Last Girl Before Freeway

by Leslie Bennetts

Except for female comics, whom Hitchens described as “hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three.” He admitted that men find such women threatening: “They want them as an audience, not as rivals,” he wrote.

  Even for men, developing a career in stand-up was an arduous challenge. For one thing, making it meant accepting a difficult life of constant travel. “The Internet is creating new stars, but not stand-up comics,” said Rick Newman, the founder of Catch a Rising Star, which helped to launch the boom in comedy clubs during the 1970s and ’80s. “To be a stand-up comic, you have to get onstage and do it all the time. You can’t call it in, and you can’t do it periodically. You don’t stay good unless you’re in front of an audience.”

  For women, the rigors of the road were exacerbated by the barriers men maintained at every venue. “There’s now a comedy club in every major city, but in the 1960s, there were only a few places down in the Village that would put on a comedian, and there were very few that would put on a woman,” said Newman. “The feeling with a lot of agents and managers and network people was that women couldn’t be funny. They weren’t even willing to listen.”

  The issue wasn’t simply a question of who got to perform; gender defined the very essence of what was recognized as comedy. Men wielded the power to decide what was funny, and their biases dictated the limits of what women were allowed to talk about. “People just didn’t buy into their material,” said Newman. “It was so prejudiced it was awful. Men could talk about masturbation, but a woman couldn’t even make a bodily reference.”

  “It was okay for guys to discuss their dicks and blow jobs, but it was never okay for women to discuss their sexuality, even though you might be following a guy talking about his shit,” said the comic Judy Gold in a panel called “Women Aren’t Funny: Debunking the Myth,” at the 2014 New York Comedy Festival.

  For decades, men maintained their stranglehold on most forms of entertainment, serving as decision makers, gatekeepers, content producers, critical arbiters, and the only consumers who really counted. Fish don’t know they’re in water, and no one questioned the universality of “the male gaze”—a term that wasn’t even coined until 1975, more than twenty years after Joan Molinsky graduated from college, when the feminist film critic Laura Mulvey articulated the concept to describe the all-pervasive ways in which the arts and popular culture were structured around the perceptions of a male viewer. As Mulvey pointed out, the male gaze depicts the world in general and women in particular from a male point of view, evaluating everything in terms of masculine tastes and attitudes.

  It was many years before this insight began to influence the larger society, let alone to expand its cultural outlook to any significant degree. Until very recently, it was just a given that Hollywood only wanted to make movies aimed at young men; the male executives who controlled the decision-making process simply didn’t care about other demographics—even though their stated reasons were often fallacious, as the robust box office grosses of many successful movies aimed at women and older audiences have demonstrated.

  But for decades, the handful of female pioneers who dared venture into comedy were forced to play by the rules that men decreed. “The women who were funny were told exactly how and why and when they could be funny,” Kathy Najimy said in Why We Laugh. “I’m sure there was a well of other crazy comedy, point of view, and observation inside them, but it was like, ‘If you’re going to be funny, it’s got to be on our terms.’”

  Such cultural restrictions extended to other disenfranchised segments of the population. “Whatever group is not the ‘right’ group, that is peripheral and therefore stereotyped by the dominant group, has to work within the stereotype,” said Gloria Steinem, who was “the only girl writer” on the satirical television show That Was the Week That Was in the early 1960s. “Black comedians were playing off the stereotypes that gave us Stepin Fetchit, so they were presenting themselves as subservient and not smart.”

  Stepin Fetchit, a character known as “The Laziest Man in the World,” was the stage persona of Lincoln Perry, the first black actor in history to become a millionaire. During the 1930s, Perry parlayed the character into a successful film career, but Stepin Fetchit later came to be seen as an embarrassing anachronism that perpetuated negative stereotypes of African Americans.

  If the rules of comedy forced black people to downplay their intelligence and industry, women had to sacrifice their femininity. From Moms Mabley to Phyllis Diller to Totie Fields, early comediennes portrayed themselves as sexually undesirable and unattractive, fat, old, or so ridiculous as to seem like crazy bag ladies.

  “The only way a woman could come to the public was to at least begin with your stereotype, and make fun of your relationship with your husband, or whatever,” said Steinem, who was hoping to become a comedy writer and dating Mike Nichols when she first met Rivers during the 1960s. “You had to start with an acceptable secondary position. If women wanted to have men as an audience, they had to make it super clear that they were laughing at themselves, not at men.”

  Because Rivers’s predecessors accepted such strictures, she found herself following a “long tradition of women comedians who hid their intellect or attractiveness to court audience acceptance,” Roz Warren wrote in Revolutionary Laughter: The World of Women Comics.

  But Rivers’s deepest yearning was to be pretty, and in comedy, this presented her with a real dilemma. “Phyllis Diller was happening right before me. But even Phyllis was a caricature, and I didn’t want to be a caricature,” Rivers said. “I was a college graduate; I wanted to get married.”

  Diller was actually quite attractive in real life, but she developed a comedic persona with fright wigs, cigarette holders, and exaggerated makeup and costumes that made her look more like a deranged drag queen than a reasonably good-looking woman in her forties. The prim Barnard girl in black dress and pearls was not prepared to go that far. “Rivers, in contrast, took the spotlight as a chic, well-dressed woman who was up-front about being both smart and funny, not to mention gutsy, irreverent, and outrageous,” Warren wrote.

  “Joan was the first one who wasn’t a clown,” Judy Gold said.

  Although Rivers didn’t turn herself into a freak, she made other sacrifices to establish a comic identity of her own. “Joanie had a lush figure, but she used to pretend she was flat-chested, like she couldn’t get a man,” Lily Tomlin said in Why We Laugh: Funny Women.

  That strategy became a hallmark of Rivers’s career, and from then on much of her humor revolved around her ostensible lack of sex appeal. She was so bosomy that she subsequently underwent breast reduction surgery, but you wouldn’t have guessed that from her jokes. “I was so flat, I used to put Xs on my chest and write, ‘You are here,’” she claimed. “I wore angora sweaters just so the guys would have something to pet.”

  And this: “They show my picture to men on death row to get their minds off women.”

  After she married Edgar Rosenberg, Rivers continued that theme with a slew of jokes about her deficiencies as a marital sex partner, claiming that she had to write “This end up” on her chest so Edgar could tell her front from her back.

  Such self-mortification wasn’t required of men, according to Shelly Schultz, who booked Rivers for her first appearance on The Tonight Show and later became a talent manager. “Everything Joan did was about self-deprecating herself,” he said. “Johnny Carson wasn’t self-deprecating. Jack Benny wasn’t self-deprecating. Bob Hope wasn’t self-deprecating. But women felt they had to be self-deprecating.”

  In truth, men’s views of Rivers’s appeal were more varied than her act suggested. Some men shared her negative opinion. “As far as I know, nobody ever wanted to screw her,” said Schultz. “I never heard anybody say, ‘I sure would like to fuck that chick.’” Other men were more generous in their assessment. “I thought the young Joan Rivers was very attractive—cute and very sexy, sensual,” said Larry King. “I would have dated Joan, but a lot of her humor was defensive. I d
on’t know why she played herself as ugly, but it was her shtick.”

  In those days, no one commented on the fact that the concept of women’s sex appeal—particularly the fixation on their breasts—was itself a creation of the male gaze, as Merrill Markoe pointed out in Why We Laugh: Funny Women.

  “‘I’m so ugly’; ‘I’m so flat-chested’—that’s not a female point of view. What do women care if they’re flat-chested? It’s only men who care if they’re flat-chested,” said Markoe, a television writer and stand-up comic best known for her work as the Emmy Award–winning head writer for Late Night with David Letterman, where she created many of the show’s signature elements.

  Since many men seem unable to accept humor and physical attractiveness in the same female package, some women suspect that sex appeal is so distracting that it simply overrides all other considerations in the male brain. “I’ve got sisters who are fucking gorgeous, and guys don’t even hear you when you look that good,” Brett Butler said in Why We Laugh.

  Others suggest different reasons why men are disturbed by the combination of wit and sexual allure. “Men definitely find female comedians threatening, mostly because they think if they date you you’re going to go onstage and tell everyone how small their penis is,” Natasha Leggero observed.

  The price women pay is often social as well as professional. “Women comedians talk about how they can’t be too funny because men won’t continue to date them,” said Rick Newman. “No ifs, ands, or buts, men are afraid of being ridiculed. Men are very threatened about being put down in front of other people, especially when it’s done with a sense of humor at their expense.”

  Such insecurities are deeply rooted in patriarchal culture. “If you’re going to have a male-dominant system, to maintain the system, you have to teach men to dominate,” Gloria Steinem said. “So they come to believe that at a minimum, control is part of masculinity.”

  Many studies have found that men are inordinately afraid of being mocked by women; even among high school students, being ridiculed by a woman ranks as a male’s greatest fear, whereas a female’s greatest fear involves being the victim of male violence.

  “If women are extremely funny, even if it’s just taking over the dinner table, men feel small and threatened,” said Caroline Hirsch. “The woman who commands the table is in the power seat, and a lot of men can’t take it.”

  According to Judy Gold, such dynamics help explain why gay women have flourished in comedy. “Why are there so many lesbian comics? We don’t care what men think, and guys don’t give a shit what we think,” she said. “We don’t thrive on being attractive to men. I don’t need to put on lipstick and be sexy to get attention. I want attention for what I’m saying, not because I have a hot ass.”

  But gay or straight, women in comedy share an even more important attribute, as Helen Hong noted in Why We Laugh. “The one thing people don’t know about female comedians is that we have balls of steel,” she said. “You just can’t see them. They’re invisible.”

  That attribute emerged with striking clarity as Rivers developed her identity as a comic. But in the early days, audiences were often unimpressed despite her fierceness. “She overcame the prejudice against women, and we have to give her full credit for that. But in the beginning, when she was slugging her way to the top, I just thought she was terrible,” said the gossip columnist Liz Smith. “She would hunch over in the footlights and talk to the front rows. She was famous for having no real talent, except to turn a comic phrase.”

  Whatever they thought of her talent, Rivers’s peers were always amazed by her courage. “Joan was so bold,” said Newman. “Back in the 1960s, she really was a new breed of comedian. She did a different style of comedy than women had done—in-your-face, bluntly honest. Women weren’t supposed to do that kind of comedy. She truly was groundbreaking. She opened up the door—and not just for women.”

  “Joan not only did things women didn’t do; she did things men wouldn’t do,” said Billy Eichner, the creator and star of the comedy game show Billy on the Street. “She was more fearless than most.”

  As time passed, Rivers’s hapless-little-girl persona began to evolve in new ways. “Back when she was doing clubs in the Village, I always thought of her as a female Woody Allen, because she was so self-deprecating and so vulnerable and so Jewish,” said Cary Hoffman, the longtime owner of the comedy club Stand Up NY. “That was before she broke the barrier of feeling free to say anything about anybody. People started doing esoteric intellectual comedy, and Joan was the first woman to go in that direction. Totie Fields would do a stereotypical dumb blonde joke, doing sign language, but Joan was taking a different, more intellectual approach.”

  She was also learning how to channel her aggression as an effective tool. “I was against putting women on in late shows, because many females could not handle the drunken audiences as well as a male could,” Hoffman said. “Stand-up is first of all about controlling an audience, before you get a laugh. But Joan learned how to control them. Even seeing her on Ed Sullivan, I was amazed at her power.”

  As Rivers developed her comedic persona, she broke fresh ground in other areas. “Rivers did something new: she spoke the truth about women’s feelings,” Roz Warren wrote in Revolutionary Laughter. “For the first time, a woman comic revealed what women really thought and felt. Rivers talked about all the secrets women usually kept hidden, making audiences laugh at such taboo topics as having an affair, going to the gynecologist, having a baby, and faking orgasms. Tame by today’s standards, a joke like ‘When I had my baby, I screamed and screamed—and that was just during conception’ both shocked and delighted sixties audiences.”

  “She talked about sex and about women in a way that, for its time, felt tremendously edgy,” said Billy Eichner. “She talked about withholding sex, about not having sex, about not liking sex. Men had been whining about their wives for many years—‘Take my wife, please!’—but Joan turned that on its ear and you saw things from the woman’s point of view. This was a new tone.”

