Interview: Think You Know Joan Rivers? You Don’t Know Her at All

For many of the forty-five years of her extraordinary career, Joan Rivers has been asking audiences her signature line, "Can we talk?"

The last few years, it's been the audience that's been talking – about her, especially her penchant for plastic surgery and her omnipresent appearances flogging jewelry and other merchandise on QVC.

It's never good when a comedian herself becomes the butt of jokes.

But now, at age 77, Rivers is having the last laugh. An extraordinary new documentary, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, chronicles fourteen months of her life that also happen to include something of a career come-back, including her recent win on Celebrity Apprentice.

The documentary, by filmmakers Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg, is well-done, juxtaposing the “present” with the pivotal moments in her amazing career: the first appearances on Carson and her early edgy (and eerily prescient) work in the 1960s; her gig as permanent guest-host on The Tonight Show which ended when she headlined an ill-fated show on a rival network; the suicide of her husband Edgar Rosenberg; and her now-legendary status as a comedy icon with a reputation for doing, well, anything to make a buck.

But it’s Joan who’s the real draw here.

We all have an opinion about Rivers – and we all think we know exactly who she is. It turns out we’re all right in a way – but we’re also completely wrong.

River is a jumble of contradictions: insecure, yet unflappable; heartless, yet compassionate; funny in her act, but completely serious about her profession. She leads a ridiculously lavish lifestyle, but still regularly hones her act in dingy, small New York nightclubs, delivering some of the funniest, frankest material of her career.

In A Piece of Work, Rivers is, by turns, a figure of triumph, determined to survive any set-back, and a figure of tragedy, convinced she must stay “relevant” in a profession and culture that stops for no one.

More than anything, Rivers is very, very smart. There is an extraordinary scene in A Piece of Work where she is heckled by a man with a deaf son who is upset that she’s just told a Helen Keller joke. The movie shows her confronting the heckler, deftly moving to get the audience back, then explaining her entire thought process afterward.

In that scene, and many others like it, we easily see that Rivers’ success and longevity are no accident. In the high-pressure-cooker of a career in comedy, she can, even in her 70s, absolutely stand the heat.

Who knew? Foul-mouth, abrasive, now-campy Joan Rivers is actually an admirable, even likable person – something I was reminded of again when I chatted with her via phone from Florida.