It was so wrong but so right at the same time. So Joan. So great. RIP my friend.
10.9.14
Joan Rivers Funeral - Putting the fun back in funeral | Margaret Cho
Putting the fun back in funeral | Margaret Cho:
At first, the words just hung there, as no one knew exactly what to do. Of course I started laughing hysterically, and everyone else, remembering who we were there to honor, followed suit. Howard Stern actually choked back tears as he continued – “Joan’s pussy was so dry it was like a sponge – so that when she got in the bathtub – whooooosh – all the water would get absorbed in there! Joan said that if Whitney Houston had as dry a pussy as Joan’s, she would still be alive today…”
At first, the words just hung there, as no one knew exactly what to do. Of course I started laughing hysterically, and everyone else, remembering who we were there to honor, followed suit. Howard Stern actually choked back tears as he continued – “Joan’s pussy was so dry it was like a sponge – so that when she got in the bathtub – whooooosh – all the water would get absorbed in there! Joan said that if Whitney Houston had as dry a pussy as Joan’s, she would still be alive today…”
8.9.14
Joan Rivers – honest and funny to the end | Daily Review: film, stage and music reviews, interviews and more
Joan Rivers – honest and funny to the end | Daily Review: film, stage and music reviews, interviews and more
Joan Rivers my god, can we talk?
That woman went out as she would have wanted, dead from complications
of plastic surgery, a few weeks after abusing the Palestinians of Gaza
in an appalling but still blackly funny series of remarks (‘well they’re
phoning in warnings so only the stupid ones are being killed’).
That last intervention will ensure that some of the obsequies will be
a little muted in tone — Rivers had a big following among American
progressives — but you can’t say she wasn’t even-handed in handing it
out.
She had a big mainstream following too, and lost a chunk of that with
her infamous ’9/11 widows’ routine where she speculated that at least
some of the desperate housewives of the New York ‘burbs, on seeing on TV
the likely incineration of their husbands, had (and she would act this
out) stamped their feet up and gone ‘oh yes yes yes thank you thank
you’.
The routine was classic Rivers, neither unctuously political nor faux
radical — simply cutting through the bullshit to make the simple
acknowledgement of the realities of domestic life, and the venal sid of
human nature.
She will not get anything like the bizarre outpouring of grief earnd
by Robin Williams — but unlike Williams she’d been funny in the last ten
years. She was funny to the day she died. Your average episode of her
basic cable dogshit show Fashion Police was funnier than anything with a hundred times the money spent on writers and stars.
How can you grieve someone whose job was to regularly appal you? How
can you grieve an 81 year old woman who most likely died from a
face-lift? My god, it must have snapped off and flown across the
operating theatre. If you find that offensive, you wouldn’t like Rivers
anyway, so it doesn’t matter.
Rivers was, if you thought she was funny at all, pretty much funny
all the time. ‘My God, Jennifer Aniston, I’m so sick of her stupid
movies. At the end of the last one even the dog was begging to die’ (Marley and Me), was about the last one I remember from Fashion Police.
Like a lot of joke-based stand-ups she was blessed with the human
capacity for forgetting — an hour after seeing Steven Wright or Rivers
and laughing fit to piss — and let’s face it, she was in her ’70s and
still performing, there’s no way she wasn’t with you there — you’d
forgotten all but the last half dozen gags, like the tail-end of a
dream. She never did serious, she never did heartwarming (as far as I
recall), she just did funny.
But there is a serious point about Rivers, and that is that she was
far more of a pioneer and innovator than Robin Williams. A showbiz-crazy
New York Jewish gal, she failed for years — at acting, singing,
everything — before she found a knack for stand-up. She rose as part of
an almost completely forgotten cultural phalanx — the women stand-ups of
the ’50s and ’60s, of whom there were many. Household names, too,
national stars in the US and in syndication.
Today only Rivers and Phyllis Diller are remembered, partly for
longevity and, in Diller’s case, because she reversed the style (which
Rivers kept), of being glammed up to the nines. Diller made a joke about
her plainness and that insured her a permanent niche.
The others — they styled themselves as Rivers did until her death,
and I guess beyond (she’s left instructions for burial — she wants to be
depilated), as glamorous, slightly up-class WASPs. The look gave them
license — on US tonight shows, in nightclubs and Vegas — to do
surprisingly risque material for the time. They were allowed in to the
all-male bastion for one big reason — stand-up comedy’s raison d’etre,
its cultural role is to ceaselessly restage the mystery of the gendered
human being.
The fact that there are men and women, that they find their meaning
in each other, and yet are simultaneously mutually intolerable, powers
the folk tales of every culture, is projected cosmically, and stand-up
is merely our way of simultaneously releasing the tension of that, and
pondering the enigma. The pre-’80s female stand-ups did that from the
‘other side’, of the patraichal culture, in a way that could not be
subsituted for.
Rivers’s innovation was to sharpen those jokes from the teasing,
sometimes fey manner, to a very edgy barely concealed hostility, a lot
of it done through the enactment of female jealousy. When the DJ Robin
Quivers used an award speech to tearfully recount abuse by her father,
Rivers remarked ‘you should have been glad of the attention. I saw you
backstage bitch, you looked like a mudslide’, a putdown as carved and
detailed as an epigram from Martial.
