daring the mirror to reveal someone else
Joan
Rivers in Joan Rivers: (Still A) Live at
the London Palladium / 2005
Ricki
Stern (writer), Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg (director) Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work / 2010
Can
we talk? Let me began by asserting that—however wonderfully kind, supportive,
loving, groundbreaking and whatever other attribution you might use to use to
describe the comedian Joan Rivers as a mother, friend, acquaintance, and performer—Rivers’
later career on stage and television was marked by an embracement of the crassest,
most outré, and outrightly bigoted of American values. Surely Rivers felt she
could represent herself as the outspoken supporter for all anti-correct-thinking
attitudes, in part, because of her almost giddy acceptance of a somewhat
absurdist Jonathan Swift-like position which she honed, with her rapier-sharp
commentary, on not only whatever her
audiences thought was beyond the limits of good taste, but outside any
one’s definition of what most might imagine to be subjects of humor.
In her 2005 performance at London’s Palladium, for example, Rivers
tackled a wide range of inconceivable topics from death, suicide (both animal
and human), murder, cannibalism, racial and sexual prejudice, extreme
extensions of human body parts (including breasts, testicles and vaginas),
bodily smells (most specifically farts), Queen Elizabeth II’s crotch, Liza Minnelli’s
marriage to a gay man, her “friend” Julie Andrews’ throat damage, Helen Keller’s
deafness and blindness, the 9/11 bombings, and, by implication, even the
Holocaust! Where can you go from there? Perhaps it isn’t an accident that at
one point Rivers stretched her body out flat upon the stage floor.
While one might suggest that Rivers’ frenetic hate fest incorporating
most of these jokes (she “hates, absolutely hates old people”; she’s convinced
that all Philippinos consume their dogs and that every actor in Hollywood has
had facial surgery; Anne Frank, she argues, was a “whiner” in need of a nose
job; her own mother-in-law could only complain when Rivers attempted to cremate
her—alive!) is a kind of black humor that has its roots in Kafka, Beckett or
even Sade--even more troubling, I would argue, are the things that the
fictitious persona of Rivers absolutely loves, which includes nearly every
bourgeois element of what used to be described as the American dream. Rivers’
persona mostly admires beauty and money, and everything that comes with that:
marriage (no matter how meaningless; an unmarried woman who lives with a man is
automatically an “absolute slut!”), financial well-being, a grandiose house
filled with possessions, a fashionable life (beautiful clothes, glittering
jewels, and elaborate (even if time-worn furs) and, finally, as the natural
apotheosis of all of these qualities and things, celebrity.
Arguably these “desirable” things are
simply the mirror-opposites of those dark forces of which the comedian makes
fun, thus incorporating a gigantic satiric portrait of American life. But
Rivers herself, in her own numerous admitted attempts to beautify herself
through countless “nips-and-tucks” of the plastic surgeon’s knife (“I was the
ugliest girl in the little town of Larchmont”), her life-time predilection for
wearing beautiful gowns, jewelry, and furs, and her clear infatuation with
celebrities and her own celebrity-status creates a severe problem if we might
wish to credit her humor with any irony.
When she reports that her daughter,
Melissa, “stupidly” turned down an offer to be a Playboy model, berating her
child and herself for refusing to do something with which she felt
uncomfortable when she might have otherwise earned a great deal of money, it is
somewhat difficult to know whether the joke she is telling is based on Swiftian
overstatement or a real, gut emotional response. When my English students, long
ago, were confused by Swift’s insistence that it may be useful for the British
to eat Irish children, I could always try to point to the language itself to
make his “real” values more apparent; but in the case of Rivers, it is nearly
impossible, at times, to separate the artifact from the fact that she has
almost become everything that she claims to value; and one wonders,
accordingly, whether or not she truly hates or at least devalues all those things
she claims to so honestly to speak out against.
Her distasteful jokes and her ridiculous
values are only laughable, it seems to me, if we can inherently imagine that
Rivers, as a real person, is simply presenting a shtick, a series of bizarre one-liners that, at heart, represent
values that she actually disavows. Yes, Sophie Tucker, may have been a coarse
figure, slyly insinuating sexual fables that shocked some in her audience, but
no one truly believed that Tucker was actually spending her days enacting her
reports. Even the would-be femme fatale Mae West, anyone with even a little bit
of perception knew, was probably more beloved by the gay boys whom she
eventually incorporated into her act, than by any significantly endowed
heterosexual man. Lucille Ball may have played a loud-mouthed, lying ditz, but we
also recognized that she was a beautifully smart lady of great cleverness.
Phyllis Diller (who, at moments, Rivers—at least in her commentaries on her
married life—seems to imitate) may have dressed the part of a badly
clothes-coordinated street lady, but we knew, or at least guessed, that behind
her façade of self-demeaning put-downs, she was a grand beauty. The sometimes
seemingly potty-mouthed “tramp” through which Bette Middler vamps, we all know
is a cover-up for the sweet, slightly sentimental, gal she is at heart. As I
have noted earlier in this volume, anyone with a stitch of brains realized that
if Elaine Stritch was a tough broad, she was also a permanently naïve lover of
life.
Rivers celebrated none of these obviously
deviously comic personae. Rivers did, in fact, look quite lovely, was
well-dressed, her hair professionally retouched and cut. She looked like a
lady, but spoke as if she had lived in the sewer for most of a life that she
had spent scratching to get up and out.
