The Late Joan Rivers: 'Does this urn make my ash look fat?'- Page 23

[A Director]

Posted: 9/5/14 at 1:26am

I know family, friends and fans are i mourning.

I use to like her. In recent years, I found her nasty, bitter and tasteless at time. I found nothing funny when she said people in Gaza deserved to die and decided to ignore her. I imagine if she was still living and working, she'd make jokes about the recent beheadings. I'm sure, she'd add, "Too soon?"

I know all about dark humor with the sting of reality and truth. IMO, Joan Rivers never told those kind of jokes.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 9/5/14 at 1:32am

And then of course, there is my Pakistani Muslim friend Fameed, from London:

RIP Joan you're genius and always will be.

Here's her first appearance on UK TV in 1983 - I remember watching this with my traditional Muslim family who sat there stoney faced whilst I was dying laughing. Pure genius!

He posted it along with this video, but it's the image of the stoney-faced Muslim family and the very flamoyaanyt young (gay) son. I just know Joan would have loved it.

http://youtu.be/ME-c05yNOYY

[DAME]

Posted: 9/5/14 at 1:34am

@A Director That is not what she said. AND she wasn't joking. ( I am assuming you are referring to the TMZ thing. ). And the "too soon?" line comes from comic Jeff Ross.

Updated On: 9/5/14 at 01:34 AM

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 9/5/14 at 1:44am

It comes from a lot of people. Like Gilbert Gottfried.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 9/5/14 at 1:50am

Congrats Millennials. The comic voice of your generation tweeted this knee-slapper:

Lena Dunham Verified account

@lenadunham

That being said, Joan is gone but a piece of her lives on: her nose, because it's made of polyurethane.

Updated On: 9/5/14 at 01:50 AM

[DAME]

Posted: 9/5/14 at 2:07am

I just know the line from the comedy central roasts where he does it in his bits.

Updated On: 9/5/14 at 02:07 AM

[PalJoey]

Posted: 9/5/14 at 8:14am

You may not think Joan Rivers deserves your respect, but I do. I'm sitting shiva for someone who who meant a lot to me. Carry on, but please be cognizant of my grief.

[ErikJ972]

Posted: 9/5/14 at 8:41am

Thanks for posting that Rolling Stone link Namo. I'm in the camp that has not been a fan of Joan, especially in her later years. Reading that article didn't change my mind but it made me understand how people can be fans of hers.
Many people on my Facebook feed have shared encounters with Joan and they all paint her as a very warm, caring, genuine person.
I just wish she would have let some of that warmth show in her act. Especially as she got older.

[Liza's Headband]

Posted: 9/5/14 at 8:59am

Why? She owed you nothing.

Perhaps if you had been more open to her and curious to see what she was like off the stage, you'd actually do some digging... read her memoirs, watch her television show, rent her documentary, etc. Then you would know how incredibly kind and generous she was.

[ErikJ972]

Posted: 9/5/14 at 9:02am

LOL.
Of course she owed me nothing. Just like I owed her nothing.
Thanks for another useless contribution to the board!

[ShakinBaconGirl]

Posted: 9/5/14 at 9:35am

Of course that Headband troll would try to make this thread about him. It seriously needs to leave. Everyone is fed up with it.

[SonofRobbieJ]

Posted: 9/5/14 at 10:28am

An artist's work must be able to stand on its own and be evaluated on its own terms.

The thing about this entire thread is that I think it shows a lot of respect towards Joan's work (and really...this is about her work, not who she was personally, though I am enjoying all the stories of how warm she was to those who got to interact with her). The amount of time spent in this thread discussing her work (both pro and con) shows just how important she was to the world of comedy, female comedians in particular, and to the cultural conversation in this country over the last however many decades. Not only do I think she'd be fine with the pointed jokes and the criticisms, I hope that she'd be moved that he work caused many people to think quite a bit about comedy and the dichotomy between the public and private faces of an artist. Pun was indeed intended, if we can call that a pun.

I've found Joan very, very funny, and I've found her off-putting. But I recognize what she accomplished in this world and I really am thrilled to know she treated her fans with kindness. I've seen too many 'celebs' treat people like sh*t to not take a moment and appreciate that about her.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 9/5/14 at 10:45am

just how important she was to the world of comedy, female comedians in particular

She was enormously important to two huge things: (1) the advancement of female comedians and (2) the early days of the fight against AIDS.

For those two things alone, we should all pay attention to the lyrics by Peter Allen and Carole Bayer Sager from their "Quiet, Please. There's a Lady Onstage":

Quiet, please, there's a woman up there,
And she's been honest through her songs
Long before your consciousness was raised.
Now, doesn't that deserve a little praise?


The people calling her a "hater" should know that she was fighting for them while they were still closeted and still in denial and still too frightened to get tested. "Long before their consciousness was raised."

As Bruce Vilanch--who was there!--said in the comment I posted up above,

as near as I can tell, she was the first mainstream celebrity to do an AIDS fund-raiser.

it was in the early 80s, before rock hudson brought the disease out of the closet.

she did it because her hairdresser was sick and she was shocked that there were no systems in place to help him.

people, and government, were terrified about what this thing was.

not joan.

