Rating:
Genre:
Comedy
Release Date: 06/17/2008
A pivotal part of 2008's fourth season of
My Life on the D List finds
Kathy Griffin crafting a comedy CD designed to snag her a Grammy...hence the title of her debut
For Your Consideration reading like a trade ad. Like many things involving
Kathy, the promotion for this CD was not subtle, as episodes were devoted to its creation and release, but more interestingly, clips of her standup act were threaded throughout the fourth season as a way of emphasizing that before she was a celeb (and let's face it, she's at least on the C-list now), she was a comedian, and a damn good one, too. Her gifts were evident on the series of live specials that separated seasons of the D-List on
Bravo, but having the standup integrated into the show and then having it available as an album shifts attention to
Kathy's standup strengths.
Griffin's greatest gift as a comedian is her ability to seem spontaneous. None of her routines feel written, they seem to leap out of her head the second they occur to her, a notion
My Life on the D List supports as it's
nothing but
Kathy riffing on the moment. Curiously, having so much of the standup worked into the fourth season -- along with seeing behind-the-scenes footage of her working on set lists -- undercuts the suspicion that her stage show is spontaneous as we see the craft that goes into it...which winds up making
For Your Consideration seem stronger, as it's humor that only
feels improvised when it's really been meticulously constructed.
Of course, none of this craft would matter if
Griffin's material wasn't very, very funny, which it certainly is here. Many of the bits were aired on the TV show and anybody who saw
Griffin live during the early months of 2008 should find these stories familiar: how
Britney has gone bonkers, how
Kathy was re-banned from
the View because she happened to let it slip that
Barbara Walters prefers Astro-Glide, her relationship with
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, a lengthy digression on
the Osmonds fueled by
Marie's appearance on
Dancing with the Stars, several segments on
Oprah, all capped off with a fantastic story about meeting
Steven Spielberg backstage at a
Seinfeld concert. Like such
Bravo specials as
Allegedly,
Kathy Griffin Is...Not Nicole Kidman, and
Everybody Can Suck It,
For Your Consideration is a snapshot of
Kathy's take of a fleeting moment in pop culture history, but the brilliant thing about
Griffin is that once that moment has passed, her routines are still funny because of her seamless writing and frenzied conversational delivery. And if that's not deserving of a Grammy, then maybe the award shouldn't be handed out in 2009.
~Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
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