by Kathy Griffin can be a talented comic, but lately, she’s a bit too full of herself as she tries to go mainstream from the D-List. On the latest edition of her Bravo television show, she made a Racist and Bigoted and stereotypical remark and she was rightfully banned from the Apollo theatre for life because she refused to own her words.
Kathy, speaking to a theatre filled with Blacks in Harlem, began to tell a story about Octomom and the plastic surgery she had done on her lips to make them bigger, and the punch line, I guess, was Kathy saying to the Black audience, “Who wants a plump pussy on their face instead of thin lips?”
The Apollo audience went stone cold quiet.
The band played her off.
The manager of the Apollo berated her.
Kathy, and her comedy minions, were forced from the theatre and into the street to look for their limo to make their great escape.
The entire episode was galling and misbegotten.
Now, there’s nothing terribly wrong with what Kathy did — she built her career on being obnoxious and outrageous and painfully insulting — but the treason against her own spirit, and the lives of those she was trying to entertain, is unforgivable; and the fact she tried to wipe off her own meanness by calling a Black comedian after her performance to make him tell her she was “funny and brave” when she was not — is a failure of character we must not dismiss.
In the end, Kathy Griffin dared to be Racist and then she ran from her own punch line. She tried to excuse her Racist joke by claiming vulgarity instead.
If you have intimate Black friends, you will have likely learned that people have historically made fun of their pronounced lips and noses for cruel enjoyment and used their facial features as tools for societal disengagement and cultural punishment.
Blacks, as I understand it, have heard the insult, “You have a pussy on your face” many times when others make fun of their lips.
Kathy Griffin’s sin of the White Woman mind was not the vulgarity of using the word “pussy” in front of 20 children in the Apollo audience — as she tried to claim on her television show — but rather the Racist insensitivity of basically pointing out to all of her Black audience that they all have pussies on their faces instead of lips!
If you’re going to dare to go there — GO THERE! — don’t start the joke and then back away from its ramifications mid-sentence and then later excuse your Racist vulgarity by claiming something that never was.
The Kathy Griffin of five years ago would’ve told that pussy face joke, realized her horrible mistake in good taste and human comity, and said something even more vulgar to put down the “ultra sensitivity” of the Black audience and their lips — but the new, self-aspiring, A-List Kathy Griffin ran from the brutality of the truth she was trying to tell and, in the end, she was righteously shunned and mocked by those she hoped to entertain, and she earned every last, hateful, hue and cry from the stung minority because she behaved like a coward in Harlem instead of an uncut comedienne.
Ugh. I can’t believe she really took it that low. How unfortunate that the audience had to be there to hear that. That would be like making bad Holocaust jokes at a Jewish center.
That’s an excellent analogy, Gordon, and that was the feeling shot back at her from the Black audience.
It was a strange episode. She started out doing really well at the Apollo. The audience was in her hand and laughing with her. That’s a tough audience, too. If they don’t like you, they boo and scream and shout you off stage.
Then, when Kathy made her “pussy lips” remark — the audience died on her. They were shocked and they were obviously confused and hurt. No screaming. No yelling. No noise at all. It was, in fact, fantastic — because their silent reaction was shunning and meaningful and Kathy was absolutely catatonic before she “came to” and ran off stage.
Kathy was quite obviously upset and she knew she had been incredibly cruel and insensitive in a mean and unfunny way — and if she had dealt with THAT reality — instead of making up the “I got in trouble for saying ‘pussy’ in front of kids” b.s., her show would’ve transmogrified from something wacky and forgetful and into something with great human resonance. She was, and still is, too chicken to deal with the Racial third rail she not only touched, but died from…
There is NO way that Kathy meant her comments about Octomom to be taken as anything racist or bordering on racist.
Also, you have the quote slightly wrong. She didn’t mention thin lips vs. thick lips.
I saw the performance, and I HONESTLY believe that she is a clueless as to the REASON for the negative reaction (I know that I was until I read that some people took the joke as racist -something that STILL surprises me).
The humor comes from the fact that Octomom has 14 kids that she can’t afford to pay for, but still has the money to inflate her lips with collagen (something that is often referred to as “pussy lips”. Just watch the 3 episodes of NIP/TUCK where they discuss it, or seek out comments on Amanda Lepore’s cosmetically enhanced lips). Female socialite’s often get this procedure, and the results almost always look very artificial (like “pussy lips”).
The joke had NOTHING to do with black people having “pussy lips”. There is NO COMPARISON between the NATURAL looks of an African American woman and those of a WHITE WOMAN who has inflated her lips to ridiculous proportions (exposing the inside of the mouth with collagen stretching).
You are off base on this one.
Kathy’s reference to Octomom was about her enhanced “big lips” that then set up the “pussy on your face” punchline.
I agree that Kathy didn’t intend to make fun of the “pussy lips” in her audience when she started the Octomom set — but the moment she said the “pussy” punchline you could see it dawn in her eyes what a terrible and vicious mistake she’d made with the audience before her.
I wish she’d been honest and upfront about her mistake — but since few mainstream White folk know the shattering history of mocking “Black features” in a majority White power culture — I can see how Kathy thought she could just cleverly gloss over her grievous error by making her mistake about swearing and not insulting people based on their Racial and cultural identifiers.
Wow, I am glad I read this, because I don’t really follow Kathy Griffin, and I had not heard about this incident. As a black female, I never heard about “pussy lips” and how making that comment was offensive to black people until I read this blog. I guess one really does learn something new all the time. But I am well aware of how black features have been mocked in the past, especially by people who did black-face. As a preteen, I lived in a neighborhood in which the neighborhood kids were mostly white. I was good friends with another girl who lived in the neighborhood. A few of the white boys who knew her, would sometimes make fun of my lips, whenever we all hung out together as a group. I had always been a bit self conscious about my lips and their meanspirited comments just made it worse, and there were times when I would just avoid being around them. I have full lips, sort of like Angelina Jolie. I just think it’s kind of funny how people worship Angelina Jolie’s lips, and see her lips as a highly desired facial feature, and how she made it cool to have plump, full lips, but the same feature on a black person has typically been subject to ridicule.
Kathy is a smart and talented woman — but the moment she said it she knew she had really been unintentionally Racially biased. It could’ve been a great teaching moment in the history of television — but Kathy took the coward’s way out by blaming the children and attaching a red herring to the whole debacle. You could see those around her were scared and the Apollo administrators were incredibly upset — and rightfully so.
Watching Big Brother 11 this year, I learned a new term. Chima, the mean and nasty houseguest who was thrown off the show for destroying CBS property and refusing to follow game rules, commented to her housemates that she was born with “DSL” lips. Nobody understood what she meant, or what she was trying to say, so she had to spell it out for them: “Dick Sucking Lips.” It was an “Ew” moment in the history of reality TV that she would feel the need to mention that and then spell it out for us all:
http://www.cbs.com/primetime/big_brother/bio/chima_11/bio.php?season=11