If I had met Joan Rivers as a child or young teenager, she would’ve taken one look at me and told my parents to buy me a lifetime subscription to Honcho and some lube.
Why? Not because I was a fey kid, but because that’s what she does.
She says things that are pointed, funny and true. Or at least as true as she sees them.
And that’s not easy to do or say. Check out Joan on the Ed Sullivan Show in the late 1960s. Here, her comedy is tailored to a mass television audience, but there is still something intelligent and biting in her satire of life as a woman during the era.
Joan is still working it and has recently put out a new DVD, called Don’t Start with Me. Although her material has changed a bit, and is — of course — a bit raunchier, she knows how to nail a joke and does it in the best way: by making us laugh at ourselves, with ourselves.
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