by Dish Staff
VIDEO: Comedian Joan Rivers dead at 81: http://t.co/3WAVZgJcjo
— The Associated Press (@AP) September 4, 2014
The tributes to the comedienne continue. Josh Israel illustrates how she was a gay icon:
In one of her earliest roles, Rivers appeared opposite Barbra Streisand in a play in Greenwich Village in the 1960s. The two played a same-sex couple and kissed. “This was before she was singing, before anything. I knew she was talented, but you never know what someone will be. She was a fabulous kisser, that’s what I knew,” Rivers recalled in 2010. She talked a great deal about gay culture on her TV shows. When the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning came out, Rivers had the cast and director on The Joan Rivers Show.
Rivers was an enthusiastic backer of marriage equality. In 2012, prior to President Obama’s historic announcement she criticized him and other politicians for cowardice on the issue. “It is outrageous. The politicians are all such ass-kissers. No one is saying the truth. They are saying what they think people want to hear,” she observed.
Megan Garber pens a broader appreciation:
Hollywood generally relegates the celebrities whose relevance expires before their lives do to predictable fates: Lifetime Achievement Awards, calcium supplement ads, respectable anonymity. Rivers would have none of this.
She knew she would never be Norma Jeane; that didn’t mean, she insisted, that she must become Norma Desmond. She kept working. And, in the process, she became more biting. She became more outrageous. She became, you could argue, more entertaining. She did her stand-up. She did the red carpet. She did Fashion Police. She had an Internet chat show called In Bed With Joan. She competed on The Celebrity Apprentice. She won.
And then, not being content with all this vaguely self-mocking ubiquity—she titled one of her books I Hate Everyone … Starting With Me— she took her B-list status and went meta with it: She starred, four years ago, in a documentary about her life, and about having a career in one’s late 70s. It was titled A Piece of Work. Which was appropriate in part because of her acerbic humor (discussing the group Florence and the Machine, she remarked, “I hope the machine is a vibrator”). But it was also appropriate because of the work—in, almost, the thermodynamic sense of the word—that went into both her appearances and her appearance. She kept getting work done. And she also, you know, kept getting work done.
Hanna Rosin brings a personal perspective:
This July my mother came to Washington, D.C., to see me interview Rivers about her new book, Diary of a Mad Diva. Rivers walked into the greenroom with an entourage, a jewel-encrusted leather jacket, her bizarro mask of a face denuded of all its ethnicity. But she did not stink like a diva. She dispensed dating advice to the two stylists on hand to touch up her hair (no sex on the first date), and instantly bonded with my mother about Gaza. (The Palestinians started it. Hamas was re-elected “by a lot of stupid people who don’t even own a pencil”). Given how Rivers talked, it would be absurd to say she was nice. She was, however, tribal. If she judged you to be on her team, she could relax, act like she’d known you forever. In this case, my mother and I were in, largely because we were New Yorkers, Jews, and in my mother’s case at least, on the right side of the war.
Yael Kohen reflects on Rivers’ inspiration:
[One of the events that helped bring it all together for Rivers] was watching a performance of Lenny Bruce. “I had seen Lenny Bruce very early on when I was on a date,” Joan told me in an interview for my book. “He just was talking about the truth: He wasn’t doing mother-in-law jokes because he didn’t have a mother-in-law. He was talking from his life experiences. I thought to myself, my god, he’s doing what I’m doing. I was talking about things that were really true. I was talking about having an affair with a married professor and that wasn’t a thing a nice Jewish girl talked about. And I was talking about my mother, desperate to get my sister and me married. I was talking about my gay friend Mr. Phyllis, and you just didn’t talk about that. It sounds so tame and silly now but my act spoke to women who weren’t able to talk about things. How nice it was to have a girl that’s fairly attractive stand up and say, my mother wants me to get married but I don’t want to.”
Today, this material may sound cliché. But we forget that in the 1950s, airing your dirty laundry in public was the ultimate taboo.
Rivers herself gets the last word:
During women’s lib, which was at its height in the ’70s, you had to say: “F— the men. I could do better.” I think women did themselves a disservice because they wouldn’t talk about reality. Nobody wanted to say, “I had a lousy date” or “He left me.” But if that’s your life, that’s what they wanna hear. If you look around, very few women comics came out of the ’70s. It really started again in the ’90s, when they realized, it’s all right to say you wanna get married. It’s all right to say I wanna be pretty. That’s also part of your life. Thank God. Because now you know, we’ve got Whitney. I love Whitney. I think what she does is so smart. Sarah Silverman, oh my God. You just look at them and go: Good girls.
… The one thing I brought to this business is speaking the absolute truth. Say only what you really feel about the subject. And that’s too bad if they don’t like it. That’s what comedy is.
The Dish 