Forget that she was the nasty piece of work talking trash about red carpet fashion crimes.
Forget she was relegated to flogging wares on the Shopping Channel.
And don’t think of her only as the woman who took cosmetic surgery to Michael Jacksonian heights.
Joan Rivers was one of the funniest women alive, an entertainer who fought for the right to become the first woman to host a late-night talk show and worked harder than just about anyone else in show business.
She died on Thursday after complications from throat surgery.
As she used to say, can we talk? Being a female comic is not easy – but Rivers made it look like it was. Intense, arms flying and deploying that raspy voice of hers to blistering effect, she turned self-deprecation – to say nothing of dumping on her husband Edgar Rosenberg, whom she adored – into a comic art. Phyllis Diller needed crazy costumes and wild hair for her stage routine, but Rivers just got up there and let it rip.
She became famous in the early 60s via her spots on the Ed Sullivan show and on the Tonight Show, where Johnny Carson became her mentor, offering her several guest host spots. But things took a tragic turn. In 1986, after she had the nerve to go out and get a late-night program of her own, Carson never spoke to her again. After a year on the air, the Fox network fired her and Rosenberg (who was her producer), and three months later her husband committed suicide.
But she was unstoppable. Over the course of her career, she wrote 12 bestselling books (mostly memoirs), won a Daytime Emmy for The Joan Rivers Show, became the first female stand-up to play Carnegie Hall and never stopped performing live.
She took heat for her humour. People called it cruel and insensitive – she made fat jokes at celebrities’ expense, especially Elizabeth Taylor – and was known to tell jokes about the Holocaust, something she said she did so people would never forget.
But she also made her own myriad plastic surgeries the butt of her gags. It is something of a sad paradox that the person who led the movement to garner more attention for female comics, someone who understood profoundly the misogynist underpinnings of the comedy business, fell prey to our culture’s ridiculous standards of beauty. But give her credit, she told the truth about why she chose a life under the knife.
And she worked her ass off. In the 2010 documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece Of Work, she’s seen panicking at the sight of an empty page on her calendar. Not working was the thing she feared most – that’s why she couldn’t say no to the Shopping Channel – and she didn’t stop until just weeks before she died.
And how’s that fight for a female late-night TV talk show host going? Seen one lately? No?
She sure as hell did everything she could to try and change that.
