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Nobody has ever enjoyed winning an Emmy Award more than Kathy Griffin.

Just ask her.

"It's always 10 feet away from me at all times," the stand-up comic, producer and actress cracks. "I don't think anyone in history has ever loved winning that thing more. I'm staring at it right now. I take it with me wherever I go."

Griffin, whose humor often tickles the outrage meter, took home an Emmy last year for her Bravo reality series, "My Life on the D-List." The third season of the self-deprecating take on the clique-ish Hollywood scene aired last summer, scoring record ratings. The fourth season begins taping this month.

"There's very little I hold back on the show," Griffin says. "It's all pretty true. It's so true to life that my mom is constantly yelling at me for something I did or said on the series."

While millions tune in to "D-List," along with her HBO and Bravo specials, Griffin's fans don't resist flocking to her saucy stand-up performances. On Friday, the funny girl opened a three-night run at Hollywood's Kodak Theatre as part of a winter swing that finds her headlining dates at Madison Square Garden.

"I'm beside myself with excitement," Griffin says of her Kodak shows. "I love that venue. I could've played somewhere else, but I know how hard it is to get people out of their house to go to live events in the first place. So I wanted to make it easy. Everyone knows where the Kodak is, and there's a nice big parking structure there, and it's centrally located."

Griffin, too, is centrally located in the media spotlight. In September, she stirred up trouble coast to coast with her Emmy acceptance speech, which she started out by saying, "A lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award," but "no one had less to do with this award than Jesus." She ended with an off-color religion joke and said, "This award is my God now!"

The Catholic League condemned the remarks and successfully had the TV academy edit them out of the Creative Arts Awards broadcast.

"Isn't it funny that everyone has gotten so high and mighty that they're worried about my little Jesus joke?" Griffin said. "But it paid off big time. I was in every magazine and all over the news. You have to wonder whatever happened to humor in this country. A lot of it is probably just garden-variety sexism. They're not used to hearing stuff like that from a woman. But I'm cracking up because, at the age of 47, I'm 'the envelope-pushing comedian Kathy Griffin.'

"I'm loving the whole thing. It just shows that times have changed. The clock has turned backward. And Nixon was probably farther to the left than Hillary Clinton."

Fans who see her can expect the sort of no-holds-barred celeb dish and biting self-diagnosis that has endeared her to a huge, unusually diverse audience. In a review of her latest special, "Straight to Hell" (which repeats at 3 p.m. Wednesday on Bravo), Us magazine pointed out that while some of her targets may be easy, Griffin's "smart, savvy ribbing comes from observing stars in unguarded moments. May she always have VIP access!"

The VIP pass didn't come overnight. A Chicago native, Griffin started out in the famous comedy troupe the Groundlings before landing the role of Brooke Shields' acerbic co-worker on the late-'90s series "Suddenly Susan." After the show went belly up, Griffin built her stand-up reputation and supplied voices for characters on the animated series "Dilbert" and "The Simpsons," appeared in a dual role on "The X-Files," co-hosted the Billboard Music Awards three years in a row, guest-hosted "The View" and frequently showed up on the talk-show circuit.

But while a lot of her shtick is based on her own looks and foibles, Griffin — who's dating Steve Wozniak, one of the two Steves who founded Apple Computer — says she can be deeply hurt when other people make fun of her. It's that insecurity that draws a large gay following.

"Sometimes it hurts," she said. "I cry sometimes when I hear what someone said about me. But it doesn't make me want to censor myself when I'm working. I constantly say things I regret and think I went too far. But the problem is, I just can't stop myself.

"I really believe censorship is the enemy of comedy."