“Age, it’s the one mountain that you can’t overcome. It’s a youth society and nobody wants you. You’re too old, you’re too old, you’re too old. If one more woman comedian comes up and says to me, ‘You opened the doors for me.’ And I want to say, ‘Go fuck yourself. I’m still opening the doors.'”
joan rivers, joan rivers: a piece of work
To write that Joan Rivers has said some crazy shit over the years would be a massive understatement. When I see absurd headlines like “Joan Rivers Says Barack Obama Is Gay, Uses Trans Slur Against Michelle Obama” (and over the last several years there has been no shortage of them), my first reaction is to laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of it. But my second is to think, Of course she’d say that. After all, funny or not, there were few things Rivers wouldn’t say.
It would be easy to cobble together a post about the enmity this has earned her; just a cursory glance at Twitter last week on the day Rivers was rushed to the hospital in cardiac arrest revealed that people hate her for reasons ranging from comments she made about Palestinian children to jokes she made about Kristen Stewart. But reeling off enormously inflammatory and insensitive remarks with all the casualness of asking someone to pass the mustard is what Rivers did. She was a comedian, and a damn fine one at that.
In the documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (currently streaming on Netflix, along with the wonderfully weird 1973 TV movie she co-wrote, The Girl Most Likely to…), which follows its subject for a year as she frets about the central obsession of life—her career—Rivers stands before a wall of filing cabinets that contain over 30 years’ worth of typewritten jokes. Pulling an ancient-looking index card from a drawer labeled “Cooking—Tony Danza,” she reads, “Why should a woman cook? So her husband can say ‘My wife makes a delicious cake’ to some hooker?” dissolving into laughter at her own punchline. “And you wonder why I’m still working at this age,” she adds.
The question of why she never stopped working is answered time and again in A Piece of Work, which was directed by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg: She equates not working with death. “I don’t want to retire,” she says. “I don’t want to go and sit in the sun. I don’t want to go and learn to garden. I paint. Who cares?” As her agent puts it, “She hears the clock ticking every minute of every hour of every day.”
Early in the film, she sits with her assistant to discuss scheduling. There’s nothing Rivers hates more than knowing her appointment book is empty, and she thumbs through dog-eared day planners from years past with satisfaction, declaring, “Now that’s a good page. You know what I mean? These are good pages. 10:00, 11:00, 12:30, this and that. That’s happiness. Last year was a very difficult year. I was playing, here we go, the Bronx at 4:30 in the afternoon. That was a real… good one.” The memory upsets her.
“I’ll show you fear,” she says, and holds up a planner with blank pages. “That’s fear. If my book ever looked like this, it would mean that nobody wants me and that everything I ever tried to do in life didn’t work. Nobody cared and I’ve been totally forgotten.”
Much of the drama in A Piece of Work is manufactured: Despite Rivers and her manager and agent variously describing her career as being “in the toilet” and “in a slump,” she was as busy as ever. Her claims of money woes were also preposterous—her business empire is ignored here. Rather, the focus is on standup engagements, appearances on The Celebrity Apprentice, and her eagerness to land endorsement deals. “I will do anything,” she offers. “I will knock my teeth out and do, uh, Dentisure or whatever it is. I will wear a diaper. I don’t give a shit.”
But that is part of the film’s charm. Rivers’ ambition was always to be an actress, she explains, and doing standup at night was just a way to bankroll her craft. That her comedy eclipsed her acting was how the cookie crumbled, but acting remained her true love and the failure of Fun City, a play she co-wrote for herself in 1970, still haunted her decades later. If people want to insult her comedy, she says, that’s fine with her, but not her acting. Finally she pronounces, and you know she’s telling the truth, “My career is an actress’s career. I play a comedian.”
And so she did, in life and in A Piece of Work, in which the role she selected for herself was that of a woman with the odds stacked against her. “Right now they see her as a plastic surgery freak who’s past-due her, you know, sell-by date,” her manager opines. “But God help the next queen of comedy, because this one’s not abdicating… never will. There’ll be nail marks on that red carpet before she abdicates. So good luck to the next queen.”
The great fun of the film is watching Rivers play that part and seeing her work on her comedy. In one of my favorite scenes she scrawls notes about jokes she might want to perform at an upcoming show, cracking herself up all the while (and misspelling the word “vagina”). A septuagenarian at the time, she looks more like a mischievous third-grader as she delights in such rude possibilities as “Are gay men proud of their excessive body hair? Like Madonna’s daughter?” and “Amazing Race: Mel Gibson chasing Jews into the showers.”
A more poignant moment comes at the end, when Rivers ponders the future. “Don Rickles is in his late eighties and he is still hilarious,” she observes. “He’s like George Burns, who was amazing until he was in his late nineties. And Phyllis Diller, until she was 92, she just laid it down. And I’d like to beat them all. And I think I will. That’s what’s so sick. I think I will.”
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Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
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