The precise nature of that ability remained unclear, however; as usual, Rivers didn’t really seem to fit in anywhere. “I was stalled in New York because I still had no slot,” she said. “My act was too ordinary for a sophisticated nightclub, was not slick enough for the Copacabana, was not dirty enough for strip joints, and was not ethnic enough for the Catskills. I was not like the other girls developing comedy acts, because when Ruth Buzzi, Jo Anne Worley, and Joanne Barretta came onstage, audiences knew instinctively they were funny because they looked funny—Jo Anne Worley screaming with her boas…From the first second I came onstage, audiences were confused. They did not know what to expect from a girl wearing a little black dress and a string of pearls, looking ready not for comedy, but for a date with an aging preppy.”
Rivers continued to believe that “the ones with talent always make it,” and that perseverance was the most crucial factor in propelling a fortunate few to the top. “To maintain success, stamina is more important than talent,” she said. “You have to be a marathon runner.”
Rivers’s unrelenting efforts to improve her act made a big impression on her coworkers.
During the 1960s, she sometimes opened for the cabaret singer Mabel Mercer, a headliner at Downstairs at the Upstairs, the ground floor room at the New York club Upstairs at the Downstairs. David Finkle, who wrote songs and later produced a revue for the club, was struck by Rivers’s unrelenting efforts to improve her act, and after she died he published some of his long-ago memories in a column that was headlined “What Joan Rivers Can Teach Us All About Work.”
“She was industry armed with tape recorder,” recalled Finkle, who writes a column called “The Aisle Seat” for a website on arts and politics called The Clyde Fitch Report. “While onstage she was the yuk-machine dynamo we all know, she was nothing but single-minded determination off…She recorded every show she did. The implication was that she listened to every session. Working so tirelessly off the audience, she never knew when an ad-lib would be eminently worth saving. Not having it caught on tape would be criminal. She might forget it otherwise.”
Rivers was still trying to figure out what her kind of humor might be—a challenge compounded by the fact that men could get away with far more than women could, onstage as well as off. But her modus operandi was already clear, and the patterns she established in the 1960s would stay with her for the next half a century; until the night before she died, she regularly performed stand-up in the small clubs where she tried out new material.
Rivers brought the same enterprise to her unending quest for more exposure. “She would call me three times a day, volunteering to come on my show,” said the television and radio host Joe Franklin, who had a talk show for forty-three years.
But no amount of exposure would ever be enough if the material didn’t galvanize audiences, and a crucial breakthrough was provided by Lenny Bruce, the pioneering stand-up artist whose no-holds-barred approach had an explosive impact during a repressive era. By 1961, Bruce had already run afoul of the law on drug and obscenity charges—the latter for using the word “cocksucker” in a San Francisco performance.
Bruce was just getting started. In the 1964 criminal trial People v. Bruce in New York City, Chief Justice John Murtagh wrote that several of Bruce’s performances at Café Au Go Go were “indecent, immoral, and impure” because he had used such words as “ass,” “balls,” “cocksucker,” “cunt,” “fuck,” “motherfucker,” “piss,” “screw,” “shit,” and “tits” “about one hundred times in utter obscenity.” Murtagh also complained about mention of Eleanor Roosevelt’s “tits,” Jacqueline Kennedy “hauling ass” at the moment of her husband’s assassination, sexual intimacy with a chicken, the masked man Tonto and “an unnatural sex act,” and Bruce having “fondled the microphone stand in a masturbatory fashion,” among other offenses.
As a young woman, Rivers seemed his polar opposite. She had been bold enough to mock the social biases affecting women in settings like dinner parties:
“We have an extra man.”
“Bring him!”
“He’s dead.”
“Bring him! We’ll prop him up and say he’s quiet!”
And yet Rivers was still “very priggish” at that juncture, in her private life as well as in her public persona as a comic. “My mother had taught me that a lady does not swear, does not discuss sex and bodily functions,” she said. “Onstage, I never swore or did sex jokes and in private I had no vices—did not curse, smoke, or drink alcohol.”