  But integrating a woman’s perspective into a male world proved endlessly challenging. In the early 1960s, Rivers briefly dealt with the gender problem by joining forces with Jim Connell and Jake Holmes in a new comedy act called Jim, Jake, and Joan. At their first meeting, Rivers said, “Who’s going to play Joan?”

  “When nobody laughed, I should have realized we were in trouble,” she observed in Enter Talking. The trio started performing as an opening act for the Simon Sisters, a folksinging duo featuring Carly Simon and her sister Lucy. Although Jim, Jake, and Joan eventually became headliners at The Bitter End, Rivers disliked what she saw as their “sophomoric humor,” and she wasn’t particularly enamored of her partners either. “We began to realize that we did not like each other very much,” she reported.

  When she left the act, she asked Freddie Weintraub, the manager who had put it together, if he would continue to manage her alone, but he refused. “I don’t see you ever making it as a single,” he said.

  After years of knocking on doors, Rivers was still receiving such verdicts with dismaying regularity. Shelly Schultz had seen her in Jim, Jake, and Joan, but when she auditioned for The Tonight Show, he gave her “the standard brush-off: ‘Thank you, but your material is just not right for us,’” Rivers reported. When she persisted, he told her, “We just don’t think you’d work on TV.”

  Rivers finally persuaded an agent named Roy Silver to come see her perform at The Duplex, and afterward Silver called a friend at William Morris to ask why she couldn’t get an agent. “Because everyone has seen her. She’s been on the Paar show twice, and there’s absolutely no interest in her anywhere,” the William Morris agent said.

  That view was widely shared. After Irvin Arthur saw Rivers at The Duplex, she pestered him to tell her what he thought until he finally said, “What can I tell you? You’re too old. Everybody’s seen you. If you were going to make it, you would have done it by now.”

  Riv
ers was crushed, but as he turned to leave the club, Arthur added, “Hey, I could be wrong. I told the same thing to Peter, Paul, and Mary.”

  Although Rivers refused to give up, she did hedge her bets by securing a paycheck with steady work as a writer. Getting hired by ABC’s The Phyllis Diller Show seemed like a coup until Diller dropped out of the show. After that, Rivers found another job, with Allen Funt’s Candid Camera.

  And then one day Roy Silver called to tell her that Shelly Schultz had agreed to put her on with Carson. After seven years of banging her head against a very hard wall, and after auditioning for and being rejected by The Tonight Show seven different times (or eight, as she sometimes claimed), Rivers finally got the crucial break that turned her into an overnight success on February 17, 1965.

  For comedians then and for decades to come, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson was the holy grail. When Carson began his thirty-year run as host of The Tonight Show in 1962, the show quickly became an all-important launching pad for aspiring comedians as well as the template for a new kind of television programming.

  “Johnny Carson didn’t invent late-night TV, but he might as well have,” explained Carson’s obituary in USA Today when he died in 2005. “For it was his Tonight Show that perfected the art of wee hours talk, comedy, and music, setting a gold standard punctuated by his genius for effortlessly wringing a laugh out of a well-chosen grimace or tie-straightening gesture…He made stand-up comics’ careers with a mere gesture, a ‘Nice stuff’ compliment that spoke volumes, or an invitation to come sit and chat. Jerry Seinfeld, Roseanne Barr, David Letterman, and Carson’s successor, Jay Leno, among many others, vaulted to stardom by warming his couch.”

  In Rivers’s various accounts of her history, she always stressed the long, uphill battle to get on The Tonight Show, and she often credited Bill Cosby with having suggested that Carson book her. That version is not accurate, according to Schultz. “I don’t think the idea of revisionist history is unique to Joan Rivers, but Joan made up these tales,” he said. “Here’s the bad news: they catch up with you sooner or later. Joan said that here’s how she got on The Tonight Show: Bill Cosby was on as a guest, there was a comic on the show who died, and Bill leaned over to Johnny and said, ‘Joan Rivers could do better—why don’t you put her on?’ That never happened. Joan just wanted to associate herself with Bill’s comedy persona. She was the queen of changing history. She never saw history as a succession of events as they were. She always rewrote history with her own idea of how she succeeded.”