Icon. Legend. Those words get tossed around like word salad, so that when they really do apply, they seem diminished, wrung dry of all meaning. Yet what else do we call Joan Rivers but an icon and a legend, since she was a comedy genius and on TV for five decades? She was the first woman (and still the only woman, decades later) to have a network show on late night. She was the first woman comedian to perform at Carnegie Hall. She was the first and only woman to perform pregnant on The Ed Sullivan Show (although they dressed her in a flowing muumuu. and she was not allowed to say the word pregnant ).
Rivers' first TV gig was behind the scenes, writing the copy for the Italian mouse Topo Gigio on The Ed Sullivan Show. She ended up on stage by accident. Sullivan was announcing the next week's lineup, and singer Johnny Rivers was scheduled. Sullivan mistakenly said "Joan Rivers," and then she had to be booked. She continued to appear regularly for five more years until the show ended.
Rivers was a friend to gays before it was popular, and her signature line "Can we talk?" was absorbed into gay culture. Her early club audiences were largely gay, and she played to them as much as possible, referencing her gay friend Mr. Phyllis in her act, years before Stonewall. In the 1980s, Rivers would be one of the first celebrities to speak out for people with AIDS, and to support efforts on their behalf. She saved lives in the years when no one would touch a PWA, let alone help them, by supporting the founding of an agency that provided meals for people with AIDS in New York City, God's Love We Deliver. Rivers volunteered for the agency for more than 25 years, and had been on the board since 1994. She brought her grandson Cooper every Thanksgiving when he visited to work in the kitchen with her. In honor of Rivers' passing, America's Got Talent judge Heidi Klum donned an apron and hairnet and was working at GLWD on Sept. 5.
At 81, Rivers was still volunteering for the meal service for New York persons with AIDS. GLWD serves up 5,000 meals daily. In 2009, Rivers won NBC's Celebrity Apprentice, where contestants play for a charity. She won more than a half-million dollars for GLWD. The group said the money would "provide over 56,000 meals and unlimited nutrition counseling" for its clients, 90% of whom live in poverty. After her death GLWD announced it's naming a bakery after her. "Joan brought love, compassion and humor to every delivery she made and every event she supported. Joan's impact on God's Love will be felt always by our clients, volunteers, staff and community. Rest in peace, Joan. You will forever be in our hearts."
Rivers was beloved by queens everywhere. Many of the RIP tweets came from gay and lesbian comedians, among them Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who said that he was heartbroken, and Jane Lynch, who tweeted, "Godspeed my sweet. Thanks for all the laughs. Thanks for all the love." There was always something LGBT in Rivers' act, and in fact her first stint in an off-Broadway play, Driftwood in 1959, was co-starring with the as-yet unknown Barbra Streisand as lesbian lovers. Later, Rivers would joke on Bravo that "Barbra was all tongue." For all Rivers' knife-edged humor, the host of E!'s Fashion Police managed to balance that bite with warmth. As American Idol winner Jordin Sparks tweeted, "Oh Joan. Thank you for being so kind to me & making me laugh until tears."
Rivers was a fixture on TV, first appearing in 1964 on The Tonight Show as a guest of then-host Jack Paar and within two years becoming "Johnny Carson's daughter," as she called her relationship with her mentor at NBC. There are few glass ceilings as impenetrable for women as comedy, and Rivers slammed away at it for five decades, dishing on Fashion Police, which will likely tank without her perfect balance of charming host and vicious fashion critic.
In their tribute to Rivers on Jimmy Kimmel Live on Sept. 4, Kimmel and Emmy-winning comedian Sarah Silverman, very much in the Rivers mode, traded insults. Silverman noted that she watched Fashion Police every week because "those were the most hardcore jokes on TV." Kimmel added the fact that they were being delivered by "this little old lady just gave them more punch."
