Joan Rivers standing before her index boxes, a joke on each card; she has a wall of these she turns to
Dear friends and readers,
Again I write hurriedly to recommend seeing a film lest it vanish before you get there. Yesterday Izzy braved the intense (and it was burning, burning hot in that car), to see Joan Rivers: A piece of work. The directors and producers are the same man and woman: Ricky Stern, Anne Sundberg, perhaps her friends?, for it’s self-evidently all Joan’s and projects her unqualifiedly as far as she dares. In the theater I was in (an art cinema which does have a Jewish customer base) there were few there, while bunches of people were at Winter’s bone, Please Give. Not Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala’s City of your Final Destination which has alas disappeared.
The issues she brings up resonate so directly and personally with American middle class life — and being a woman, and I found myself connecting personally. Why? Partly because I’m so different from her but am aware her norms are intense versions of US ideals I can’t eradicate from my soul either — though unlike her I try.
More: how she ended the film by talking of her intense emotional pain over the loss of her long-time friend, associated, employee, Billie. She has been forced to estrange herself from him. And he and she go way back: there is no one else who remembers with her what she remembers. He was there when her husband killed himself. He was there when this or that funny or mad or miserable thing happened. She could talk with him and they’d laugh and love and cry for much of her adult life: he seems to have been her Man Friday. We see him in the film a lot. She needed him to be there for her when she was in trouble; he did all sorts of stuff for her. The problem was he’d disappear now and again, sometimes just when she needed him most. This began to happen all the time. Empty chair. So the relationship is now severed. I was so moved because I am now estranged from someone where the emotional pain of it just gets worse. I can do nothing about it because this person doesn’t want me; she needles, berates, insults, and has contempt for me. So I must stay away. And yes there are these rooted memories. I came close to crying as Rivers talked about this perhaps common experience.
So what is so good about this movie? Its feel of burning honesty. She keeps her soul alive by getting on that stage and doing her thing, by activating her anger, sublimating it and reaching others where they live. And the way she confronts our cultural hypocrisies and defies them and in her act mocks our false norms.
The subtitle refers to the them that she’s a perpetual piece of work in progress. Performing from the time she gets up. Celebrity, what is it, how do you make, keep it up, what is its price. Part of the discourse of this documentary. There’s a commencement speech by Meryl Streep worth listening to this about just this. Towards the end of Streep’s speech she says:
“Being celebrity has taught her to hide but being an actor has opened her soul.”
We see this in this Joan Rivers film.
We open on sharp close ups of her face. Old. She’s putting on make-up. Dressing slowly. She does this early each and every day. She getting old you see, 75, and no one wants an old woman. Her history of plastic surgery, her use of make-up and her advocating these are brought up front and central. She’s a woman of burning ambition at 75 keeping her soul alive — she tells honestly about her life through reminiscences: I didn’t know Carson blackballed her utterly from NBC when she tried to lead a night show of her own (first woman to try and none since). He hung up when she called to tell him about this opportunity and never spoke to her again. For years she couldn’t get on NBC:
When young a guest on Carson
I didn’t know her husband killed himself shortly after that:
and how ugly and cruel are these shows like Celebrity something-or-other (there is no rationale for watching such a show, or supporting it because however you describe your emotions you will be feeding off of its basis in viscerally public mortification). The “roasts” on comedy central were brutal to her.
Her daughter, Melissa, is in “the business” too and we see the tensions between them. Her daughter was one of those cruelly humiliated on this Celebrity show:
Joan Rivers lives high and luxuriously and this takes money. She calls her home (very fancy) a kind of Marie Antoinette place, evoking her understanding of how envy and resentment towards a woman who flaunts her riches easily rises. At the same time she has never managed to achieve the status of any of the men nor the kind of teams they have. We see how she goes anywhere — including a devastating gig in Wisconsin to a fundamentalist (Republican) type audience.
Her raw comedy is still daring for a woman and she is admonished on HBO for her use of “fuck” — which I loved her for ignoring. The men utter it all the time.
She manages to get 17 people on thanksgiving and gets in a big table. She has her few close relatives, close staff and brings in people in her building who she knows have nowhere to go and some street people she passes regularly. Before that she goes round giving out meals on wheels. She supports the children of her staff members by sending them to the best private schools.
Although the discourse is not explicitly as this is a woman’s life in the comedy business and outlook on life itself, that’s what is at its core. She’s aware of this and how as a woman she’s been in the paradoxical position of suffering from the very things she advocates.
It’s very hard to write and deliver comedy. She says she’s an actress, a serious one acting out a comic. Years ago in NYC she tried to make it in a play she wrote and produced. She was fiercely made fun of. Merciless. She actually moved out of NY for a time. We see her try again; she is so much older than everyone else in the crew. They do well in front of audience at Edinburgh and take it to London. The audience gives a standing ovation, but the critics are lukewarm and the words are all about their being put off by her being a woman, old, her self-centeredness, and yes her looks. How dare she think her personal life of such interest. So she does not take it to NY. Once being so mocked and castigated there was enough.
I collapsed in helpless laughter at a couple of the routines, especially the one about anal intercourse. She advises it in her routine. No pregnancy and you can do lots of other things at the same time. Read, do the bills …
The joke was during a routine she did in a small nightclub, going down hill — dressed this way. She leaned over and acted it out.
Alas no one (or only a couple and in different places) in the theater laughed the way I did at these routines.
Another of the five women’s films women’s enews recomended at the opening of summer this year. Thus far I’ve managed 4 superlative ones (if you add in Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala): Winter’s Bone, Please Give, City of Your Final Destination, and now this Joan Rivers documentary.
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
From Majorie on ECW (whose enthusiasm spurred mine to make a blog):
“I hear her on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and thought it a wonderful interview. What a life this woman has lived; such extremes highs and lows. I had not realized she had done a lot of theater as well.
Thank you for posting this, Ellen. I must admit to being a fan of Joan Rivers after seeing her on Celebrity Apprentice. It was there I saw her as more than the smiling face with sharp remarks on the red carpet.
I don’t usually watch the celebrity shows because they’re so often like train wrecks in debilitatingly, super-slow motion. However, the one with Joan Rivers was amazing because of her poise, her ability to get on with others, the way she lost her temper once when someone on the show was disrespectful to her daughter, and the way she was able to make her team rise above the rest. She was an example of grace under fire with the ability to wield a sword (not going to degrade her by saying “unsheathe her claws”) when needed. She won by a landslide.
Top that off with the interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air–an interview where Terry Gross laughed more than during any other, then “Joan Rivers: A Year in a Life” is a must see (though, unless it comes to Maine, I’ll have to wait for the DVD or Netflix Instant View release). Here’s a link to the Fresh Air interview:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127556307.
Marjorie
From Penny:
“I have mixed feelings about Joan Rivers, I know back when she was on TV more often she was a Republican
and when Ferraro was chosen as first woman VP, she went after her scathingly. Now all of a sudden she likes Obama. Interesting because he is not that liberal but not that conservative either.
I remember the Johnny Carson incident and her husband’s suicide that she was able to go on after is to her credit.
All celebrities feel like they have to hide. Meryl Streep can now pick and choose her projects so she did the movie mama mia because of all the females she would get to work with. One of them was interviewed on cable news show by a female comedian host and said that Meryl Streep was afraid to come out of the their hotel because the paparazi were after her. But other than that they enjoyed working together, it was fun project not done
for work but for the fun. And yes it was in Greece so that was a boon for them too. this woman said she kept her kids healthy by raising them as did Streep away from Hollywood, both these woman(can’t remember the actresses’ name) raised there kids on this coast and had helpful husbands. Streep moved from NY to live in CT. I think her life would be so much more interesting to me.”
On the film of Joan Rivers: this’ll sound paradoxical, but I’m recommending it as a film, as a portrait of a type swirling around central issues of real interest, and it’s irrelevant what are River’s politics or where she lives. The theme of hiding the self is not meant literally but metaphorically. E.M.
It would seem that one could make the distinction that women’s standup comedy is “inner directed,” while men’s comedy is “other directed.” So Joan Rivers, Margaret Cho, Phyllis Diller, talk about themselves, ridicule themselves, while their male counterparts (who are they?) ridicule other people, mimic them, often savagely. Comics like Andy Kaufman and Andrew Dice Clay became famous their brutal put-downs of people they viewed as unacceptable or defective. I never understood why people thought Don Rickles was funny. Rodney Dangerfield made me laugh, as did Henny Youngman. But, RD at least put the target on himself as often as on others.
