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.