Beautiful, intelligent, comical: Joan Rivers. If she had been a painting, she would never have had a relaxed expression. Mouth open, eyebrow raised, as if caught at the very instant she was about to say something that would make some people laugh and irritate others. Rivers never tried to please everyone. She chose, instead, to be heard. <\/p>\n
Her voice \u2013 raspy, edgy, unmistakable \u2013 has spanned decades of television and stage like a razor-sharp blade. In the 1960s, when female comedy was still looked upon as a curious exception, Joan Rivers did not ask permission. She stepped onto a stage and began to speak. She did so with a relentless pace, jokes that came in bursts, impossible to dodge, with the surgical precision of someone who knows exactly where to strike. <\/p>\n
Joan had started out in New York, dividing her time between small clubs, rejected auditions and evenings when, she recounted, \u201cthe audience consisted of more mice than people.\u201d The first real recognition came in 1965, when Johnny Carson invited her to The Tonight Show, America\u2019s top talk show. Carson, who was not in the habit of openly praising guests, introduced her to the audience, saying: \u201cGod, you\u2019re funny. You\u2019re going to be a star.\u201d And Joan Rivers did not deny it. <\/p>\n
Over the years Joan solidified her style
edgy but precise, ironic but never gratuitous. She was one of the first women to get her own late-night show, The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers, and her career expanded between film, theater, writing, and, of course, television. Her style always remained recognizable: irreverent and unstoppable. She had an innate ability to dismantle the hypocrisies of custom, celebrity, and social conventions. <\/p>\n
She did not even spare herself. Her body, her face, her marriage, her defeats, her sorrows: everything became comic material, everything turned into a story. Rivers was not afraid to show herself vulnerable; in fact, she made it her strength. Like when she said that her plastic surgeon owned a house in Malibu because of her, or that her face had undergone more renovations than Versailles. Self-deprecation was his way of being in the world. Without whimpering, without self-pity, but with enviable comic timing and a determination that asked for no indulgence. Nothing held her back. Not criticism, not personal tragedies, not even being considered too edgy in an environment that preferred docile characters. <\/p>\n
Without whimpering, without self-pity, but with enviable comic timing and a determination that asked for no indulgence. Nothing held her back. Not criticism, not personal tragedies, not even being considered too edgy in an environment that preferred docile characters. Beautiful, intelligent, comical and never accommodating-Joan Rivers
Everything contributed to Joan Rivers\u2019 stage concreteness: the way she could make a fool of Hollywood without ever coming off as out of place, her talent for downplaying even the unbearable. <\/p>\n
She was capable of turning even her own grief into a spectacle, as she demonstrated in the documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (2010), where she unfilteredly showed the toughness and loneliness behind the glamour. <\/p>\n
\u201cI succeeded by saying what everyone else is thinking, \u201d was the phrase that represented her. Joan Rivers throughout her career has continued to make people laugh with vehemence and intelligence, two gifts that rarely manage to coexist without one cancelling out the other. In her, yes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Beautiful, intelligent, comical: Joan Rivers. If she had been a painting, she would never have had a relaxed expression. Mouth open, eyebrow raised, as if caught at the very instant she was about to say something that would make some people laugh and irritate others. Rivers never tried to please everyone. She chose, instead, to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1021,"featured_media":900490,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-900489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-omnibus"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n