I Like to Watch

by Emily Nussbaum

  In the Times in October 1965, Charles L. Mee praised Rivers as one of the New Comedians who had broken away from Borscht Belt shtick. “The style is conversational, suited to television ‘talk’ programs,” Mee wrote. “It may take the form of Bill Cosby’s colloquial stories or Woody Allen’s self-analysis or Mort Sahl’s intellectual nervosities. But it is not Jack Benny. Benny may be a tightwad on stage and a philanthropist off. Not so with the new comedians. They write their own jokes and are expected to live them offstage as well as on.” Funky authenticity was her generation’s fetish. But Rivers’s act also worked because of her look. “Female comics are usually horrors who de-sex themselves for a laugh,” Eugene Boe wrote in Cue in 1963. “But Miss R. remains visibly—and unalterably—a girl throughout her stream-of-consciousness script.” In 1970, the Times published a trend piece about stylish “comediennes”—titled “The Funny Thing Is That They Are Still Feminine”—in which Rivers claimed that she dressed simply for strategic reasons: “That way you’re less of a threat to women.” Onstage and on TV, she had a girl-next-door cuteness, a daffiness and a vulnerability, that lent a sting to her observations: If this nice Barnard coed, in her black dress and pearls, saw herself as a hideous loser, clearly the game was rigged.

  As the rare female New Comedian, Rivers’s persona also hit a nerve, playing as it did off a contemporary slur, the Jewish American Princess. In 1959, Norman Mailer had published a notorious short story, “The Time of Her Time,” in which a bullfighter gives a Jewish college girl her first orgasm by means of sodomy and the phrase “dirty little Jew”; the same year, Philip Roth published Goodbye, Columbus, with its iconic Princess, Brenda Patimkin. In 1971, Julie Baumgold wrote a cover story for New York, at once disdainful and sympathetic, called “The Persistence of the Jewish American Princess,” portraying the type as a spoiled girl who wouldn’t cook or clean. Obsessively groomed, the JAP has been crippled by her mother, who refuses to let her daughter call herself ugly. She’s “the soul of daytime drama,” waiting for a rich man to save her: “Clops and blows come from Above, but still she expects. It isn’t mere hope; it is her due.”

  Rivers took that sexist bogeywoman and made it her own, raging at society from inside the stereotype: She was the Princess who did nothing but call herself ugly. She vomited that news out, mockingly, yearningly, with a shrug or with a finger pointed at the audience. “Arf, arf,” she’d bark, joking that a rapist had asked if they could just be friends. A woman I know used to sneak into the TV room, after her parents fell asleep, for the illicit thrill of seeing another woman call herself flat-chested. If Rivers’s act wasn’t explicitly feminist, it was radical in its own way: She was like a person trapped in a prison, shouting escape routes from her cell.

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  From the sixties to the eighties, Johnny Carson was, for aspiring comics, the model of a scarce resource; to get to the big time, you had to make it with Johnny. But Carson, notoriously, didn’t like female comics. In Yael Kohen’s We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy, from 2012, the show’s talent coordinator Patricia Bradford recalls the atmosphere: “They hired women over their dead bodies. They just didn’t want them there.” Even popular female comedians—Totie Fields in the sixties, Elayne Boosler in the eighties—couldn’t get traction. “I don’t ever want to see that waitress on my show again,” Carson told his booker about Boosler, when she was considered a top stand-up, the peer of Jerry Seinfeld.

  Yet, back in 1965, Joan Rivers had slipped through the eye of that needle; she was funny enough, feminine enough, new enough, traditional enough, just right. It was a trick she never forgot—after years of struggle, she’d become, in her eyes, Carson’s daughter. The gig was a mercy booking: the “death slot,” the last ten minutes. In her black dress and pearls, Rivers was introduced not as a stand-up but as that rarity, a “girl writer.” She did “Last Girl in Larchmont”; she told a story about her wig being run over on the West Side Highway. When the segment ended, Johnny wiped tears from his eyes and said, on camera, “God, you’re funny. You’re going to be a star.”

  Within days, it was true: She got press, she got gigs, she got famous. Months later, she married Edgar, a British producer to whom she’d been introduced by Carson, just days after they met. For sentiment’s sake, she wore that same outfit on the night of her final appearance with Carson on The Tonight Show, in 1986, to plug Enter Talking, which was dedicated “To Johnny Carson, who made it all happen.” But, behind the scenes, she was insecure: Among other developments, she had seen an NBC document that listed ten men as potential Carson replacements. Two weeks after her appearance, Carson learned that Rivers had signed to do a competing show on Fox. She called to explain; he hung up. He never spoke to her again. Two of Carson’s successors at The Tonight Show, Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien, honored the ban, and she didn’t appear on the show again until Jimmy Fallon broke the spell, six months before her death.

