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I got to tell Kathy Griffin that Sarah Huckabee Sanders was stepping down.
When the news alert popped up on my phone Thursday afternoon during a taping of The Last Laugh podcast, it stopped the red-headed comedian in her tracks.
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“Where are we having the party?” she asked. “I mean, this is a celebratory moment.”
Griffin, who became a primary target for the administration after she posed for a photo holding up a Trump mask covered in ketchup, has reason to celebrate. A full year after that incident—following countless death threats and multiple visits from the Secret Service—Sanders was still bringing it up during her briefings.
After ABC fired Roseanne Barr for making racist comments about former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, President Trump tweeted, “Bob Iger of ABC called Valerie Jarrett to let her know that ‘ABC does not tolerate comments like those’ made by Roseanne Barr. Gee, he never called President Donald J. Trump to apologize for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC. Maybe I just didn’t get the call?”
Echoing this sentiment, Sanders asked, “Where was the apology for Kathy Griffin going on a profane rant against the President on The View after a photo showed her holding President Trump’s decapitated head?”
“I’m assuming she just ran out of bright-colored shmatas,” Griffin joked during our interview, which will drop in July, speculating about the reasons for Sanders’ abrupt departure. “Because I’m obsessed with how she basically has one dress. It’s like she has a Singer sewing machine. And she has one dress that she just reworks, and it’s above the knee, it’s usually a little bit of a bell sleeve. It’s a very bright color and she is standing by that dress. So maybe she’s leaving just to shop more? But I think she’s been shopping propaganda long enough, who’s with me, people? I said it!”
“But can you imagine, I mean, who’s going to be next? Hogan Gidley?” Griffin asked, before telling the story about her run-in with the deputy press secretary at last year’s White House Correspondents Dinner. “He had the nerve to come up to me and go, ‘I’m drinking a Mexican beer and there’s going to be a wall!’ And I was like, ‘Sir, can you keep moving?’” she said. “I guess if you’re Sarah Huckabee’s right-hand man that’s your idea of a sick burn.”
Next month, Griffin’s new documentary-slash-comedy special—or “docu-comedy” as she calls it—will premiere in movie theaters all over the country in a one-night-only event, as opposed to streaming on Netflix, Hulu or any other major platform. To this day, she says the Trump photo and its aftermath has left her “blacklisted” by the Hollywood establishment.
When I suggest that Huckabee Sanders will probably follow in her father’s footsteps and join Fox News, Griffin took some swings at him as well for his terrible Twitter jokes.
“He actually missed his calling as just a really steady, hacky comic,” she said of Mike Huckabee. “And he’s so proud of Sarah. That would not fly in the Griffin household. If I behaved like Sarah Huckabee, my parents would be on my ass.”
Subscribe to The Last Laugh podcast now to hear the full conversation with Kathy Griffin when it is released in July. Next week on the show: Writer and star of the new movie Late Night, Mindy Kaling.
For more, listen to this week’s episode with Roastmaster General Jeff Ross:
