Joan Rivers was always a polarizing comedian—either you loved her or you hated her.
To some, she was a legend who delivered candid, un-sugarcoated truths about people and the world; to others, a comic who stirred up controversy with her jokes. Despite all of that, however, it is true that Rivers was a unique woman who endured a lot of obstacles to get where she was in life, and a female comic who helped pave the way for other funny women who followed.
Since her start in the 1960s, Rivers was always self-deprecating and unabashed in her stand-up routines, and basically any appearance she made, she set herself apart from other comediennes.
She wore simple conservative clothing, unlike her few counterparts–namely Phyllis Diller–who resorted to more outlandish costumes to make themselves appear as a joke, so to be seen as being funny. Rather, Rivers let the content in her jokes speak for themselves. For example, while Diller was making cracks about her ineptitude as a domestic housewife, Rivers made fun of the social stigma put on single women, using her life as a backdrop.
In an interview with Yael Kohen, author of We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy, Rivers said about her start in comedy, “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.”
She was unlike the women who came to stand-up and television shortly after she started as well—female comics who ushered in a slightly different feminist view on life, one that focused more on the suburban lifestyle and the working and/or stay-at-home moms.
Rivers remained as a reflection of how those who grew up in her era felt, lived, and were taught. Although she did constantly change her image to a certain degree to stay with the times, she was never afraid to make satirical social commentary, regardless of the sensitivity of the issue.
Up until the day she died, she was making people laugh and cringe with her jokes. Of her many critics she would say, “If you laugh at it, you can deal with it, and if you don’t, you can’t deal with it. And don’t start telling me that I shouldn’t be saying it. That’s the way I do it. I would have been laughing at Auschwitz.”
Whether you criticized her for her vulgar jokes or hailed her for comic creativity, she is a legend. Her name will forever be mixed with praise and chagrin. As Washington Post writer Stacia Brown notes, “How do we who are alive and remain reconcile the deaths of those who lived ‘unapologetically’?”
Ultimately, Joan Rivers is a comedienne who remained a staple of pop culture, Hollywood, and television for over 50 years. That is worth remembering. Everything else, can be debated.
Claire Farrow can be reached at Claire.farrow@spartans.ut.edu