Comedy Legend and T.V. Host, Joan Rivers Passes on at 81

(CALIFORNIA, U.S.A)

Joan Rivers, a pioneering female
stand-up comic and the queen of
“Can We Talk?” gossip, has died,
her daughter, Melissa Rivers, said
Thursday. She was 81.

Rivers was undergoing surgery on
her vocal cords at a clinic in New
York City on Aug. 28 when she
stopped breathing and had to be
transported to Mount Sinai
Hospital. Melissa Rivers and Joan
Rivers’ 13-year-old grandson,
Cooper, who live in Malibu,
California, rushed to her bedside.

    “My mother’s greatest joy in life
     was to make people laugh,”
     Melissa Rivers said in a
     statement.

    “Although that is difficult to do
     right now, I know her final wish
     would be that we return to
     laughing soon.”

Raspy-voiced and brassy, Rivers
was always self-deprecating, foul-
mouthed and politically incorrect.
A master of reinvention, she
endured in show business because
of her tenacious work ethic,
which she credited to her
“immigrant mentality.”

Comedians typically push the edge
of the envelope, but Rivers proved
time and again that she didn’t
even see the envelope. To her
fans, she was as shocking as she
was endearing.

“The way she is funny, she tells
the truth according to herself,” the
late film critic Roger Ebert wrote in 2010. “She hates some people. She has political opinions. Her observations are so merciless and her timing so precise that even if you like that person, you laugh. She is a sadist of comedy, unafraid to be cruel — even too cruel.”

No topic was off limits. From
Elizabeth Taylor to Queen
Elizabeth to even Anne Frank,
Rivers loved going after public
figures.

    “I mock everybody, regardless of
     race, creed or color,” she told
     the Toronto Star in July. “Every
     joke I make, no matter how
     tasteless, is there to draw
     attention to something I really
     care about.”

Four years earlier, she explained
her no-holds-barred approach to
The Times of London: “If you laugh
at something, you shrink the
dragon.”

Her favorite punching bag, though,
was always herself. “My mother
used to look at me and say: ‘Looks
don’t count. Now, get out of my
sight, you big lump.’”

Rivers was the first to mock her
facelifts and other plastic
surgeries. Her grandson calls me
Nana New Face. And when he was
younger, the joke was he had
never seen me without bandages.

So one time, we saw ‘The Return
of the Mummy,’ and he ran to the
TV set and he went, ‘Grandma,
Grandma.’

A famously hard-working dynamo,
she was nowhere near close to
retirement. She worked the red
carpets for the MTV Video Music
Awards and the Emmys near the
end of August and had been scheduled to appear at the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank, New Jersey, on Aug. 29. She co-hosted “Fashion Police,” starred in WE TV’s reality series “Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best?” and hosted two online shows, “In Bed With Joan” and “Drunken Celebrity Phone Calls.”

A lifelong fashionista, Rivers, with
her daughter, began doing the
awards red carpet circuit in the
mid-1990s on shows for E! and
later TV Guide. Her love of all
things couture led her to coin
another well-known catch phrase:
“Who are you wearing?”

The comedian also embraced
social media, and that, of course,
brought its share of controversy.
In 2012, Rivers used Twitter to tell
R&B star Rihanna not to go back
to Chris Brown after a domestic
violence incident, in her own
special way: “Rihanna confessed to
Oprah Winfrey that she still loves
Chris Brown. Idiot! Now it’s MY
turn to slap her.”

“I love the Internet, and I love that you can say whatever you want,” Rivers told The Boston Globe last November.

Born Joan Alexandra Molinsky on
June 8, 1933, to Russian immigrants, Rivers spent her
childhood in Brooklyn until her
parents moved to upper-class
Westchester County, New York.

She believed she inherited her
sense of humor from her father,
who was a doctor. Her mother
was a housewife.

“I’m not sure if I was happy. I was the class wit, not the class clown — an important difference,” she told The Times of London in 2010.

Because her father threatened to
have her committed for being an
actress, Rivers studied at
Connecticut College and Barnard
College, where she earned degrees in English and anthropology.

Although her true love remained performing in theater, she worked in retail and fashion after college.

After her first marriage to James
Sanger ended in annulment after
six months, Rivers decided to
become a serious actress. She
studied drama and appeared in a
few plays, but she was advised by
an agent that she should be in
comedy. He also advised her to
change her name.

Rivers landed her big break in
1965 on “The Tonight Show:
Starring Johnny Carson” and
released her first comedy album
shortly thereafter, “Joan Rivers
Presents Mr. Phyllis and Other
Funny Stories.” In 1983, after
frequent appearances on Carson’s
“Tonight Show,” she was
designated the first permanent
guest host, a prestigious role that
broke down barriers for women in
comedy.

Married to British TV producer
Edgar Rosenberg at the time —
after a four-day courtship — Rivers
continued to find humor in her
own life, making fun of herself as a
“fat kid” or a flat-chested
housewife. Eventually she landed
her own vehicle, “The Show With
Joan Rivers,” in 1968 — the same
year her only daughter, Melissa,
was born. The show lasted two
years.

In 1972, Rivers moved to Los
Angeles, where she wrote a book,
“Having a Baby Can Be a Scream,”
starred in a feature film, “Rabbit
Test,” and co-created a TV series,
“Husbands, Wives, and Lovers,” for
CBS. She was living in a mansion
in Bel-Air and headlining shows at
Carnegie Hall, and she was the
highest-paid entertainer in Las
Vegas.

By then, her “Can We Talk?” catch
phrase was known throughout
America. She was on top of the
world until Fox offered Rivers her
own talk show airing opposite
“The Tonight Show” in 1986.

Carson never spoke to her again
and banned her from the show.
Jimmy Fallon was the first person
to allow her to return during his
first episode as host this year.

Her Fox show, “The Late Show
Starring Joan Rivers,” was short-
lived. The network fired Rivers
and her husband when she
challenged the decision to fire him
from his job as a producer on the
show. Then, in 1987, Rosenberg
committed suicide, devastating
the comedian. Rivers became
bulimic and estranged from her
daughter, and she contemplated
suicide herself.

“I had no choice but to come out
of it, because of Melissa,” Rivers
told The Sunday Times in 2006.
A year later, she moved to New
York City and landed a role in Neil
Simon’s “Broadway Bound,” for
which she received rave reviews.

In 1988, she launched “The Joan
Rivers Show” with her co-host,
her little dog Spike. In 1990, she
won a Daytime Emmy for Best Talk
Show Host.

In the next decade, Rivers
continued to experiment with
other TV show formats and began
selling jewelry on QVC. She
reconciled with Melissa, and the
pair starred in a movie that
dramatized their lives and sparked
their partnership on E! as red
carpet and fashion commentators.
Rivers also won a Tony Award for
her role in “Sally Marr and Her
Escorts.”

Since then, Rivers appeared on
several TV shows, such as
“Suddenly Susan” and “Nip/Tuck”
and “Celebrity Apprentice,” headlined in Las Vegas and wrote 12 books. Her last, “Diary of a Mad Diva,” was published this year.

“I’m terrified if it looks like
nobody wants me,” Rivers told The
Toronto Star in July. “How long
will that go on? Forever. In our
business, you never know. And
it’s not the money. I joke about
that enough but that isn’t what
drives me. I love the performing.
I love the work.”

In recent years, death came up a
lot in Rivers’ interviews and jokes
as she coped with the loss of good
friends. The night before she was
hospitalized, Rivers did an hour of
stand-up at the Laurie Beechman
Theatre in New York City, where
she joked, according to the New
York Daily News: “I’m 81 — I
could go at any moment. I could
fall over right here and you all
could say, ‘I was there!’”

She told The Times of London four
years ago that she “would not
want to live if I could not perform.
It’s in my will. I am not to be
revived unless I can do an hour of
stand-up. I don’t fear it.”

(NBC)