The act Bruce was praising was an entirely different Joan. The one who mixed a little Phyllis Diller and a little Totie Fields and didn't kick other people when they were down. And cry when called out for it.
Look, it's fine to dismiss me as a "hater" when really all I am is somebody who truly appreciates good comedy but who thinks that good comedy has some sort of moral compass, an ethical center. Put aside the fact that Joan has spent the last half of her career being a viper toward others and then breaking down in tears if any of her targets call her out on it. That's just garden variety hypocrisy and she's not the first hypocrite in showbiz.
What I hate (her favorite word!) is her latter day beeline to outright cruelty. I DVRed her appearance on Seth Meyers a week or two ago and I had to turn it off after two minutes. Why? Because she was her usual petty, bilious bitch? Nope, although she was. I turned it off because she started with a riff on Anne Frank that was a COMPLETE rip-off of the famous Anne Frank bit created by the late great Frank Maya, who died of AIDS in 1995, and I just could NOT abide that. Sure, people lift material all the time, but they build on it and twist it into something of their own. Not Joan.
Maya's legendary riff was how living in cramped quarters in New York City really screws up New Yorkers' perspectives and he detailed visiting the Anne Frank House Museum and thinking "this place is HUGE and it's so cute the way you walk in through the bookshelf!" He later went on and said that he wouldn't have lasted three hours in those cramped quarters with his own family, stomping his feet on the stage and yelling "We're up HERE! We're up HERE!". The comedy was not at the expense of Anne Frank but was about his skewed perspective on the world.
Joan, on the other far less talented hand, immediately tried a variation on the Maya routine on the Meyers show and said how Anne Frank had it real good, compared to the cramped places people live in today. And Anne only wrote ONE book and why does she have such a great reputation when Joan has written many more? So basically, Joan took comedy that was thoughtful and well-crafted by somebody else and stripped the art off it, reducing it to something base that mocked a teenager who died in the Holocaust.
So now this is where somebody chimes in and says I'm over thinking it or borrows Joan's Get Out of Jail Free card ("It's just a JOKE!") but what I am saying is it's a bad joke that is nasty and mean-spirited and it was stolen from somebody who was a craftsman and created something that was off-beat and funny and quirky without having to mock a victim of the Holocaust.
The last 15 years have seen her getting more and more reprehensible and coasting on the rep of having been groundbreaking at one time. I have seen so, so, so many talented women comics perform live who may or may not be "lovely, gracious ladies" off-stage (I don't know or care to know, I'm just talking about their acts) who somehow manage to write cruelty-free comedy that is consistently hilarious. Perhaps they wouldn't be onstage today if Joan hadn't held open the door for them; the door KICKED open by Totie Fields, Moms Mabley and Phyllis Diller, which Joan walked through. There are all sorts of ways to be pioneers in a field and to be funny while still remaining humane. Humane and human. It's probably in that way that what Joan has done to herself surgically is a metaphor for her work.
And since Joan is the first one to call somebody a hypocrite (like the CNN woman who admitted to wearing leather shoes when she asked the perfectly logical question if Joan had been trying to tweak PETA by wearing fur in some dumb photo of hers), anybody who thinks the jokes in this thread that were written in the style of Joan Rivers go "too far" are really EFFING hypocrites.
Perhaps a We Love You Saint Joan thread would be better suited to such "sensitive" (one of Joan's least favorite words!) souls. This one, titled as it is, will continue to commemorate Joan in the her own imitable style.
Grow up.
Twitter @NamoInExile
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Updated On: 8/29/14 at 01:27 AM
