Kathy Griffin and Ellen DeGeneres are two women who one would think would have a lot in common.
They’re both female comedians who have been working in Hollywood for decades. They’re also both radical liberals who despise Donald Trump with every fiber of their being. In fact, DeGeneres hates Trump so much that she fled America after his second presidential victory last year and moved to England. While Griffin is unfortunately still in the U.S., she obsessively bashes Trump on a seemingly daily basis.
Despite all of this, however, there is no love lost between two. In fact, Griffin and DeGeneres have been engaged in an “epic” war that has been ongoing for many years. In a recent video posted to her YouTube channel, Griffin ripped into DeGeneres as she opened up about their feud like never before.
Griffin’s ‘Loathing’ For DeGeneres
“I have a loathing for her that is epic,” Griffin, 65, admitted of DeGeneres, 67. “I know a lot of it is jealousy, I get it. She’s way more successful than I’ll ever be.”
“You’re welcome, Ellen,” Griffin continued. “That’s way nicer than anything you’ve ever said about me or ever will.”
Indeed, that would be the last compliment that Griffin would give DeGeneres in her video. Instead, Griffin looked back at the origins of their feud, which started when she guest-starred on DeGeneres’ 1990s sitcom Ellen.
When DeGeneres showed up for the table read, she immediately recognized Griffin from a commercial she’d done for Kenmore Stereos. The ad featured Griffin bluntly reciting the lyrics to Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music” in a deadpan way.
Check out the ad for yourself here.
At the table read, DeGeneres allegedly demanded that Griffin recite the lyrics again, much to her dismay and embarrassment.
“It was just off. It wasn’t said with, like, a fun spirit,” Griffin recalled. “If that was me and I was the star of the show, I just wouldn’t do that to somebody who’s like the day player. I felt like she was saying ‘dance, [expletive], dance.”
Griffin eventually gave in and recited the lyrics. The joke, however, didn’t land in that environment.
“You could hear a pin drop because I felt like the rest of the room was just going, ‘I don’t get what’s so special about this,’” she said. “[Ellen] then also kind of looked at me like, ‘what are you doing?’”
“If you know her, that is like who she is,” Griffin added of DeGeneres. “She never was friendly after that. It was just rough.”
Griffin And DeGeneres’ Feud Escalates
In the decades since then, their feud has only escalated. Back in 2007, DeGeneres denied Griffin’s claim that she’d been banned from The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
“I know she had a big thing about wanting to be on the show, and we didn’t book her,” DeGeneres said. “She did a whole thing that I banned her from the show. I didn’t ban her from the show, because first you have to be on the show to be banned.”
Later that year, DeGeneres finally had Griffin on her talk show. However, during her opening monologue, DeGeneres made a point of calling Griffin “mean.” This didn’t sit well with Griffin, who immediately felt betrayed.
“I was in the dressing room like, ‘[expletive]! You’re another woman comic, c’mon!’” Griffin told Us Weekly at the time.
DeGeneres And Griffin Fight Over Joan Rivers
Their next run-in came in 2014 after the death of the legendary Joan Rivers. DeGenres had never been a fan of Rivers, thinking that the comedy icon was “too vulgar.” Despite this, Griffin reached out to DeGeneres after Rivers passed away urging her to honor her.
“I just called her and I just said, ‘Look, woman to woman, comic to comic, I think you need to let go of your hatred for Joan Rivers. She’s passed away, just do a [expletive] tribute, be cool,’” Griffin later recalled.
DeGeneres, however, was not having any of it. She fired back by telling Griffin “there’s a difference between mean and funny.”
Needless to say, Griffin didn’t take this very well.
“That [expletive] set me off,” she said. “So we had a fight in which I used inflammatory words like, ‘Look you [expletive] untalented hack.’ … You know when you’re fighting with someone and you can kind of laugh at a point? Yeah, not that day.”
One Final Fight
Finally, Griffin seemingly wrote about DeGeneres in her 2016 book Celebrity Run-Ins: My A-Z Index. Though she didn’t mention her by name, Griffin wrote about someone who appeared to be DeGeneres kicking her out of a dressing room at the Emmys.
“I’m almost positive a certain beloved daytime talk show host once had me kicked out of a backstage dressing room at the Emmy Awards.” she wrote: “I can’t prove it, but this person, who has short blonde hair, has a mean streak that all of Hollywood knows about.”
Now it was DeGeneres’ turn to call up Griffin and give her a piece of her mind.
“The only angry call I got was from Ellen DeGeneres, which is, by the way, not fun to get when you’re like, a female comic who loves her and her accomplishments,” Griffin told the Hollywood Reporter in December of 2016. “She was extremely upset, and I think she had a thought that she was going to, like, put me in my place, or whatever, but as you know I’m not shut-uppable.”
“We kind of got into it, and I’m not going to lie, after I hung up, I sobbed like a baby,” Griffin concluded. “I admire her and, you know, it was a difficult conversation. But hey, it came with the territory.”
Though it appears that DeGeneres and Griffin have managed to avoid each other in the years since then, it seems that they still feel quite a bit of bitterness towards one another. In the end, it’s safe to assume that DeGeneres and Griffin won’t be exchanging Christmas cards this year. Good riddance to them both!