Kathy Griffin: A Funny Thing At Walter Reed

Here was a mission fraught with peril: Allow chatterbox comic Kathy Griffin into the rehab wards at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in the District and let her make jokes for -- and about -- amputees learning to cope with the use of prosthetic arms and legs, or with life in a wheelchair.

Griffin is not renowned for her delicate sensibilities or exemplary good taste; thus, one might reasonably approach with caution.

One of her first inspirations is to have female members of her staff join her in donning push-up bras and showing lots of cleavage. She knows her audience. "I need you girls to look sexy," she tells her two assistants, quickly adding, "I mean '-er.' Sexi- er."

Griffin's morale-boosting visit to the military hospital serves as the fourth-season finale for "Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List," her episodic and self-deprecating autobiography that airs weekly on the spunky-funky Bravo channel. What's refreshing about the series is that Griffin is one of the very few lower-echelon stars with a reality show who admits that her showbiz status falls somewhere short of living legend.

She's a kind of Desperation Diva, forever mocking her inability to join the beautiful people at play or to cause a huge fuss when planting a Manolo toe on some mangy red carpet.

Somehow, Griffin has managed to keep the act fresh -- much of the time, anyway -- and she shows a sweet new sensitivity in her visit to Walter Reed, never falling back on schmaltz or sanctimony as she conducts candid, ribald interviews with men who show not a sign of self-pity or bitterness. Instead, they join Griffin in laughing at themselves or scoffing at their predicaments.

Perhaps some viewers will question the sincerity, or "reality," of one moment late in the show, when Griffin talks to the camera about the men she has met there -- their "personal strength" and their "coping mechanisms" -- and is unable to hold back tears. "I would never let them see me cry," she says. But she does let us see it, perhaps because the sight is bound to soften and deepen Griffin's image.

She's so adept at making obnoxiousness ingratiating, however, and she appears so uninterested in concealing her feelings that you'll want to think the moment is genuine -- not the kind of contrivance that William Hurt immortalized as a cunning TV journalist in the 1987 comedy "Broadcast News."

To almost all the men she encounters as she wanders among the wards at Walter Reed, Griffin issues an invitation: Please come to see her show tonight, 6 o'clock in Building 41, promising a few laughs and a generic Good Time. But Griffin is so honest with viewers that she confesses in her narration to having laid a veritable ostrich egg on the little makeshift stage: "I was bombing worse than Karl Rove running around shirtless in a Green Zone."

Enter "Nick," an admirably good-natured corporal who earlier claimed to be able to hide a six-pack of beer in one of his prosthetic legs. Exactly how this works we can't be sure, because although Griffin hypes the feat to the crowd, Nick either didn't perform the trick, or it was filmed but not shown. (It would be nice if Griffin's on-the-level candor had extended to telling us what the heck happened.)

Before Griffin even arrives at Walter Reed, we hear an officer warn her that she should go easy on the jokes attacking President Bush, as well as to tone down her raunchy language. The hour is rife with bleeping, as one forbidden word after another hits the cutting-room floor. Uncensored is a T-shirt, worn by a soldier named Jace, that reads: "I'm hung like Saddam" (with a cartoon of the deceased dictator bidding the world farewell from inside a noose).

And we can easily figure out the blurred word from one soldier's shoulder-to-shoulder tattoo: "(Bleep) Me, I'm Irish." He concedes that maybe the tattoo wasn't the smartest adornment.

These men are obviously entitled to their irreverence. One amputee has decorated his prosthetic leg with gold-star stickers to make it sardonically festive. Protesting the censorship of some of her material before she performed it, Griffin says self-mockingly, "Nobody told Rodin to change 'The Thinker' and say, 'Okay, maybe the guy should be 'The Talker.' " She's not really comparing herself to Rodin, of course, just as it's all a spoof when she lugs her heavy old Emmy along to the gig and even gets one soldier to hug it as he poses for a photo.

Put together without pretense, false piety or self-congratulation, Griffin's visit to Walter Reed is a captivating little slice of television, and of life. "They need a laugh," Griffin said of the soldiers before embarking for the hospital, and the felicitous and salutary result is Mission Accomplished -- this time for real.

Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List: The season finale (one hour) airs tonight at 10 on Bravo.