The American Spectator : Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

Text Size

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

By James Bowman on 7.12.10 @ 6:02AM

Not very nice work, even if you can get it.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, a documentary by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, opens with a very obscene but very funny joke by la Rivers, who at the age of 75 (at the time of filming two years ago) was still doing live stand-up comedy in seedy little clubs -- and any other sort of gig she could get. To some kind of night club audience she recounts how her daughter, Melissa, received and rejected an offer to pose topless for Playboy at a fee of $400,000. The joke doesn't really work without the obscenities, but let's just say that mom, unlike daughter, will do anything, as she and various of her intimates tell us more than once in the movie, to put on a show that people will want to come to see. A self-described "work addict," she says at one point, "You want to see fear? I'll show you fear," and holds up an appointment book opened to a blank page. Her own appointment book, reassuringly, is densely scribbled over.

"Joan will turn nothing down. Nothing," says Billy Sammeth, her sometime manager from whom she is now estranged -- because, according to a lawsuit he has since filed against her, her sacking of her oldest friend with obvious to-the-camera regret made a better story for this documentary. Even if that's not true, just about everything else in her life is grist for the movie's mill. Even her multiple facelifts are now made part of the Joan Rivers brand. "First I was the pioneer, then the poster girl, then the joke" of plastic surgery, as she cheerfully admits. It doesn't seem to matter to her which of these she is, so long as it contributes to her iconic status in the public eye. That's obviously something you need to bear in mind as you watch this movie, which is clearly yet another bid for public exposure -- which is to say, as she herself is very frank about it, fame and money.

We have all grown used, by now, to the paradox of "Reality TV" -- namely that, as soon as you put reality on TV it ceases to be real. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it becomes more unreal even than the sitcoms and scripted dramas that used to be on TV and maybe even more unreal than the news. Not that anybody cares very much about this. But one consequence of our willingness to go on living in this twilit world of unreal "reality" is that the need to discriminate between real and unreal -- on which, in more primitive times, survival itself once depended -- ceases to seem very important to us. I write not from some position of hypothetical superiority but as one who is himself as amazed and bemused by the confusion as anybody. In order to watch Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, one has to be capable of living in this state for at least 84 minutes without going crazy, a feat that is probably within the capacity of most of us these days.

Sometimes, the perpetual performance reveals its variance from reality. Another joke, told to the club crowd come to listen to her stand-up routine, is about her staff. "I say to them, 'Staff!'" she says, adding parenthetically, "I don't learn their names because they're like you: they come, and they go. I say, 'Staff, I'm lonely. Who's going to f*** me tonight?'" Being a slut, like being someone with multiple facelifts, is all part of the shtick, though the former, unlike the latter, seems patently nothing but a "bit." At another point she tells a story against herself of how she once told a joke about the casting couch whose punch-line went: "I'm Joan Rivers, and I put out!" Jack Lemmon, who was in the audience, walked out, she claims, saying: "That's disgusting." Did it happen? It hardly seems to matter. The point is that the joke is only really disgusting if you're naive enough to believe it's true.

Another joke, as she shows us around her fabulous Manhattan apartment, goes: "This is how Marie Antoinette would have lived if she had had money." Yet, at another point in the film she claims that, "Since 1968, they have been sending limousines for me, and I never step into one that I don't thank God I am so chosen." Is that part of the act too, or is it true? Elsewhere she confides, seemingly without self-conscious pathos, that "No man has ever told me I was beautiful." How about that one? True or false? Or we see her on a radio talk show talking with the hostess about plastic surgery and the superficiality of appearances. Doesn't she want someone to love her for her soul? asks the radio gal.

Joan Rivers replies: "I just want to be loved."

I don't know. That one I can believe, though it's also a great joke -- at least for the iconic Joan Rivers to tell. She tries to give to her workaholic habits and her lust for performing in public a sense of calling, even of mission. "Ask a nun why she's a nun," she says. "I had no choice." But then, at another point in the show, when wearily descending into yet another night club, she claims: "If I had invested wisely, I wouldn't be doing this." Both things cannot be true, can they? If not, then all you can do is ask, which is the more Joanish?

In the end, the movie is an indispensable document for historians of America's celebrity culture -- though it doesn't get us any closer than we ever have been to finding any grace or loveliness in that culture.

About the Author

James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of Honor: A History and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (18) | Leave a comment

drudge ette obama| 7.12.10 @ 6:20AM

Rivers must be completely without remorse or embarrassment to do what she does. Her talent is her level of grossness and perversity.

What she does is why Jack Lemmon walked out and why I find her nasty. She is like Blago...no holes barred, literally.

Give me Phyllis Diller in waders (remember her spoof on the cover of Field & Stream on the Cosmo covers in the 1970s?) anytime.

Or Carol Burnett. Even Lucy.

PolishKnight| 7.12.10 @ 12:56PM

Drudge, I'm chuckling because I remember Joan lashing out at Annie Duke on celebrity apprentice because Annie simply criticized her daughter in the boardroom and Joan took it personally.

I've been following "Last Comic Standing" and a similar hypersensitivity that acts as a wet blanket. The judges are terrified of racial and religious humor, even humor that would be insightful and light hearted. And forget about trying to go for harsh gender humor.

