For Your Consideration

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.