When Rivers saw Bruce perform at the Village Vanguard in 1962, the experience changed her life. He not only refused to honor the prevailing taboos—he ridiculed all of them. He made jokes about niggers, kikes, guineas, micks, and spics, and told the audience that it was only the taboos against such slurs that gave them their power and viciousness.
“His words—violent, obscene, wise, astonishing, appalling, liberating—rose and fell, paused and rushed, in musical cadenzas of blasphemy,” said Rivers. On the most basic level, Bruce was “hysterically funny, with total control of his audience.” But what really resonated for her was his fearlessness—and its contrast with her own uptight, anxious pretensions.
“I was seeing myself through his eyes, confronting my own hypocrisy, the way I had lived the Molinsky lie of phony riches and, while hating it, used it myself as a facade and a refuge,” Rivers wrote in Enter Talking. “Sitting in that nightclub, breathing the hot, heavy, smoky, electric air, I saw the essential tragedy of my family—their pretense of wealth was so central to their lives, they could not ever admit the lie, even to each other, could never let down and laugh behind closed doors and say, ‘Can you believe this? We haven’t got a nickel and look how we’re living, and everybody thinks…’ Then it would have been our secret joke, our shared hoax binding us all together, and everything at home could have been wonderful.”
The electrifying experience of watching Bruce onstage would revolutionize Rivers’s approach toward her work. “The revelation that personal truth can be the foundation of comedy, that outrageousness can be cleansing and healthy, went off inside me like an enormous flash. It is still central to my stage performance,” she said in Enter Talking, which was written nearly a quarter of a century later. “Hypocrisy, pretending to be something you are not, will eventually turn into lies, one lie piled on another piled on another until your life is built on quicksand—until you become my mother and my sister, who always had to be the Molinskys of Larchmont and never found a way in life based on reality, never had the foundation to be happy. That is what my act is all about. If audiences can be honest and laugh about some parts of their lives—the problems of getting older, being fat, having the child leave home, being a woman, being ordinary—then they can be honest and laugh about all parts of life.”
By the time Bruce died of an overdose in 1966, he had been blacklisted by nearly every club in the United States, so fearful were their owners of being prosecuted for obscenity. But Rivers always credited him with having provided the turning point in her development as a comic, and she claimed to have stopped doing many of her usual routines from that day forward.
Even so, the journey toward the kind of honesty she aspired to achieve was halting and painful.
“Though I understood what was wrong for me, I did not grasp what was right,” she said. “The truth had been clear and compelling in Lenny Bruce’s mouth, but I did not realize how difficult it would be, how terrifying, to find it and say it for myself. Personal truth means to me talking about your pain, which means stripping everything away, showing all of yourself, not some corner of your life okay for audiences to see. But the risk is awesome.”
For Rivers, those insights were increasingly infused with the realization that she could also use her gender in ways that would startle people. “The country was ready for something new—a woman comedian talking about life from a woman’s point of view,” she wrote in Enter Talking.
In doing so, Rivers was also acting out he
r own very personal drama of primal rebellion. “My mother was such a lady,” she said in Joan Rivers: Exit Laughing. “I think my whole act is about shocking my mother—to this day.”
For Rivers, Bruce certainly demonstrated how shocking a performer could be, but he gave her another gift—a message of validation that encouraged her to persevere despite constant rejection. One night when she bombed at The Bitter End, Bruce sent her a note that read, “You’re right, they’re wrong.” Rivers was ecstatic, and from then on she carried the note around in her bra to remind her of having received such a powerful message of encouragement from an artist she idolized.
Years later, when both she and George Carlin had become major stars, Rivers told him, “You know what kept me going? Lenny Bruce came over and saw me and sent me a note: ‘You’re right, they’re wrong!’”