Kimmel played a clip from a recent guesting of Rivers that was hilarious. The two were discussing Rivers' grandson Cooper, and Rivers said he currently wanted to be a football player. She threw up her hands, and Kimmel asked what she wanted him to be when he grew up. Without skipping a beat she said, "Gay." He laughed and said, "Gay?" and Rivers said, "Who else would care that I knew Judy Garland?"
David Letterman also gave Rivers a send-up in his opener on Sept. 4. Chatting with bandleader Paul Schaeffer, Letterman said, "She was indefatigable. She would be on all the shows, and she would also work about 300 dates a year. That's a lotta work, that's a lotta travel. And here she is 81 and still doing it, and as funny today as she was when she first got into it. And talk about guts. She would come out here and sit in this chair and say some things that were un-be-lieve-able. And she stood behind her jokes and she would say these things and never apologize. She would say, "Hey, I'm a comedian, these are jokes.'"
The jokes almost always began as deprecating take-downs of herself, then moved on to everyone else. Like most comedians, she left no one unscathed. She often said, "I succeeded by saying what everyone else was thinking." Rivers talked about female bodies and female experience at a time when neither of those things was discussed. Rivers reinvented herself more times than she had her face lifted, and as Silverman noted, she wasn't done yet. Silverman said with most 81-year-olds who die you say, they were 81, they had a good life. But Rivers was somehow, at 81, still at her peak, still funny as hell and breaking new ground and telling the most hardcore jokes on TV and not caring what anyone thought about it.
Rivers was a victim of her era and of the boys' network that comedy still is, especially comedy on TV. Rivers may have changed with the times, but the times did not change with Rivers. When she was offered her own late-night show with the fledgling Fox network, she took it. Who wouldn't? But doing so got her blackballed by Carson, who viewed her as his perpetual protege. He had made her his permanent guest host, which meant that when he went on vacation there was Rivers. It was a kind of indentured servitude, yet she was presented as churlish for not wanting it for life.
Carson blackballed her from the network. Jay Leno upheld that when he took over The Tonight Show, and so did Conan O'Brien when he hosted the show. It wasn't until this year that Rivers was invited back to the network, 26 years later, by the show's new host, Jimmy Fallon. He invited Rivers to appear on his debut show in February, then invited her back to guest in March.
Rivers remains the only woman to ever host on late night on network. (Chelsea Handler is the only woman to host at night on cable.) NBC considered no women for its two slots, and CBS replaced Letterman and Craig Ferguson, both of whom are retiring, with other white men. No women were even considered. Yet Tina Fey was head writer at SNL for some of the show's funniest years. Seth Meyers was head writer there as well, and now has the spot previously held by Fallon. There are many female comedians now who would be ace on late night: Fey, Aisha Tyler, Handler, Jane Lynch (who just won an Emmy) and Silverman among them. Rivers opened the door, cracked the ceiling as much as it could be cracked. She was, as Meyers said in a tweet, a force of nature. Louis CK said she was his inspiration, that he loved her and missed her already.
She's always been there, as long as we have been watching TV. She was there during our childhood and she was there two weeks ago. She was, as Letterman noted, indefatigable. Selling her jewelry on QVC and making that network sing. Touting her 12 hilarious New York Times best-sellers. Overcoming her personal tragedies, like her friends lost to AIDS and her husband lost to suicide. Louis CK said, "She was real. She was kind." Two traits we don't see nearly enough of. So RIP, Joan.
View askew
Among those for whom Rivers opened a door are the women of The View and The Talk, who have borrowed heavily from her humor and her confrontational style. On Sept. 4, ABC announced the two new co-hosts joining Whoopi Goldberg and Rosie O'Donnell on The View later this month. Actress Rosie Perez and political commentator Nicole Wallace will be the new co-hosts when The View starts its season Sept. 15. Wallace served as communications director for George W. Bush. She will be the show's right-leaning voice, although she is not as lunatic fringe as the previous right-wing women, Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Jenny McCarthy, were. Wallace was among the women who did a screen test for The View in August, but she got into a shouting match with both Goldberg and O'Donnell over abortion rights and surrogacy in a test show. Wallace also did three guest co-host stints earlier this year.
Perez's name had not been mentioned at all, but she was also a previous guest co-host on the show, in February. The Oscar-nominated actress is a Latina activist, and she will be the first Latina on the show. Wallace will be the youngest member of the group at 42. Perez is 50, O'Donnell 52, and Goldberg is now the oldest at 58. There might be a lot of fireworks at the tiny table, which will boost ratings and inject some drama into the show, which was flailing last season. We look forward to a new era without Barbara Walters to see who becomes the show's natural leader, Goldberg or O'Donnell. Or will it be one of the new women?
Why is Joan Rivers dead and Phil Robertson still alive? That's the kind of "we thought it, Rivers said it" that makes us wish she were around to take one of her perfect stabs at the Duck Dynasty star who refuses to slither back into the swamp from whence he came. Robertson was all over the tube last week while Rivers was on life support, talking about his various hates. We saw him pop up on Sean Hannity's show on Fox News talking about the Islamic State. If you you just went "Whut?!" you are not alone. Yes, somehow this backwoods extremist gun loon is considered by Fox News to be someone we should listen to about foreign policy. Although, to be fair, they don't get more foreign than Robertson. He was succinct on how to deal with ISIS: "Convert em or kill em." Which is, ironically, exactly the way ISIS feels about people like Robertson.
On Sept. 2, Robertson was at it again on ABC's Good Morning America in an interview with Ryan Owens that was expanded upon later that night on Nightline. Robertson still believes Jesus was a homophobe (except Jesus never said anything at all about homosexuality). The A&E star was on GMA touting his new book unPHILtered: The Way I See It. According to Robertson, the Bible contains the only tangible answer to the "question" of homosexuality. His recent comments regarding gays include, "[Gays are] full of murder, envy, strife, hatred. They are insolent, arrogant, God-haters. They are heartless, they are faithless, they are senseless, they are ruthless." Oh, is that all?
In the interview with Owens, Robertson asserted, "I don't hate anybody." As for his comparing gay sex to bestiality, Robertson claimed, "The only place that I know of that I could have gone to answer that question would be a Bible. I'm as much of a homophobe as Jesus was. People who are participating in homosexual behavior, they need to know that I love them." Yet somehow we are not feeling the love.
Gay relationships, same-sex marriage and other social issues will be at the heart of Fox's new show Utopia, which premieres this week as one of the most highly anticipated of the new season. The show is the American remake of the Dutch reality series from reality series mogul John de Mol (Big Brother).
Fox says of the controversial show, "Utopia follows a cast of 15 men and women who are placed in isolation and filmed 24 hours a day for one year. The cast must create their own society and figure out how to survive. The series will be shown twice a week, but there will be online streaming 24/7 with 129 hidden and unhidden [we just want to note that this isn't a word] cameras all over the Utopia compound. The live streams will begin on Aug. 29, when the 15 pioneers will enter Utopia. Over 5,000 people auditioned for the series [but they only picked the pretty ones]. Every month three pioneers will be nominated and could be sent back to their everyday lives. The live streamers will decide which new pioneers get their chance to become Utopian."
This show could be fascinating or just Big Brother writ large. Or it could be Lord of the Flies, which is kind of what we're expecting. Go look at the cast of contestants on the show's website so you can see what the possibilities are. And of course, who's the hottest. The age range is relatively narrow. The youngest Utopian is Bri Nyugen, 20, a veterinary tech from Westminster, CA. The oldest is Bella Chartrand, 45, a real estate entrepreneur from Griffin, GA. In the middle are a belly dancer, a chili farmer, a pastor, a few unemployed hotties, a behavioral specialist (that will come in handy), a holistic doctor, a security programmer and an attorney (because even in Utopia, people will want to sue someone).
So for the fabulousness of Joan Rivers, The View 's new configuration, the Duck Dynasty bigots, the Utopians and so much more as the new season launches, you know what you have to do. Stay tuned.