So they're left with vulgarity or Seinfeld-like observations about "what's the deal with airline peanuts?"

Alan Brooks| 7.12.10 @ 5:34PM

Rivers was unfair to Dan Quayle, calling him a child ("Quayle was upset because Big Bird kicked him")

IMO she is liked for her aged cuteness as much as anything.

Alan Brooks| 7.12.10 @ 11:37PM

Her voice IS charming, as for instance the fembot in 'Spaceballs'.

Kitty| 7.12.10 @ 6:38AM

Joan Rivers used to be funny, but that was decades ago when tv censors didn't have to bleep her routine.

She was also a very attractive woman. Here's an early picture of her:
http://www.independent-magazin.....tofest-inc

loulou| 7.12.10 @ 10:38AM

Joan Rivers has always been really funny and is STILL funny. She's a commedienne, she's supposed to be gross. She's a lot funnier than Bill Cosby ever was. Or the Smothers Brothers.

Padoux| 7.12.10 @ 12:26PM

So she's supposed to be gross? What era do you come from? I am sixty four and can laugh at dirty jokes but today that"a ALL comedians can do. After all, one feels obligated to laugh at obscene jokes and language, as not to, is to be a prude or uncool. Vulgarity is mostly a crutch of a poor comedian. As a young person I saw two comedians at a Playboy club, one told dirty jokes to the point of embarassment, the other did impressions, and was truely funny but unknown at the time. The first guy was forgotten, the second was Gabe Kaplan who went on to considerable success. The timeless humor of the old comedians remains funny to this day, sans, obscenity. Will all this crude vulgarity be seen the same way in the future? I think not. Is the F word even provocative anymore or funny? No way.

Mark| 7.12.10 @ 1:53PM

I'm calling you out! I do not believe for a second that you ever saw Bill Cosby's early standup routines. You couldn't have and still claim he wasn't funny.

Padoux| 7.12.10 @ 12:15PM

Reality TV is a bane, a curse, a monster devouring TV since it is cheap to produce. What tickles me is the dramatic music and shots backing up a cook fixing a dish, a panel deciding who will be the next supermodel, clothes designer, blah blah. Just surfing the chanels I've seen this pap, I would puke if I watched it. I'm sure many watch since it stays on but thank goodness there a few crime dramas left and that I can read about six novels a week. As to Joan Rivers, I don't understand why a person her age has no class or wisdom. She is a living parody of herself and loves it. Benny, Berle, Ceaser, (not that she's in their class) did and do not act like fools to be pitied. Carson, Dangerfield, where are ye? Bob Newhart, now there is class.

Seek| 7.12.10 @ 12:26PM

I saw the documentary about two weeks ago. It was an honest look at the gnawing insecurity that lies at the root of so much celebrityhood in contemporary America. Believe it: Every stand-up comic, no matter what his or her age, fears that blank calendar.

And, yes, the movie, was funny -- very funny. Joan Rivers may be 77 now, but she's young by me.

Northern Rebel| 7.12.10 @ 12:39PM

I too, remember the young Ms. Rivers, and she was the funniest woman this side of Phyllis Diller.
While Lucy, & Carol Burnett are the greatest, Rivers still knows how to tickle the funny bone.

However, it's not for everyone.

uncle curmudgeon| 7.12.10 @ 1:40PM

Jackie Gleason's was a real class act - the Sinatra of comedy (he killed); and Ernie Kovaks was the Seinfeld of his day, making the most absurd situations normal (and funny). Joan was funny when the rest of us were reality based. Alas, we have passed from an information society to an entertainment culture: the reality disconnect to which Mr. Bowman refers. Can't stop for bread, y'all. I'm late for the circus. By the way, didn't we recently elect Obamus Creepi Maximus? All Hail The Great One! (Sorry, Jackie. RIP)

KyMouse| 7.12.10 @ 1:37PM

I think it was Woody Allen who said, "Fame is a mask that eats into the face." In Rivers's case, it seems to have eaten into her mind and, even worse, her soul.

PCC| 7.12.10 @ 7:48PM

Our economically strapped, white-bread house had every one of Bill Cosby's records. We used to sit around the record player as a family and listen to him, over and over again. He was funny!

WAKE UP| 7.12.10 @ 10:22PM

It's all very sad - but not unusual in the entertainment game.

Obamus Creepi Maximus| 7.12.10 @ 11:28PM

All who do not hail me will be relegated to the dustbin of clowns and circuses.

jeff| 7.13.10 @ 2:43PM

J. Bowman, if he knows anything, anything at all,about Hollywood is, that the objective of Hollywood is promote a leftist agenda, and that
leftist agenda is promoted via high or low culture.
Thus, J. Rivers is satisfying a low culture role, along with David Letterman et al. If conterfactually,
J. Rivers did not exist, another J. Rivers like person would take her place. The celeberties are interchangable, the leftist agenda is constant. To have higher expectations of hollywood is like having expectations of a serial killer becoming a saint.

jumanji| 7.20.10 @ 4:48PM

When I saw her documentary, I wasn’t expecting to be affected as strongly as I was. It was really very touching, she has had some hard times in her life, and still manages to show up everyday and give it her all. I really respect her for that.