Joan Rivers could drive you crazy.
On a red carpet she could pound a viewer into submission.
But she was also just plain funny, and she never slipped into cruise control. She was in overdrive until she ran out of road.
She was the hardest working and fastest talking woman in show business.
One Monday night, she was hosting an extended edition of “The Fashion Police,” moderating serious dish on how the stars dressed for the Emmy Awards.
Sorry, said Rivers, but Lena Dunham “looked like a pinata.”
By Rivers standards, that was barely an insult. This is, after all, the woman who once remarked, “Boy George is just what England needs — another queen who can’t dress.”
“You have to laugh at all this stuff,” Rivers said in an interview earlier this year. “How else can you keep your sanity?”
Over decades in the spotlight, Rivers heard all the words that are thrown at edgy female comedians — that she was bitchy, she was abrasive, she wouldn’t shut up.
Her reply was, in effect, “And what’s your point?”
All comedians say they’re hardest of all on themselves. Rivers didn’t have to say it. She joked about everything from her plastic surgery to her sex life, and it all came back to the same punch line: It’s a joke, it’s a joke, it’s funny, c’mon, we can all laugh about it, it’s okay.
What she also didn’t have to say, or didn’t say, was how hard she had to fight to become, for better or worse, a household name.
She was an early adopter of the in-your-face female comedian persona pioneered by the likes of Phyllis Diller and Moms Mabley. But she blasted a fresh trail marked by one omnipresent sign: “No retreat, no surrender, no apology.”
Dozens of women comics — think Sarah Silverman, Amy Schumer, Kathy Griffin — have benefited from Rivers’ guideposts.
After Rivers’ husband Edgar committed suicide, for example, she worked it into her standup routine. “It was my fault,” she cracked. “We were making love and I took the bag off my head.”
The number of levels on which that could be called tasteless can’t be counted. Rivers never pulled back. It was a joke, like saying Elizabeth Taylor “is so fat she’s my two best friends.”
Blazing the trail was harder than she made it look, a truth underscored by her famous falling out with Johnny Carson.
Carson made her a favored guest and his regular fill-in host for the simple reason she made him and his audience laugh. But Johnnie exiled her when she began hosting a rival show and they never patched it up before his death in 2005.
She always regretted that, but she also understood something else: For all Carson’s support, she was never going to get his “Tonight” show chair after he retired.
“They would never have given it to a woman,” she reiterated earlier this year, the day after she was finally invited back to “Tonight” by Jimmy Fallon.
She was right; no matter how good she was — and she was very very good most of the time – she was playing in a game where she came to bat with two strikes against her.
She responded by becoming one of the game’s most consistent hitters.
For instance:
“I’m not saying she’s easy, but she’s been in more motel rooms than Gideon.”
“I take him to McDonald’s just to see him eat and watch the numbers change.”
“You make the beds, you wash the dishes and six months later you have to start all over again.”
“I once dated a guy who was so dumb he couldn’t count to 21 unless he was naked.”
“I wish I had a twin so I’d know how I looked without plastic surgery.”
Rivers had the soft side. She moved from her much-loved New York to California — kicking and screaming, she said — to spend more time with her daughter Melissa and her grandchild.
When she wanted to, she said, she could turn the persona off.
“But as long as people want to hear me, I’m going to keep talking,” she said this year, “Why not? That’s what I’d be doing anyway.”
There were times when you wished Joan Rivers would shut up. Now there will be times when we miss the noise.
