Like everybody else, I was hopelessly in love with Joan Rivers. I remember watching her on the Tonight Show, and on Letterman and everywhere else: she was always electric and savagely hilarious, and she’d always go just that much further than anyone expected. Her connection to an audience was instant and overwhelming; “Can we talk?” was her mating cry. Because she was so eager and so unpretentious, and because she was a female stand-up, she was often underrated; she could scare heterosexual male comics, and she confused the politically correct. And she managed the impossible: she stayed funny, forever.
I’m not sure when I first met Joan, but it might have been when she came backstage at Jeffrey, and happily posed for photos, while seated on the play’s enormous bed, with the cast. She was always kind and generous, to me and everyone else. While she travelled with friends, there was never any sense of a snooty entourage: Joan loved talking to everyone. She also loved New York and the theater; she was the ultimate mensch. She was also the only person I ever heard use the word “Jew” while selling her collections of jewelry and clothing on QVC, and she clearly loved shocking her peppy, vanilla co-hosts.
For a woman who loved talking about how much plastic surgery she’d had, Joan was helplessly authentic. She’d talk, and joke, about everything, including her husband’s suicide. She was ravenous for fresh material, and my partner John and I would go see her trying out new routines at Fez, the basement lounge at the Time Cafe, which used to be on Lafayette Street. She’d be filthy and wild, and she could get away with anything; she was Joan Rivers. When her dog pooped on the floor at a supermarket, Joan would insist to the manager, “I did it!”
Like so many great, brash female comics, in her private life Joan was incredibly cultured; she was extremely well-read, and her homes were always elegant. But Joan never denied anything about herself, which made her irresistible. And while other comics were heralded for being cutting edge or outspoken, Joan was truly subversive. She was a heroine to women and Jews and gay men,which wasn’t always a formula for the more sedate, mainstream forms of recognition.
And while it’s terribly sad that Joan Rivers has died, it’s even sadder that she’s stopped talking.
