Joan Rivers (1933-2014)

Joan preps to guest-host WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show, on which she was a frequent guest, this past January. (Photo by Amy Pearl/WNYC)

by Ken

Among the plethora of remembrances of Joan Rivers now pouring forth, I commend to your attention to the one on the WNYC website, " Joan Rivers, Unflinching And Iconic Comedian, Dies At 81," by Mike Katzif, the "digital producer" of the station's Soundcheck broadcast, above all for the generous assortment of audio clips included of appearances she made on WNYC, all but one from The Leonard Lopate Show. For once, I don't think there's likely to be any question about the use of the word "iconic." And achieving icon status is a, well, iconic achievement.

To speak personally for a moment, a person reaches a point where it's not this or that that makes you feel old, everything makes you feel old. So it is when I reflect that I cn look back on the whole of Joan's public career, from the time when she began to receive national exposure. It's all the more poignant when I recall how fresh and impudent and funny she was way back when.

Of course she went on to carve out a career for herself that qualifies as "iconic," and the last thing I want to do is to minimize what a considerble as well as hard-fought achievement that was. The considerable amount of personal trouble and heartache that was mixed in was a larger-than-normal part of the story because the career she carved out included so much personal exposure.

If you sense that there's a "but" here somewhere, there is. And the "but" is that the kind of personality Joan created herself as -- a fixture in the world of meaningless and mindless gossip and show-biz yammering -- put her increasingly outside the orbit of my consciousness. On those rare occasions when I watched, listened to, or read her, I was surprised and pleased to find that, amid all the tiresome shtick and gimmickry, the spirit-lifting impudence of old could still show itself, and she could still be funny, in her own distinctive ways, because like all the greatest funny people, she had a vision of the world that was very much her own. My goodness, how smart she was, as well as talented.

As for the rest, well, it reminds one that "smart" and "talented" are almost the least of what it takes to make and sustain a show-biz career, in particular the kind where you yourself are the product on offer. This has to be beyond grueling for anyone, and for a woman -- as has always been pointed out in any discussion of Joan's career -- it has to be many times more difficult. Obviously, an important component of the "freshness" of the comedy I remember from her early career had to do with the perspective of a female comic. Of course there had been female comics before her, but before her who even imagined that a woman might, say, host a national late-night TV show? (Even now one might ask how many women are doing it.)

I don't suppose I can more than guess at how hard it was build and sustain a career like Joan's, a career where she made herself a sustained presence rather than waiting to be tapped for the occasional TV appearance. If I'm left with the feeling that somehow that career didn't make the very best possible use of all that talent and all those smarts, well, this is something we're pretty good at as a culture. Still, she made as many people laugh as anybody ever has, and along the way she made a certain number of people think a little. And note how much love there is in the outpouring at her passing. That's a lot to pack into one lifetime.

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