Joan Rivers, the raucous, acid-tongued comedian died Thursday. She was 81.
Rivers was hospitalized last week after she went into cardiac arrest at a Manhattan doctor’s office following a routine procedure. Daughter Melissa Rivers said she died surrounded by family and close friends.
Rivers — who opened her routine with the trademark “Can we talk?” was born to Jewish Russian immigrant parents.
Comedy was not only her calling, but her therapy, as she turned her life inside out for laughs, mocking everything from her proclaimed lack of sex appeal (“My best birth control now is just to leave the lights on”) to even her own mortality.
“I have never wanted to be a day less than I am,” she insisted in a 2013 interview with The Associated Press. “People say, ‘I wish I were 30 again.’ Nahhh! I’m very happy HERE. It’s great. It gets better and better. And then, of course, we die,” she quipped.
With her red-carpet query “Who are you wearing?”, the raspy-voiced blonde with the brash New York accent also helped patent pre-awards commentary — and the snarky criticism that often accompanies it, like cracking that Adele’s Grammy wardrobe made the singer look like she was sitting on a teapot. Rivers slammed actors at the Oscars, Emmys and Golden Globes for E! Entertainment. In 2007, Rivers and her partner-in-slime, daughter Melissa, were dropped by their new employer, the TV Guide Channel, and replaced by actress Lisa Rinna. But they found new success on E! with “Fashion Police,” which Rivers hosted and her daughter produced.
No performer worked harder, was more resilient or tenacious. She never stopped writing, testing and fine-tuning her jokes.
“The trouble with me is, I make jokes too often,” she told the AP in 2013, just days after the death of her older sister. “I was making jokes yesterday at the funeral home. That’s how I get through life. Life is SO difficult — everybody’s been through something! But you laugh at it, it becomes smaller.”
She had faced true crisis in the mid-1980s. Edgar Rosenberg, her husband of 23 years, committed suicide in 1987 after she was fired from her Fox talk show, which he produced. The show’s failure was a major factor, Rivers said. Rosenberg’s suicide also temporarily derailed her career.
“Nobody wants to see someone whose husband has killed himself do comedy four weeks later,” she told The New York Times in 1990.
Survivors include daughter Melissa and a grandson, Edgar
