The Late Joan Rivers: 'Does this urn make my ash look fat?' — Page 9

good riddance to bad rubbish
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On topic: Joan is one of my favorite people in the world. For anyone who sees Joan as purely a heartless, bitter old woman may I suggest watching A Piece Of Work? The way she speaks about trying to stay relevant and not wanting to be forgotten breaks my heart. Watching it last night, knowing of Joan's current situation, it hit even harder.

I'm really trying to understand people's thinking

Tell the truth: Are you really? Or are you just pretending to be really trying?

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Truth: I am really trying to understand the disconnect between how people respond to the mean things Joan says while also telling me the things I am writing here are too mean and that I have to have some respect. This is obviously a response to what the thread became as opposed to the thread I started, which was to be mean about a mean lady.

I'm trying to understand how some people say it's a persona Joan uses and, and… I still don't know what.

I really AM interested because I find how people respond to comedy fascinating. I'm something of a student of it.

There are a couple of other things that I haven't brought up. One, I never intended this to be THE Joan Rivers thread. I started it as a wiseass thread with wiseass comments about what happened to Joan in the style of the distasteful ways Joan has handled things that have happened to other people in her act. I actually have found the way it has evolved over the subsequent posts to be really fascinating.

Another thing I didn't bring up was that back in the mid-late-'80s I knew the comic Denis Leary. This was before he hit upon the persona he may or may not have been inspired by Bill Hicks to develop and take all the way to the bank. That persona is an a-hole. Just a stupid macho throwback. I know what a nice and funny guy he was off-stage but as his character became more brash and focused on talking about sports BS and macho straight stuff and meanness, I didn't spend a lot of time telling people how nice he was offstage.

For a while I would go see him out of a sense of loyalty or whatever and even made the effort to see him host a gala at the Just For Laughs festival in Montreal. I've seen a lot of those galas and Leary was the second to worst host I have ever seen (the worst, by far was Jason Alexander). A ton of his time was devoted to bringing hockey players onstage and showing off some hockey trophy. Most of his bits were that angry persona that seems to be based in nothing. The Montreal Gazette headline the review "Why so angry Denis? The worst of his bits involved talking about doing some touristy sled dog stuff with his sons and I won't even bother to reconstruct this thing that ended with how it was just Denis's luck that he would be stuck behind a GAY DOG. There was no point to it other than to be homophobic. And it was indefensible. I ended up thinking, I don't have to go see this guy out of a sense of loyalty because at one time I had some sort of relationship to him and I know for a fact that "he's nothing like that character" and that I was free to critique his lazy work.

So I find a lot of the responses in this thread fascinating, I really honestly do. And maybe trying to understand people is fruitless, Jane, but that has never stopped anybody from trying.

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Updated On: 8/31/14 at 11:42 AM

The flip side of that is I am not making any money at it.

I don't know that I can agree with your incredibly generous assessment that she has no personal feelings about the people she's mean about. You know, the bits have to come from *somewhere*. And she famously titled one of her books, "I Hate Everyone… Starting With Me."

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"It doesn't matter what she thinks personally."

Right. I was just responding to you saying what she thinks personally. That she had no personal feelings about them.

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For anyone who sees Joan as purely a heartless, bitter old woman may I suggest watching A Piece Of Work?

I've seen it. I could have sworn I talked about it at some point, but I guess I didn't. I would have talked about how people would have told me that it would change what I thought of her, and how I heard people telling some "sad" anecdote about it recently on Entertainment Weekly radio, and how watching the movie did not make me see her in a better light and how I didn't understand what was so sad about the clip they played on the radio, because it was a sad clip about how she was forced to perform at 4:30 in the afternoon in the Bronx.

What I wouldn't have said the first time I brought i up if I had talked about it at all, but would have brought up the second time I talked about it if I talked about it at all, is that it did make me see her as more than heartless and bitter. It made me see her as disingenuous at best and delusional at worst. Like the sad story about her performing in the Bronx at 4:30 in the afternoon that I never talked about before, I would suggest that only she is the one who has to take those soul-crushing gigs because only she is the one making herself living in that ostentatious, overindulgent apartment she shows in the movie and that it was disingenuous to suggest that the over the top lifestyle she purports to lead is of anything but her own doing, and that the crippling maintenance of that lifestyle is a burden beyond her own control.

Yes but only the funny ones.

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Well, here's where the response is that as her comedy grew uglier and meaner, she herself grew more thin-skinned and unable to take what she dished out. I think that's probably true. But who knows--she may or may not have found the jokes funny.

But what I still don't get is the motivation. If you honestly find jokes of this kind to be beyond the pale, why make them? Namo apparently is conducting some sort of social experiment in order to learn something about how comedy works (or doesn't). Others seem to think that she has it coming, or something. Or those who still like her have it coming. Or something.

At the end of the day, I don't think it much matters. She's not reading them. Probably her family members aren't reading them. And I doubt anyone's mind is going to be changed.

Updated On: 8/31/14 at 02:30 PM

" then why isn't it enough to let them off too? "

Because they never said they wanted to be let off the hook.

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I was looking at Melissa Rivers Facebook page today and couldn't believe all of the hate on there. "I'm so glad your family is suffering" and things like that. The woman is close to death and people are making fun of it. This isn't like if Dick Cheney, someone who profited off of the misery and deaths of countless people was dying. Joan is an entertainer. You might not like the kind of entertaining she does, but she's not HURTING people and her family are still human beings and they're suffering right now. I just don't see how kicking someone when they're as down as they can get shows that you're "better" than what you claim to not like. If you're going to claim that you don't like something someone does, you can't do it yourself and claim "sanctuary" in an effort to prove a point that you're better than the thing you say you don't like.

And I'm not speaking to anyone specifically on this thread, just in general about the entire situation which is really sick.

This thread is one of BWW's finest examples of cognitive dissonance ever.

Somebody else thought so too.


Pity they suck

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