  Still, for more than twenty years, Carson and Rivers had bantered, with him serving her the straight lines—“But don’t you think men really like intelligence?”—and her lobbing back the punch line: “No man has put his hand up a woman’s dress looking for a library card.” It was a heavenly match; their ideas about men and women were congruent, like Lego bricks. At first, she worked her single-girl material: “Looks matter!” Then she tried a streak of softer, Erma Bombeck–like material, exploring subjects like housework and breastfeeding. (One of her early books was a pregnancy guide.) In both iterations, she rarely criticized other women, other than the fun slut “Heidi Abromowitz” and abstract rivals, like the airline stewardesses who, in one of Rivers’s routines, cater only to men.

  Then, in 1976, Rivers had a new breakthrough: She saw Elizabeth Taylor on the cover of People. As she wrote in Still Talking, the 1991 sequel to Enter Talking, she realized that “nobody had dared say about this icon, ‘She’s a blimp,’ dared admit that you could stamp Goodyear on her and use her at the Rose Bowl.” When Rivers tried Liz-is-fat gags, the audience exploded. If she cut them, they’d shout requests. “We women were furious when the most beautiful of all women let herself go,” Rivers wrote. “If she became a slob, there was no hope for any of us.”

  These crude gags—about Liz, Christie Brinkley, Madonna—became her hottest material, on Carson and in front of Vegas crowds, as Rivers plugged into tabloid culture. Liz Taylor puts mayonnaise on aspirin! When she pierces her ears, gravy comes out. In Enter Talking, which she wrote well into her Hollywood era, Rivers never mentions her Liz Taylor jokes. But in Still Talking, five years later, she makes a case for these gags as a cathartic form of women’s humor. “I never look at the men in the audience, never deal with them,” she wrote, describing appearances in Las Vegas. It’s wives who get it: stay-at-home moms who wish they’d married rich; middle-aged women who love Rivers’s bitter blurt about how Jane Fonda had the perfect body and her husband left anyway. Rivers is explicit about her aim, which is not just to entertain but to educate: She wants fat girls to know that “they need to pull it together,” to resist their mothers’ dangerous lies about inner beauty. “If Blanche DuBois took stock and said, ‘This is where it’s at, and I’m going to get rid of these schmatte clothes and get me a nice pants suit, and look smart here, with a pocketbook and a hat’—she would have been all right.”

  There’s a sympathetic way to view these routines: Rivers wanted women to be savvy, not naive, about what the opposite sex was really like. She was a fiery pragmatist—another tagline was “Grow up!” During the seventies and eighties, she shared this message with the popular magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown, another skinny meeskite (although she called herself a “mouseburger”), the cheerful Machiavelli to Rivers’s angry Hobbes, who, in Cosmopolitan and her books, offered practical tips on how to thrive in a sexist world, albeit as a mistress rather than as a wife. For both women, there was little use in trying to change, or even reason with, men; you just neede
d to find a way to get their attention, then harness their power as your own.

  At the end of her Vegas act, Rivers would offer to reward a woman in the audience with a ficus tree—she’d drag it across the stage, struggling, as the orchestra watched but refused to help. She describes the moment in Still Talking: “I say, ‘Fucking liberation. We did it to ourselves.’ Women love that line. I am raging out like King Lear—Queen Lear—screaming into the wind, screaming for all us women.”

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  “Michelle Obama is a tranny.” “What’s Adele’s song, ‘Rolling in the Deep’? She should add ‘fried chicken.’ ” All her life, Rivers defended even the most rancid zingers as a way of puncturing Hollywood puff, saying what we really thought—“punching up.” Stars could take it, Rivers argued. (“You don’t think so?” she said to Playboy in 1986. “Jackie Onassis, with her eyes on either side of her head like E.T., is not fair game? With her $38,000,000?”) It’s boring to be offended, more boring than a bad joke. But, watching Fashion Police, Rivers’s celebrity panel with its “twat” gags, I’d get queasy, the way I’ve felt at a bad bachelorette party: Is this how we bond?

