By K. A. Laity
Still making the rounds slowly is the documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work. Do yourself a favour and check it out. Yeah, I know what you're thinking: argh, the red carpet embarrassments! Criminy, Celebrity Apprentice?! And yikes, the plastic surgery.
True enough; no argument here. But if you have any inkling of what a tough gig comedy is and triply so for a female, you will march yourself and all your friends to the theatre to see what that really means. You'll come away with a very different attitude.
You see, Rivers knows exactly what she's doing and she knows what you think, too. She just doesn't care. Her work is her focus, or rather "the career" which her daughter Melissa says, she one day recognized as her "sibling" in the family that they all took care of.
Rivers's blistering stand-up routine takes the piss out of her public persona, her desperation on the red carpet and her workaholic habits. She knows how it looks. It's the path she's chosen and she devotes herself to it like a field marshal. It's amazing to see her team at work—assistants, housekeepers, driver, managers—and the devotion evident in their attitudes. Fascinating, too, to see how she works from her card catalogue of jokes (for example, when she reads from a card in the drawer labeled "Cooking" and "Tony Danza"), her giant handwritten cue cards, and her makeup rituals.
It's a fascinating look at the very unglamorous side of show business, the long haul of a career. It's exhausting to watch the 75 year old Rivers constantly in motion from New York to Edinburgh to London to Wisconsin to L.A. to Toronto and back again to NYC.
You see the prices she's paid; lauded by Johnny Carson until she was offered a competing gig and he turned his back on her forever. Her husband worked for her success, but took the failure of her American talk show personally and committed suicide, leaving the bewildered Rivers not only adrift but in debt as well. The filmmakers leave us with the impression that this might be the root of Rivers non-stop, shark-like motion.
But comedy is reason enough. The love/hate relationship she has with Kathy Griffin demonstrates this: they both admire one another, but know there's not likely to be more than one token "girl" in most comedy situations. The scorn Rivers shows in advance of the unsurprisingly pathetic Comedy Central roast—as she predicts, most of the jokes are about plastic surgery and her age particularly in a sexual light—highlights her awareness of the norms of the still aggressively male world of comedy, particularly in the States (you could never get a career like Kathy Burke's in the US).
It's a fascinating look at a long-term career, working woman; it's also damn funny. You may feel some pity for Rivers, but I don't think she would ever accept it.
Image via XX Cinema