Carlin replied, “He sent me the same note.”
While that news must have been deflating, Rivers chose to focus on Bruce’s generosity: “I think he sent it to every comedian around. How sweet, in a way.”
As time went on, Carlin established a similar tradition with younger comics, whom he encouraged with his own characteristic advice: “Keep kicking them in the nuts.”
Carlin’s formulation was as male-centric as the comedy world itself, but it was a classic female heartbreak that supplied the final catalyst for Rivers’s professional metamorphosis. Her affair with David Fitelson had ended when she married Jimmy Sanger so precipitously, but she and David met again at Joan’s cousin’s wedding years later—and they discovered that their feelings for each other were as strong as ever. When they renewed their relationship, it instantly became as stormy as it had always been in the past; their fights were just as epic, and the whole dynamic was so toxic that Rivers described the constant emotional uproar as “a disease.”
She finally summoned the strength to break up with him yet again, but after three weeks of anguished separation, Fitelson came to the house in Larchmont, pushed his way into the living room, swore his undying love, and said he couldn’t live without her. So he and Rivers got back together.
Their reunion was brief. A month later, she learned some shattering news: during the three weeks when they were separated and Fitelson realized he couldn’t live without her, he had managed to impregnate someone, Rivers reported in Enter Talking. At long last, Rivers and the great love of her youth broke up for good.
“I have never again in my life endured such pain,” she recalled. “I had lost the one man I had wholly loved. I had lost my visitor’s pass into the glamour of his father’s house on Morton Street filled with the theater at the topmost level, lost my best friend, lost a living piece of a precious era of my childhood, lost the object of an intense physical attraction, lost my girlish illusion that when I met the man I loved, my life from that moment would automatically be a fabulous romance forever. I was left now with an endless, desolate emptiness.”
Unable to let go of every last trace of him, Rivers continued to wear a much-loved present Fitelson had given her, an old raccoon flapper coat of his father’s from the 1920s. For her next performance at the Showplace, she wore it onstage and “stood there, empty, lost, fighting against tears, looking through the audience in the hope that he was there. Suddenly the terrible, raw truth came from my mouth. ‘I’ve just broken up with somebody and I think I’m going to die.’”
She was enough of a performer to follow that up with some funny material about an affair with a married professor who impregnates his wife after getting engaged to his girlfriend. She also told a joke about the raccoon coat that became a staple of her act. Asking the audience if they liked her coat, she said it was an engagement present from her professor. “But I knew something was wrong when he told me to wear it in Jersey—during the hunting season,” she said.
As the waves of laughter washed over her, Rivers felt as if a dam had broken. “I knew in that moment I had found the key,” she said. “My comedy could flow from that poor, vulnerable schlep Joan Molinsky, the nerd I felt sorry for, who made me so ashamed I struggled to hide her like a retarded sister, shut away in an upstairs bedroom. At last I had become hurt enough, upset enough, angry enough to expose her onstage—and in my act from that night on, the pain kept spilling and spilling and spilling.”
Joan’s pain was hardly unique, as other comics readily acknowledge. “I think most of us have something terribly wrong, i.e., unhappy, inside us to go up and take the mike to start with,” said Brett Butler in Why We Laugh: Funny Women.
“There is an element of crazy,” Kathleen Madigan said. “Not like somebody you hide in the attic, but it’s a very weird life to agree to. If the crazy train came, I’m on it.”
For many comics, one common denominator is an unhappy childhood. “People who do this usually have to, usually because they did not get enough love from one of their parents,” added Natasha Leggero in Why We Laugh.
“We’re all dented cans, and with some of them, you open them and you get botulism,” Lisa Lampanelli observed.
“I don’t know any comic who hasn’t had a rough time,” said Judy Gold, who was six feet tall by the time she was thirteen. “We don’t belong, whether it’s in your family or school. I was called names my whole life—Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Orca, Yeti. There’s nothing you can say to me I haven’t heard. I never got hugged or kissed, or got ‘Great job, Judith!’ This is how we’ve coped our entire lives.”