  Still, other times I get it. Among women, the pugilistic brutality can be delicious, the fun of using these goddesses (or Bachelorettes, or Housewives) as shorthand: conduits for taboo emotions like envy, disgust, fear, the anxiety of falling short. By most accounts, by the time Rivers died she was less embattled than she had been after Edgar’s death, when she struggled with bulimia and depression. She was close to her daughter and grandson, to the comics she’d mentored, to the gay men who dug her diva vibe, to the many who “got” and loved her. When I saw Rivers’s famous face, I’d wonder if part of the appeal of plastic surgery wasn’t the surgery itself. When it’s over, you’re new, whether you’re beautiful or not; you’ve made the battle visible, instead of pretending there was no battle. In her 2009 book, Men Are Stupid…and They Like Big Boobs, she put it straight: “It’s the way things are, accept it, or go live under a rock.” Or, as the women in my family told me, in Yiddish, “You’ve got to suffer for beauty.”

  As a teenager, Rivers looked much like the teenage Dunham: She was pudgy, with a beaming grin and friendly eyes. But the caption she wrote for the picture of her in Enter Talking reads, “The thirteen-year-old fat pig, wishing she could teach her arms and hips to inhale and hold their breath.”

  That makes me sad. But, then, she wasn’t wrong about the world that girl was walking into. Look at the male comics who were her peers at The Duplex: Bill Cosby, Woody Allen, and Mort Sahl, who became a devout anti-feminist. Look at Johnny Carson, or at Jerry Lewis, who is still repelled by female comics. In Still Talking, there’s a passage in which Rivers expresses her disgust “that the public buys the hypocrisy of the men revered as national institutions.” And yet her humor was rarely directed at men: These were jokes by women, for women, at women. There’s no reality series making fun of the men who wrecked Wall Street, but there is one, a hilarious one, adored by female viewers, devoted to their catfighting, parasitic, bedazzled wives.

  There’s a poem by Sharon Olds called “The Elder Sister.” In it, the narrator talks about how much she used to hate her sister, “sitting and pissing on me.” But then she learned to see that the harsh marks on her older sister’s face (her wrinkles, the frown lines) were “the dents on my shield, the blows that did not reach me.” Her sister had protected her simply by being there, facing the abuse, first—not with love “but as a / hostage protects the one who makes her / escape as I made my escape, with my sister’s / body held in front of me.”

  Maybe that’s true of Rivers: Her flamboyant self-hatred made possible this generation’s flamboyant self-love, set the groundwork for the crazy profusion of female comics on TV these days, on cable and network, cheerleading one another, collaborating and producing and working in teams, as if women weren’t enemies at all. (Everywhere but in late-night TV: Decades after Carson, there are still ten men on that list.) Rivers came first—and if her view darkened, if she became an evangelist for the ideas that had hurt her the most, she also refused to give in, to disappear. “I would not want to live if I could not perform,” she once said. “It’s in my will. I am not to be revived unless I can do an hour of stand-up.” That’s inspiration, too. We can celebrate it without looking away.

  GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS

  HANNAH BARBARIC

  Girls and Enlightened

  The New Yorker, February 11 & 18, 2013

  When I got my job at The New Yorker, I was midway through reporting a cover profile of Lena Dunham for New York magazine. As a result, I didn’t write an actual review of her HBO series, Girls, until the second season—at which point, I had to lobby for the opportunity. The show felt so oversaturated by media coverage, my editor suggested I skip it. It’s shocking how much has changed since then, for Dunham and for the world around her. But I still love Girls and I stand by this piece, which explores how much the show and its harsh critical reception were intertwined. Rereading it, I can see a prickly defensiveness to the essay that reflects the moment as much as any of the ideas expressed.

  My biggest regret is not having devoted an entirely separate column to Enlightened, which was also one of the best shows on HBO that year, but which didn’t get enough press.

  The HBO series Girls has been a trending topic all year, but in one sense it’s nothing new. Created, written, and directed by twenty-six-year-old Lena Dunham, who plays the wannabe memoirist Hannah Horvath, Girls is merely the latest in a set of culture-rattling narratives about young women, each of which has inspired enough bile to overwhelm any liver. Among the most famous is Mary McCarthy’s novel The Group, from 1963, with its scene of a humiliated girl sitting in Washington Square Park with her contraceptive “pessary.” Women clung to that book like a life raft, but The Group was sniffed at by Norman Podhoretz as “a trivial lady writer’s novel,” while Norman Mailer called its author “a duncey broad” who was “in danger of ending up absurd, an old-maid collector of Manx cats.” (Lady writers, beware of men named Norman.)

