Arts

Joan Rivers: The Original Nasty Blogger

Over-confessionalism, celebrity snarking, mommy blogs: She invented them all.

In Sunday night’s Comedy Central Roast of Joan Rivers, comedians from Carl Reiner to hostess Kathy Griffin looked back on Rivers’ five-decade stand-up career. In between barbs about the geriatric dryness of Rivers’ vagina (“How many men died in its construction?” wondered Gilbert Gottfried), Griffin and stand-up comedian Whitney Cummings hailed Rivers as an inspiration to generations of female comedians. But Rivers’ influence goes way beyond the comedy club. Many familiar corners of the Web—dirty over-confessionalism, celebrity insults, mommy-blogging—can be traced back to Rivers’ delightfully nasty humor. This “legendary bitch,” as Griffin called her, can also be considered in many ways the mother of the blog.

In his 2008 polemic Snark, David Denby lambastes bloggers like Perez Hilton and the writers of Gawker for creating a “future America in which too many people sound mean and silly, like small yapping dogs tied to a post; in which we insult one another merrily in a kind of endless, zany, brouhaha.” But, of course, Americans have been sounding “mean and silly”—or at least heartily enjoying someone else’s mean and silly—for at least a couple of decades. In 1983, when Rivers was subbing for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, arguably the most influential show on TV, Sally Bedell Smith wrote in the New York Times that “[Rivers’] popularity has exceeded even that of Mr. Carson during the weeks she appeared in January and March.” That popularity was based on calling Elizabeth Taylor a tramp and dismissing Bo Derek as a dummy. She was a sort of proto-Perez, drawing verbal squiggles on the faces of celebrities.

Rivers started life as a nice Jewish girl. She was born Joan Alexandra Molinsky in Brooklyn in 1933. The daughter of a Russian immigrant doctor, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Barnard in 1954. After graduation she had a number of unfulfilling day jobs while attempting to launch her stand-up career. Rivers performed in the Catskills and at Greenwich Village clubs in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, and her big break came in 1965 when she appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

She went on to become the first permanent guest host of The Tonight Show, and helmed the show for a nine-week stint during the 1983-84 season. After that, Rivers hit a rough patch. She had a falling out with Carson over her own show, The Late Show With Joan Rivers, which was cancelled less than a year after it premiered in 1986. In 1987, Rivers’ husband and business partner, Edgar Rosenberg, committed suicide. For a while, Rivers’ career was in the crapper. But the ever-resilient comedian rebounded. She realized that celebrity coverage in the United States was shifting toward the trash-talking she helped popularize, and she capitalized on it. She had always commented on the lives of B-list stars and was learning that America was interested in such coverage. The past 20 years for Rivers have included stints on Hollywood Squares and on E! along with her daughter Melissa as the network’s resident red-carpet interviewers.

From the beginning of her career, she was self-deprecating and incredibly personal. When you listen to her stand-up from the early ‘80s, you can see flashes of the “bad mommy” blogger brigade. Her husband and daughter popped up in most of her routines, and she often joked about her domestic failures. (“I have no sex appeal. The only time I hear heavy breathing from my husband’s side of the bed is when he’s having an asthma attack.”) This post about breast-feeding from mom-blogger Dooce, who is famous for her funny, unvarnished presentation of wife- and motherhood, is a spiritual relation to Rivers’ stand-up: “Suddenly I've got two giant, round stains on my shirt. And [my husband’s] all, you know, that would be so sexy if it didn't remind me of a cow.”

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