For such misfits, the ability to make other people laugh seemed to provide salvation. “The beaten down and stomped upon end up with a better sense of humor,” said Madigan.
As Patricia Marx observed in Stand-Up Comedians on Television, “We laugh until we hurt; they hurt until we laugh.”
“Comedy only comes from a place of tragedy or anger or being hurt,” Rivers said in the documentary. “The worst thing that can happen to a comedian is to fall in love and be happy. You’re screwed; get out of the business!”
Rivers believed that women were meant to get love through the one irreplaceable asset she lacked, and she never got over the unfairness of being sentenced to a life deprived of the power of physical beauty. Many female comics see that deficiency as having played a formative role in shaping their comedy. “I think that for a lot of women, comedy is compensation for not being beautiful,” said the feminist film critic and author Molly Haskell. “Desperation and compensation are the two traits you find over and over again in women comics. Essentially it’s an act of aggression: ‘I’m going to make you love me, goddamn it!’”
“With women, a lot of it is because we hate our looks,” said Lisa Lampanelli. “If you’re not going to get acceptance as a sex symbol, you’re going to figure out how to have a personality and say, ‘Let me develop that instead of looks, so I can at least get in the game.’ If you’re funny, and you are making fun of yourself, you figure, I can get me before they get me. A lot of self-hate about looks drives you into doing comedy about that. Not being beautiful is way hard. I always hated myself. If you told me I could look like Audrey Hepburn and only live till sixty, I’d say, ‘Sign me up.’”
Rivers felt the same way. She knew that if she’d been gorgeous, she wouldn’t have needed to make people laugh. “The very pretty little girl is not the funny little girl,” she said. “Tell me one good quip that ever came out of Angelina Jolie’s mouth.”
Because she was funny, Rivers succeeded in building an extraordinary life of worldwide acclaim and vast wealth—but she never stopped seeing her greatest strength as a poor second best to what was really important.
Why We Laugh: Funny Women was released in 2013, a year before she died. The documentary opens with a quick take in which Rivers admitted that her own priorities remained, at eighty, what they had been at twenty.
“If I had to choose between funny and beautiful? Beautiful,” she said.
Then she gestured dismissively, waving her perfectly manicured hand as if to banish her words so they wouldn’t be overheard by the other comics who were int
erviewed for the film.
“Don’t tell them. Fucks the whole hour,” Rivers said.
Chapter Three
Dicks and Balls: Breaking Into the Boys’ Club
When Rivers first started doing comedy, she had no illusions about the inhospitable nature of the territory. “Comedy is masculine,” she said in an interview for the video documentary series Makers: Women Who Make America. “You’re out there and you’ve got to be in charge. I’m a lion tamer.”
Comedy had been known as a male preserve for generations. “It was always a boys’ club,” said Lou Alexander, who started doing stand-up in the 1950s.
Thirty years later, little had changed. “If I had twenty-six headliners a year, probably twenty-two were men,” said Caroline Hirsch, who opened the comedy club Carolines in 1981. “It’s a very aggressive art form, and there’s nothing feminine about it.”
As a result, few women even considered trying to break in. “I thought you had to be an old man in a suit telling jokes about your wife,” Natasha Leggero said in Why We Laugh: Funny Women.
In the same documentary, Jenny Yang reduced the problem to its essence: “Stand-up comedy is all dicks and balls,” she said.
Until very recently, many men viewed this state of affairs as immutable. In 2007, the late Christopher Hitchens wrote an infamous Vanity Fair essay called “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” which posited that “humor is a sign of intelligence” and offered his explanation for women’s deficiency. Men have to cultivate wit to impress women enough to sleep with them, Hitchens claimed—whereas women don’t need to appeal to men that way because men already want to sleep with them.
Last Girl Before Freeway Page 6