  This dialectic recurs again and again. There was Rona Jaffe’s dishy potboiler The Best of Everything, from 1958; Wendy Wasserstein’s plays of the seventies and eighties (a sweeter vintage); and Mary Gaitskill’s collection of kinky short stories, Bad Behavior, from 1988. (Not to mention the work of Sylvia Plath and every song by Fiona Apple and Liz Phair.) These are stories about smart, strange girls diving into experience, often through bad sex with their worst critics. They’re almost always set in New York. While other female-centered hits, with more likable heroines, are ignored or patronized, these racy fables agitate audiences, in part because they violate the dictate that women, both fictional and real, not make anyone uncomfortable.

  Like Girls, these are also stories about privilege, by and about white upper-middle-class women who went to fancy schools. Wasserstein’s awesomely strange early play Uncommon Women and Others features the Hannah Horvath of Mount Holyoke: fat, sharp-eyed, horny Holly Kaplan, making late-night phone calls to a man she’s barely met. The Group was about Vassar graduates in lousy marriages to leftist blowhards. The Best of Everything starred Caroline, a Radcliffe graduate, who falls for an older drunk who might as well be Girls’ sardonic barista, Ray (the great Alex Karpovsky). Because such stories exposed the private lives of male intellectuals, they got critiqued as icky, sticky memoir—score-settling, not art. (In contrast, young men seeking revenge on their exes are generally called “comedians” or “novelists” or “Philip Roth.”) There’s clearly an appetite for this prurient ritual, in which privileged girls, in their rise to power, get humiliated, first in fiction, then in criticism—like a Roman Colosseum for gender anxieties.

  Girls has been attacked, and lauded, and exploited as SEO link bait, and served up as the lead for style-trend pieces, to the point of exhaustion. The authors of these analyses have often fretted over privil
ege: The show is too white, Hannah’s a spoiled brat, or a bad role model for millennials, or too fat to qualify to have sex on cable television. But when there’s a tiny aperture for women’s stories—and a presumption that men won’t watch them—when almost no women are Hollywood directors, when few women write TV shows, of course it’s the privileged ones who get traction. These artists have what Dunham has referred to as Hannah’s Unsinkable Molly Brown force. (Molly Brown, after all, was a mouthy rich woman who survived the Titanic.) To me, the whiteness of Girls is realistic, within the circumscribed social worlds that it explores, although the show is both slyer and clearer about class than about race. But, as Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote recently in The Atlantic, “the problem isn’t the Lena Dunham show about a narrow world. The problem is that there aren’t more narrow worlds on screen. Broader is not synonymous with better.”

  The specificity of Girls also links it to earlier eras. In particular, it echoes a time when the legendary wildness of male New York intellectuals and artists was made possible by middle-class girlfriends who paid the rent and absorbed hipness from the kitchen. As Joyce Johnson, Jack Kerouac’s onetime girlfriend, observed in her scathing memoir Minor Characters, an account of kohl-eyed Barnard coeds fleeing to Greenwich Village, “Even a very young woman can achieve old-ladyhood, become the mainstay of someone else’s self-destructive genius.”

  In a different time, Hannah and her friends are the bohemians, fresh out of Oberlin. Hannah, her uptight friend Marnie, her decadent friend Jessa, Jessa’s cousin Shoshanna, and an assortment of male friends and lovers live in shifting roommate arrangements, on the fringes of New York’s creative industries. With admirable bluntness, Girls exposes the financial safety nets that most stories about New York—and many New Yorkers—prefer to leave invisible. Last year, at Jessa’s surprise wedding to a finance guy, a scene that might have been the climax of an ordinary meet-cute romantic comedy, Shoshanna blurted out, “Everyone’s a stupid whore.” The show began with Hannah stealing a maid’s tip, and characters are forever ducking out on the rent or ogling someone’s brownstone. In an early episode, Hannah was humiliated when her hookup Adam masturbated in front of her; in a fury, she turned her complaints into a demented dominatrix routine, which ended with a demand for cab money, plus extra for pizza and gum. Then she took a hundred-dollar bill—likely the one that Adam’s grandmother sends him each month. It felt like a metaphor for her own confused professional ambitions: Earlier, she’d sabotaged an office job she didn’t want anyway; now she’d turned her sex life into art and got paid.