Now doesn't that deserve a little praise?

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 9/5/14 at 3:15pm

Here's what Letterman had to say last night. Like a lot of people, he liked Joan's refusal to back down from things she said. He says, "There are no victimless jokes" and I really wonder if that's true?


Dave on Joan action

[themysteriousgrowl]

Posted: 9/5/14 at 3:38pm

Namo, give it a rest. When you focus on the objectionable things, you can't focus on the non-objectionable things. Do you see?

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 9/5/14 at 3:58pm

I'm looking at both. That's been my downfall.

[Reginald Tresilian]

Posted: 9/5/14 at 4:01pm

I think most people have been looking at both; just weighing up the results differently.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 9/5/14 at 4:07pm

So we've already established beyond quibble that Joan was a 1983 pioneer in the fight against HIV/AIDS, years (or a full decade) before many in the gay community itself were roused to action.

I will leave it to Roseanne Barr to speak to Joan's unimpeachable feminist credentials.

Read carefully what Roseanne has to say about Joan's "layered feminist social critique," which I would think is obvious but which seems to be going over the heads of most of the Joan detractors. (Unless they are being deliberately obtuse in order to provoke discussion.)


ROSEANNE BARR: Hail, Hail, A Vagenius Has Left This Realm: Joan Rivers, Rest In Peace

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 9/5/14 at 4:08pm

Wow. Roseanne really did call her St. Joan.

To Reg's point, the links in this thread have shown me stuff from the last 15-20 years that I was never interested in watching because I had given up on her. And there's definitely been stuff I have loved.

If I'd ever heard of In Bed With Joan it didn't stay in my brain. I watched a couple episodes yesterday, my favorite being Aisha Tyler whom I've seen perform live. There are funny bits and there are cringe-worthy bits. When Aisha says that some people say she isn't "black enough" Joan responds, "That's ridiculous, that means you're educated" and I cringed the cringe my late grandmother used to give me. And of course, all energy and tenacity notwithstanding, it WAS a woman from my mother's generation and in her sunset years my mother didn't always have what we would call issues of racial or class sensitivity either.

Updated On: 9/5/14 at 04:08 PM

[Reginald Tresilian]

Posted: 9/5/14 at 4:17pm

As I said a few pages back, I think seeing her as a comic who, in later years, lost her way and ended up doing work we might not have liked (or approved of) is completely understandable. But that shouldn't negate all that came before. And as her life was ending, it was also understandable that many people wanted to focus on the good bits, the joy she gave, and the ground she gained.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 9/5/14 at 4:18pm

She didn't just call her St. Joan." She also called her a "vagenius."

In Joan's memory, let's all resolve to cringe less. There are better ways to be good citizens than going around cringing all the time. Much better to get in bed with Aisha or Bianca Del Rio and having a good, honest open conversation exploring how Aisha experiences being called "not black enough" and how Bianca experiences the word "tranny."

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 9/5/14 at 4:32pm

But I don't think it was open, because I don't think that was what Aisha was saying and I think Joan's response was essentially a racist one. And yes, the racism of a grandmother who doesn't realize saying, "This black person is so well-spoken and educated" is in fact racist.

And I think people deferred to Joan. Was it a tribute to her longevity? I mean, when Carol Channing kept referring to Justin Vivian Bond as "he," Justin tweeted, "Who cares? She's ----" however old Carol Channing is.

I would LOVE for somebody somewhere to have had an open conversation with Joan about any number of things. But when Joan said to Tyler, "That's ridiculous, it just means you're educated" and essentially shut down the discussion. I never saw an example of anyone ever trying to have a give and take with Joan where she didn't change difficult conversations just where they could have grown interesting. And naturally I am talking about the public conversations of which there were so many with Joan.

Also, Roseanne ranking on writers wanting to get paid is kind of a bummer.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 9/5/14 at 4:34pm

Roseanne singing the national anthem was a bummer too.

Life is a bummer.

LAUGH.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 9/5/14 at 4:41pm

I know when I got bogged down by another famous woman with seemingly at-odds messages to the world, a smarter guy than me told me, "Namo, people are COMPLICATED!" and I get that but somewhere I don't "get" that.

I will never stop cringing at things that make me cringe and I will never just laugh because things are terrible. Personally, I thought Roseanne's national anthem was hilarious, but that's because I know that cracker who wrote that song made those notes so damn high, etc...

[PalJoey]

Posted: 9/5/14 at 4:44pm

I just asked a particularly strong young female writer, with a strong lesbian-feminist background, the following question:

Would you consider Joan a feminist because of her pioneering work or an anti-feminist because she made jokes about her looks and the looks of other women?

Her response:

I consider her a feminist, period. A comedian's job is to push boundaries and traverse them and that she did. When male comedians do it, they're funny. When female comedians do it, they're mean and bitchy. She always went for the punch line.