Last Friday night, Kathy Griffin, star of the Bravo reality show "My Life on the D-List" and heir apparent to the Sandra Bernhard/Joan Rivers style of snark and dish comedy -- without the singing and the dead husband -- brought down house at the Warfield with her second sold-out San Francisco show.
Onstage doing standup, Griffin is energetic and totally comfortable, with a loosely structured conversational routine that could seemingly go on forever. Her Robin Williams-like manic energy leads the audience on a frenetic, often disjointed, but always piercingly funny walkabout through American pop culture.
The fun and festive crowd, which was about 90 percent gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender, was prepartying heavily at the Warfield's upper-level bar before show time. By 8:00 (tickets indicated a 7:30 start time), the crowd started to clap and call for Miss Griff, who was fashionably late -- what? you expect a huge superstar like Kathy Griffin to be on time? The delay worked to her advantage though because by the time she finally pranced onstage at 8:05, the crowd was waiting to explode.
Like Bernhard, KGriff has a huge gay following. She usually starts her live comedy shows with the entreaty, "where's my gays?," but on Friday night, no such query was necessary. Haircuts, public displays of affection, gratuitous use of studded leather belts, and t-shirts with slogans like "Gone Fisting" and "Who am I? Reach Around and Find Out" said it all. This was definitely her crowd.