When onstage The Palladium she seems
disappointed with the size of the purposeless orchestra (for which she claims,
she had to pay for herself), we can’t imagine that she’s lying to us. She
wants, she claims time and again, everything that money can buy. Her outrage
for getting six and a mirror for the 12 players she ordered up—even if they
perform briefly only upon her entry and exit—seems utterly genuine. Although
she may perform anywhere and everywhere just for the love of an audience—several
of whose members she demeans throughout her skits—we truly believe she would
like the stage to be filled, as were some corners of the Palladium, with
flowers and plants. A great part of her personae, in fact, depends on our
belief that she is utterly honest—which is why her audiences let her escape
with the numerous expressions of intolerance and hate; in a sense, she’s asked
for and gained our permission to dish out the worst before she serves up what
she proclaims in the best of life.
But
what if the audience, such as the English one at the Palladium, doesn’t want or
even comprehend all that American straightforwardness that advertises its own
ultimate ugliness of moral values and convictions? What if her audience doesn’t
know who Paris Hilton or the countless other irrelevant “celebrities” Rivers
mentions are? In several instances, the poor camerawoman of her Palladium
performance seems to have had almost jump over seats with camera in hand to
show us a few laughing youths to create any sense of response.
If
nothing else, you have to give Rivers credit for walking that tightrope between
who she pretended to be and who she just might been night after night. At times
like the ugly Queen in Snow White, Rivers dared the mirror reflect back someone
else.
The
above comments were in reaction to watching the Joan Rivers video of her
performance at the London Palladium, which I watched after the news of her death
last week, after she suddenly stopped breathing during minor surgery. For
the same reason I also took time out to view the 2010 documentary about Rivers
made by directors Annie Guldberg and Ricki Stern.
That film, both directly and indirectly,
brought up many of the same issues I discussed above. On one the level the film
portrayed an absolutely level-headed and smart business woman struggling to
keep her career going long after the age (75) at which most comedians and
actors have given up any hope of performing. There is something endearing about
a woman who cannot imagine retirement, and who clearly is a fanatic about her
ability to continue doing what she loves most, to stand upon as stage (“The
only time I am truly happy”).
Despite admittedly difficult times with her
daughter, Melissa, moreover, the documentary makes clear that Rivers deeply
loves her and, despite the career—which Melissa argues stood always as another “being”
in her mother’s life—worked hard with her husband Edgar to give her a “normal”
life.
Certainly, Rivers admittedly plays the
Diva (even if the Diva is often lonely), but she is also absolutely humble in
her willingness to take on almost any job offered her, including ads for
Depends adult diapers and gigs in small towns such as the one we witness of her
performing in Wisconsin. As she makes it clear, given the fact that she must
pay not only for her only quite lavish penthouse life, but helps with education
and support of several relatives, she needs money. But money seems almost
secondary compared to her need to be “loved” as someone who daily makes people
laugh.
If on stage Rivers “hates” the old,
children, and even those who suffer, every Thanksgiving morning she delivers (this
year with her young grandson) meals to those who, ill and dying, cannot get out
of their apartments. In the afternoon, Rivers invites relatives, friends,
neighbors, and even a few homeless people to dine with her.
Even if Rivers comes off as psychotically insecure
and needy, in short, she is also presented as a savvy and loving individual who
comprehends precisely the outsider comedic vein she is mining. When, during her
Wisconsin performance, an audience member virulently reacts to one of her jokes
about the deaf (he has, so he announces, a deaf son), Rivers abuses him right
back, insisting upon her right to use anything to make human beings chuckle;
but later she admits that he comprehends his hurt. She has, after all, made her
career, as she puts it, “going into places you shouldn’t go.”
And despite the shell of toughness she near-perpetually projects, we
also glimpse throughout A Piece of
Work, the difficult times—Johnny Carson’s refusal to ever speak to her
again after she took on a show on Fox Network, the suicide of her husband
Edgar, and the overall ups and downs of her career—which has helped, as she
admits, to make her “furious about everything” that is not right and just in
the world. As an agent reports, Rivers is stoic in her insistence about “standing
out in the rain” to wait for the lightning to once again strike.
Yet watching this sensitive film, one is
also struck with just how perverse Rivers’ personal values are. Her penthouse
may represent great wealth, but in its faux Marie Antoinette French interiors it represents
a kitsch ginger-bread conception of great wealth (“Marie Antoinette would have
lived here if she could have afforded it?). The gold leaf upon its walls, it
short, may really be gold-leaf, but the whole concoction represents no one’s
personal taste as much as it does a taste acquired by someone who has leafed
through too many lavish decorators’ catalogues. In her own home, we recognize,
Rivers lives in a kind of stage-set—even if all the objects in it represent the
“real” thing—as Henry James might have joked.
In fact, beyond the obsession to recreate
her own body, Rivers, an astute observer easily perceives, never lived in
a “real” world. Everything in her life was an image of an image; language for
this comedian was never something that actually might create reality but merely
something that stood in, like a metaphor, for some reality lying always just
outside her grasp.
Perhaps the most telling moment of this
sometimes brutally honest deconstruction of the Rivers “semi”-legend comes when
she begins to describe her love of acting. I always wanted to be an actor, she
claims. “I got into comedy only as a way to make money so that I could act.”
In short, Rivers herself is a work of “art,” is not a real being, but something she has herself created. Her career, she insists, is an actress’ career, and “I play a comedian.” We must admit that as a comedian-performer she certainly gave her all, literally “dancing as fast as she [could].” But sadly she interpreted her audience’s laughter—and no one’s jokes better fit Henri Bergson’s definition of laughter being intertwined with hostility or even hate—as showering her with acceptance and love.
Sadly, it becomes apparent, when Rivers
looked into the mirror there was, most often, absolutely no one there!
Los Angeles,
September 17-18, 2014