Humour. Hard to say what it is, exactly. My kids can watch Disney sitcoms by the hour without laughing; but if I ask them why they watch these shows they say, “Because they’re funny.” I got my little one to watch some Three Stooges (battle) and she loved it; we watch them on Netflix on demand, so she just fast-forwards to “the funny parts.” When her friends come over, she makes them watch, too. (A quality in her that I love, she is not just about “top 40” or “what’s cool,” but defines “cool” for herself.)
Thanks.
mp
Very insightful, Mike. I can see it. A woman who would brutally put someone else down would be deeply resented. Men do some self-deprecation but I noticeit’s superficial and typing, not personal. The woman comedienne is also at risk for in putting herself down she can offend because her culture is part of what she critiques. I’ve seen this with some of the Jewish reaction to Rivers.
It’s a commonplace that most people don’t want to examine what makes them like a work or laugh.
Another aspect of this having to do with Rivers being a woman: watching Rivers cope with being old and looking old reminds me of the perverse cruelty of the Snow White fairy tale. Fairy tales are often misogynistic — reflecting the cultural “norms” that they come from. One of the worse and most perverse in my view is the story of the aging queen in Snow White. In my experience most older women stop having photos made of them; they also don’t enjoy looking at themselves in the mirror at all. Far from exulting in their beauty they are made to feel bad about themselves.
My experience has been that I’m ignored a lot more, began to be disrespected (I had to revamp my act, get harder and more impersonal to stop this), and I’ve had the first “personal” comments I ever had from students in my evaluations in over 30 years of teaching. By which I mean I’ve had comments on my appearance: one poisonous one said how dare I dress ‘sexily’ (when I don’t at all): it seemed this young men felt himself somehow attracted to me and deeply resented it, was angry and lashed out with slurs.
The ending of the original fairy tale has the aging queen killed through torture. She is forced to put on red hot dancing shoes. I love to dance still myself. It’s another perverse kind of wish that the old woman would go away, kill herself as useless, and not dare to do anything the male thinks appropriate to women he might want to go to bed with.
Thank you for the comments, Mike,
Ellen
From Diana R on WWTTA:
“Ellen,
Thanks for the comments about Joan Rivers. I was a fan of hers in the 1980s (I know nothing of her politics, I’m sorry to say) and do remember the backlash against (and extremely negative portrayal) of her “backstabbing” of Johnny Carson in getting her own show and the shock of her husband’s subsequent suicide. I felt a man making a similar move to Joan’s to try to build and safeguard her career would been framed completely differently–as both savvy and justified. Joan was outraged that although she had been handpicked by Carson as his regular substitute host, the network wouldn’t even consider her as his replacement or even have the courtesy to call her and explain why.
It always seemed to me that the extreme criticism of her for “biting” Johnny, who ‘made’ her (didn’t she ‘make’ herself) was another example of punishing the “uppity” woman for daring to get out of her place. “Johnny” was portrayed as the innocent victim of a scheming Jezebel! The all-powerful Johnny Carson as a victim of Joan Rivers! And nobody questioned that portrayal! Poor, poor little Johnny! I think Joan was definitely a path breaker and paid a high price for it.
I do remember her explaining that when she first started to go “big” as a comedian, her husband made her promise that she wouldn’t make him look ridiculous, as he perceived Phyllis Diller to be doing to her own husband, so I don’t know how much of Joan’s self directed humor came
out of a woman’s psyche and how much was a careful, conscious product of not offending important men in her life.
I do remember her always worrying about money, to the point of explaining how she had figured out how she could subdivide their Beverly Hills house into four apartments, which I used to think was part of her humor but now I believe spoke to her understanding of just how vulnerable she was as a woman in a man’s world–men take care of each other, whether they admit or not, and she knew she wasn’t in the club.
I have not seen her in years, so she is frozen in my mind at a certain age. I imagine she would be resented for getting old as Hilary Clinton is–and one wonders about the fate of Sarah Palin. One imagines her resigning from the governorship of Alaska was a recognition that her clock is ticking fast and the moment for her is now. I admire Joan for her candor. I’m sure she speaks candidly in this movie and will look forward to seeing it on dvd. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.”
From Izzy:
“Yesterday went with mom to see Joan Rivers:A Piece of Work. I knew surprisingly little about her before this movie; it was very enlightening. It reminded me of Pop Star on Ice/Be Good Johnny Weir(Which I still need to see the final episode of), in that it portrayed someone brutally honest enough for a very real psychological portrait to come forth: we see her be ruthlessly ambitious and do things she says freely she’s only doing for money or publicity, we see her rich lifestyle, we see her grieve for a photographer gone blind at a young age, and we even see her decide not to bring her play to New York because she can’t stand the idea of the critics treating it the way she fears they well. It says something that my mom described it as hitting very close to home for her even though the two of them are drastically different people. There’s comedy, too, mostly hers; some of the jokes are very funny.”
