Kathy Griffin is on a roll. At least a Kathy Griffin kind of roll.

Last week, on a New Year's Eve telecast with Anderson Cooper on CNN, Griffin used a squelch made popular by nightclub comedians from time immemorial that features some salty language. Going to commercial, Griffin shouted good-naturedly to a bystander, "I don't go to your job and knock the d---s out of your mouth."

Perfectly acceptable in a comedy club. But on the venerable news station? Turns out that's OK, too.

Griffin, who performs two shows at the River Rock Show Theatre on Saturday, insists she thought the program had already gone to a break. When she found out otherwise, she immediately turned to her co-host and said, "Are you in trouble? Am I in trouble? Are we fired? Are you fired?" Cooper was nonplussed. "He acted like it was nothing," she says on the phone from her home in Los Angeles. "He said, 'No! It's cable. The FCC doesn't govern it.'"

Still, it got people talking. Which is something the self-proclaimed D-list celebrity covets. She also revelled in her 2007 Primetime Emmy win for her reality series Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List when she accepted the award saying, "Suck it, Jesus. This award is my god now." That bon mot got her condemned by the Catholic League. All well and good for the lapsed Catholic. But the joke on CNN has made her an instant splash on the Internet.

"You have no idea how excited I am at the age of 48 to be a YouTube sensation," she says. "I have never in my whole career had what they call the YouTube moment and now it's had something like a million views. I am absolutely in heaven. I live for this s--t."

With all this publicity, it's only fitting that in her fifth season, which airs on Bravo in the U.S. and the Comedy Network in Canada, the theme is that she's an A-lister in training. So she gets advice from the likes of Bette Midler, Rosie O'Donnell, Gloria Estefan and Lily Tomlin. In fact, Griffin is coming up a day early just to catch Tomlin, who's appearing at the same venue on Friday. (See story on opposite page.)

"When I talk to Lily Tomlin," Griffin says, "I'm sure that she will be one of many, many Oscar nominees and Grammy winners that will say, 'Maybe you shouldn't say things like that.' But I can't help myself!"

She dishes it out and her fans eat it up. Griffin draws from all quarters but is especially popular in the gay community.

"I call them the unshockable gays," she says. To her, they're the ideal audience because they're an oppressed minority who have real world problems they are confronted with daily.

"Who knows if somebody used a slur or if in any way they had to deal with any kind of anti-gay sentiment in their day," she says, "so by the time they come to a comedy show they're just willing to go there with me. They want to laugh. Gay audiences are the very least likely to walk out in shock at anything I say. I mean, what haven't they heard?"

If there happens to be a dissatisfied customer or two, though, she doesn't sweat it. On the contrary, she welcomes it.

"I like to think I haven't really done my job until at least one person's walked out," she says.