Griffin Der —

I love Kathy Griffin.

Anyone who can skewer so many people with such precision and sardonic wit is okay in my book. Plus, I love that she’s so unpredictable on live TV, yet they keep giving her live gigs.

I completely understand that in comedy nothing is sacred, no matter how sensitive, because that’s just how comedy works. The more taboo the subject, the more viciously a comedian will go after it.

It’s up to you to avoid those comedians who cross your line and sully topics you hold sacred, including fat jokes.

Now, I’ve written on the subject of fat jokes before and my general take is that intent is everything. No, intent is not magical, but we’re all grown-ups and we each have the ability to discern whether a joke is intended to make light of common experience, or to simply degrade and dehumanize.

Will we all come to the same conclusion? Nope. But again, it is up to you to censor what content you take in. I don’t believe in censorship (unless you’re an unrepentant asshole, in which case, I have no problem) because there is no end to the amount of offense people are capable of experiencing.

In other words, you and I could hear the exact same fat joke and I could laugh and you could get pissed and start a letter-writing campaign to destroy the joke-teller. If we resort to censoring anyone who offended somebody, then there wouldn’t be anything left to laugh about.

It reminds me of the old Hays Code in Hollywood, or the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), where, out of an interest to protect our culture from smut and Communism, committees were formed to determine what was and was not appropriate for American people to read, watch and hear.

Of course, I’m all for putting pressure on artists and entertainers who “cross the line,” but I am against any particular group or groups drawing that line and saying, “This far and no further.”

So, in that regard, I think it is vital that comedians are fully responsible for the appropriateness of their material, as well as the response they get from the public.

And so it goes with Kathy Griffin.

Recently, Griffin performed on the “VH1 Divas Salute the Troops” show in front of American soldiers and told the following joke:

“She’s the only contestant in the history of the show to actually gain weight,” Kathy said of Bristol [Palin]‘s long run on ‘Dancing With the Stars’ as the troops loudly booed.

“No, come on, come on,” she continued. “She gained like 30 pounds a week, I swear to God, it was fantastic. She’s like the white Precious.”

Now, I enjoy a good Palin joke as much as the next person, but regardless of who the target was, I have two problems with this joke:

First, it’s not funny.

As I’ve written before regarding a certain “humor” columnist who wrote a bunch of “jokes” for HuffPo, as well as Jon Stewart’s fat suit, the gravest offense of a fat joke (to me) is not that the joke is about fat people, but that it isn’t funny.

And by not funny, I don’t mean “fat jokes aren’t funny.” I mean the entire joke itself was a half-assed, hack cliché that anybody could have written.

I recently heard an interview with Patton Oswalt on “Marketplace” where he talks about how Twitter has improved his comedy writing:

OSWALT: And here’s the great thing about Twitter: For a comedian, I really think all comedians should be on Twitter and should follow all of their friends on Twitter. Because what happens is, if some news story happens or some media kerfuffle happens, you’ve either got to get on Twitter immediately and get your joke out there first, or if you don’t, you read all your friends jokes and you know, OK, I’ve got to top all of that stuff. And it really kind of…

RYSSDAL: Well, the pressure…

OSWALT: I’ll tell you, Twitter has really helped me write better. Like, I remember when Leslie Nielsen died and I immediately, I didn’t even think about it. I wrote, surely he can’t be dead. Right? And then I realized 8,000 people wrote that joke. And then other people were saying dude…

RYSSDAL: My grandmother wrote that.

OSWALT: The guy that delivers the Sparkletts water in our office thought about that an hour before you did. And I was like, you know what? They’re right. I got lazy and just didn’t think of something clever to say.

To me, this is Griffin’s big fail. I think she wanted to do a Palin joke in front of the troops to provoke a reaction. Palin was on DwtS and she’s chubby, so she tossed off this line about her being the “white Precious.”

I gotta tell ya, Precious was released in November 2009 and since then I have heard similar “white Precious” jokes about many other fat white girls, and it isn’t getting any funnier.

The most surprising was when Bill Corbett (the second Crow on “Mystery Science Theater”) retweeted a comment someone made about seeing a “white Precious” walk by. I cannot for the life of me find it now, but I remember tweeting him that I was disappointed that he would stoop so low.

So in my opinion, Griffin failed not for being mean to Bristol Palin or to fat people, but because she is capable of writing truly original, biting, sharp critiques of people and, instead, she resorted to a hack cliché for a cheap provocation.

This alone isn’t worth the time or attention of you or me or anyone else. What is worth noting, however, is this second fact about Griffin’s performance that evening.

At one point during the show, Griffin came out to “dazzle” the troops in a camo bikini:

This picture was part of a HuffPo story that briefly mentions that she wore the bikini, along with the following quote:

Earlier this year, Kathy, 50, told Giuliana Rancic how she stays thin.

“It’s frustration and starvation,” she said. “I’m cranky all the time and I’m hungry all the time.”

I thought I would check out the content of this previous article and here’s the full context, which is pretty interesting:

Kathy Griffin may have had a nose job, lipo and an addiction to diet pills, but at the Grammys she maintained that her breasts are her own.

“They’re real, I’m not doing the Montag,” she said when Giuliana Rancic commented on her cleavage. “My body is slammin.”

“How are you getting this body?” asked Giuliana.

“It’s frustration and starvation,” said Kathy. “I’m cranky all the time and I’m hungry all the time.

“You look good, that’s all that matters,” said Giuliana.

Emphasis mine.

There’s a link in that post to a People article about Griffin’s new book where she says, “What I can’t figure out is why I wasted time worrying about my looks. I am a comedian. I’m not on the runway in Milan.”

The article goes on to talk about the pressure Griffin felt to be thin; going so far as to take speed and get a liposuction that nearly cost her her life. Then she posts the post-op pictures in her book because, as she says, “I want women to know that this is what lipo looks like. Like, are you sure you don’t want to just work out a little more?“

Emphasis mine, once more.

So after all that she has been through, after all the hell she put herself through, after risking her life and pushing the envelope to be thin, what does she do? Does she blast the culture that pressured her into starving herself and exercising “quite a bit” (which, if I had to guess, would be something akin to the dangerous 4 hour “Biggest Loser” regimen)?

No, she recommends that women “just work out a little more.”

This, in a nutshell, is everything that is wrong with our culture. We have a perfect example of a woman taking her quest for thinness past the point of health (and if you are starving and cranky all the time because of it, then you are past the point of health) and people patting her on the back and saying “You look good, that’s all that matters.”

Then this same woman, who seems to admit to being miserable with her unhealthy lifestyle, turns around and takes a cheap shot at Bristol Palin for being chubby.

To me, that’s not funny.

That’s sad.