The other item she added was viscerality, of the female body, the
abject – ‘my God when I was pregnant I was so big when my waters broke
my dog drowned! And he was in Detroit!’ — contradicted by the
high-finish of her appearance. It was an extended performance of the
core contradiction of public femininity, and it went for decades. She
was not only doing a sort of goyim minstrel act — she was essentially a
drag act who happened to be a woman.
God knows I don’t feel a skerrick of sympathy or loss for Rivers
herself. But as Billy Wilder said, walking away from Ernst Lubitsch’s
funeral ‘worse than no more Lubitsch, no more Lubitsch jokes’. She died
after days in an induced coma, like everyone who watched Anzac Girls. Can we talk?
That woman went out as she would have wanted, dead from complications
of plastic surgery, a few weeks after abusing the Palestinians of Gaza
in an appalling but still blackly funny series of remarks (‘well they’re
phoning in warnings so only the stupid ones are being killed’).
That last intervention will ensure that some of the obsequies will be
a little muted in tone — Rivers had a big following among American
progressives — but you can’t say she wasn’t even-handed in handing it
out.
She had a big mainstream following too, and lost a chunk of that with
her infamous ’9/11 widows’ routine where she speculated that at least
some of the desperate housewives of the New York ‘burbs, on seeing on TV
the likely incineration of their husbands, had (and she would act this
out) stamped their feet up and gone ‘oh yes yes yes thank you thank
you’.
The routine was classic Rivers, neither unctuously political nor faux
radical — simply cutting through the bullshit to make the simple
acknowledgement of the realities of domestic life, and the venal sid of
human nature.
She will not get anything like the bizarre outpouring of grief earnd
by Robin Williams — but unlike Williams she’d been funny in the last ten
years. She was funny to the day she died. Your average episode of her
basic cable dogshit show Fashion Police was funnier than anything with a hundred times the money spent on writers and stars.
How can you grieve someone whose job was to regularly appal you? How
can you grieve an 81 year old woman who most likely died from a
face-lift? My god, it must have snapped off and flown across the
operating theatre. If you find that offensive, you wouldn’t like Rivers
anyway, so it doesn’t matter.
Rivers was, if you thought she was funny at all, pretty much funny
all the time. ‘My God, Jennifer Aniston, I’m so sick of her stupid
movies. At the end of the last one even the dog was begging to die’ (Marley and Me), was about the last one I remember from Fashion Police.
Like a lot of joke-based stand-ups she was blessed with the human
capacity for forgetting — an hour after seeing Steven Wright or Rivers
and laughing fit to piss — and let’s face it, she was in her ’70s and
still performing, there’s no way she wasn’t with you there — you’d
forgotten all but the last half dozen gags, like the tail-end of a
dream. She never did serious, she never did heartwarming (as far as I
recall), she just did funny.
But there is a serious point about Rivers, and that is that she was
far more of a pioneer and innovator than Robin Williams. A showbiz-crazy
New York Jewish gal, she failed for years — at acting, singing,
everything — before she found a knack for stand-up. She rose as part of
an almost completely forgotten cultural phalanx — the women stand-ups of
the ’50s and ’60s, of whom there were many. Household names, too,
national stars in the US and in syndication.
Today only Rivers and Phyllis Diller are remembered, partly for
longevity and, in Diller’s case, because she reversed the style (which
Rivers kept), of being glammed up to the nines. Diller made a joke about
her plainness and that insured her a permanent niche.
The others — they styled themselves as Rivers did until her death,
and I guess beyond (she’s left instructions for burial — she wants to be
depilated), as glamorous, slightly up-class WASPs. The look gave them
license — on US tonight shows, in nightclubs and Vegas — to do
surprisingly risque material for the time. They were allowed in to the
all-male bastion for one big reason — stand-up comedy’s raison d’etre,
its cultural role is to ceaselessly restage the mystery of the gendered
human being.
The fact that there are men and women, that they find their meaning
in each other, and yet are simultaneously mutually intolerable, powers
the folk tales of every culture, is projected cosmically, and stand-up
is merely our way of simultaneously releasing the tension of that, and
pondering the enigma. The pre-’80s female stand-ups did that from the
‘other side’, of the patraichal culture, in a way that could not be
subsituted for.
Rivers’s innovation was to sharpen those jokes from the teasing,
sometimes fey manner, to a very edgy barely concealed hostility, a lot
of it done through the enactment of female jealousy. When the DJ Robin
Quivers used an award speech to tearfully recount abuse by her father,
Rivers remarked ‘you should have been glad of the attention. I saw you
backstage bitch, you looked like a mudslide’, a putdown as carved and
detailed as an epigram from Martial.
The other item she added was viscerality, of the female body, the
abject – ‘my God when I was pregnant I was so big when my waters broke
my dog drowned! And he was in Detroit!’ — contradicted by the
high-finish of her appearance. It was an extended performance of the
core contradiction of public femininity, and it went for decades. She
was not only doing a sort of goyim minstrel act — she was essentially a
drag act who happened to be a woman.
God knows I don’t feel a skerrick of sympathy or loss for Rivers
herself. But as Billy Wilder said, walking away from Ernst Lubitsch’s
funeral ‘worse than no more Lubitsch, no more Lubitsch jokes’. She died
after days in an induced coma, like everyone who watched Anzac Girls. Can we talk?
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