The bigoted, easy “jokes” she sometimes fell back on weren’t worthy of her. But when she went after bigger targets, she always nailed it.
Virginia Sherwood / NBC / Getty Images
Joan Rivers worked very hard to seem like an asshole — which is the highest compliment I can offer her. For five decades, she made a career out of being everything we teach women not to be: Superficial, rude, bitter, angry, selfish. She portrayed herself as simultaneously over- and under-sexed, simultaneously vain and ugly. She was intensely abrasive, respectful of no one and nothing, and consciously, inventively, relentlessly cruel. Little girls might be made of sugar and spice, but Joan Rivers — the public version of her, anyway — was made of rage, venom, and implants. And she liked it that way. She lived to deflate and disrupt the ideal of "nice" girls.
Joan Rivers on the Ed Sullivan Show, 1967.
As much as Rivers did for women in comedy, she also angered and hurt a whole lot of people. When she died, she was being protested by supporters of Palestine for saying that dead Palestinians "deserve to be dead." (She later clarified that she meant "Hamas," but that certainly wasn't what she said, and she was so passionately pro-Israel that there's good reason to believe she meant every word.) She had also recently called Michelle Obama a "tranny."
And that's just the tip of the iceberg: Any overview of her work uncovers racist jokes, transphobic jokes, an abundance of cruel jokes about rape and rape victims, not to mention a ton of not-so-clever jokes about fat women. (The punchline, usually, was that they were fat, and ate food a lot, resulting in their fatness. Surprise!)
But the big problem with Rivers' bigotry is that it undermined the truly radical, beautiful elements of her cruelty. It wasn't just that her statements were offensive: It was that, when she was trying, and going after targets that were worthy of her scorn, she could do so, so much better.
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