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Kathy Griffin makes the D(ean's) list

By Loren Keller

Earlier this month Kathy Griffin took home her second Emmy for the Bravo reality series “My Life on the D-List,” which has been picked up for a fifth season.

It was reported last week that the red-haired comedian has filed a $100,000 cybersquatting lawsuit against the people operating the site KathyGriffin.com, which claims they are "reaping the uncompensated benefit from the unauthorized use of her name and identity."

And an estimated 3,500 people so far have paid up to $45 a ticket to see her acerbic stand-up act Saturday at Carver-Hawkeye Arena in Iowa City.

All of which begs an obvious question: can Griffin really be on the D-list any more?

“In the past year she’s been everywhere – she kind of exploded,” says Judy Hurtig, Hancher Auditorium’s artistic director. (The performance was relocated from Hancher following the summer flooding.) “We actually booked her over a year ago. We caught her on the cusp, I guess.”

Griffin’s career in comedy had been a low simmer for the better part of a decade. After performing in the early 1980s with the Los Angeles improve troupe The Groundlings and on the L.A. alternative comedy circuit, she scored her first HBO special, “Hot Cup of Talk,” in 1998.

She went on to a recurring role on “Seinfeld” and a starring role on “Suddenly Susan”; voiced characters on the “Dilbert” and “The Simpsons”; and appeared in “The X-Files” as well as Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady” video. And that’s not counting the three years in a row she co-hosted “The Billboard Music Awards,” or her appearances on “the Late Show with David Letterman,” or her winning “Celebrity Mole” on ABC, or “Kathy’s So-Called Reality” on MTV…

You get the idea. (If not, there’s also her newest CD, For Your Consideration, which includes the bits “Oprah’s a Diety (And I Think She Is Full of Shit),” “The Osmonds Were Never Cool” and “My Run In With Spielberg.”)

Tickets, $40 to $45, are still available and fans who’d like a shot at meeting Griffin when she visits Iowa City can enter a YouTube video contest; details here.

Hancher’s Hurtig says audiences shouldn’t be put off by the A-list size of Carver-Hawkeye Arena.

“The way our stage staff is planning it, it’s a much more intimate space than all of Carver-Hawkeye,” she says. “We’ve just opened up two more sections. At this point we’re at about 3,500 seats sold and I think in this current configuration we can go to 4,000; if we sell more than that we can open more sections.”