those places. It’s just in my DNA. I love them all.”
Emily McClanathan is a freelance writer.
“Kathy Griffin: My Life on the PTSD-List” is 8 p.m. Dec. 31 at the Chicago Theatre, 175 N State St.; tickets $43.50-$179.00 at msg.com/the-chicago-theatre