You pick out good details: the one of the photographer is ‘there but for the grace of Lady Luck’ go I. Did you see Diane R’s comment: at the time the “fight” with Carson became known and she was excoriated and he made the pathetic victim. Right. How many staff people she has had around her all these years. They are her family 🙂
Writing as Miss Drake
I know nothing of Rivers’s politics either, Diane. As my daughter pointed out in her blog on this movie, we “see her be ruthlessly ambitious and do things she says freely she’s only doing for money or publicity, we see her rich lifestyle, [and] we see her grieve for a photographer gone blind at a young age … ” and participate in meals on wheels on holidays.
I don’t follow most things that occur popularly; so at the time I would not have known that Carson’s (to me) intolerant and vengeful behavior was known and (worse yet) widely publicized so as to make him the victim.
Often I find I disagree directly with whatever is the popular attitude. When I first saw that poor heiress be kidnapped I didn’t think much about it, as she was a rich elite type and there were literally milloins of people on the globe suffering as badly and worse than me; when she emerged with a gun imitating them, there was this outpouring of rage and resentment. It was then I felt for her assuming what’s called the Stockholm syndrome had gotten to her.
I’ve read a lot about concentration camps and what happens to people on them in my time and also known people who were there and who knew others. Primo Levi is the man to read here.
I see the misogyny of the reaction. The film does not show Rivers to be resented for her age directly; only that she has a harder and harder time getting gigs, and that she _had_ to have plastic surgery or she would not be acceptable on a stage today. That is made nearly explicit.
As to Sarah Palin, I find her politics and public behavior abhorrent. The Nation had an article on how women who are reactionary and enact vicious politics are getting ahead — I’ll connect this to Wasserstein: this is precisely what her Heidi Chronicles reveals: feminism hijacked and totally changed so that sexually what’s happened is so-called liberation with men still having the power leads to women being abused all the more, and we get token women (like blacks) heading groups who make life harder more miserable poorer for women and blacks as a group.
Ellen
“I really enjoyed your post about Joan Rivers. I don’t know if the movie will get here or not. The Catherine Keener movie is here and I intend to see it. Kathy”
Hi Ellen,
I just saw a movie I think you would like based on your mentions of Please Give on Wompo. The film is Away We Go and it was out last year for just a second. It’s now on video. I watched it last night and enjoyed it immensely. Screenplay by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida. The director of Sam Mendes. I think you will enjoy looking at it.
Enjoy all of your posts to wompo and your blog.
Julie
Thank you very much Julie. I’ve put it on my queue. I saw your books was published: warmest congratulations, something to be very proud of, Ellen
I’m really truly a converted fan of Joan. I saw her movie a few days ago and it completely changed the way that I see her, as a performer and a person. I’d have to say that it’s one of the best movies I’ve seen, documentary or otherwise.
I just finished watching “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work” and may I say, that’s not going far enough??!! What a film–I highly recommend it. Rivers is 75 and still working hard. No resting on laurels for her.
One joke of hers (among many) that made me almost fall out of my chair was from her first appearance on the Johnny Carson show. I’m paraphrasing, because I can’t remember it exactly, but the exchange went something like this:
Johnny: But don’t you think men want someone who’s intelligent, who has a brain?
Joan: Ah, that old thing. Let me tell you, when a man puts his hand up a woman’s skirt, he isn’t looking for a library card.
Marjorie
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I wish Joan Rivers the best because she is a really nice women. & she is beautiful & she will always be she should now that she has a piece of my heart i wish i could be like her when i grow up.. I LOVE YOU JOAN RIVERS!!!
I love Joan Rivers! She is such a sweet Mom and Grandmother; I would love to know her and be part of her life. She has so much energy, potty mouth and snarky but that is part of her act, a very kind hearted person, and funny too! Love to watch Fashion Police and Joan & Melissa. I think she is really pretty too, love her hair and face lift; I am going to wear my hair like hers when I get her age. I feel sad for Melissa sometimes, she and her Mom are such good friends and when Joan passes someday, it will be really hard for Melissa. I hope Joan lives forever, heck I will miss her too!