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| Joan Rivers didn’t want love, just laughs | Joan Rivers didn’t want love, just laughs |
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| It’s been a terrible summer for comedy: first Robin Williams, now Joan Rivers. Last month, Rivers posted a photograph of them together – Williams looking like a wild mountain man, Rivers in perfect makeup, jewellery and a fur stole. It looks as if they’re in a dressing room, one or both about to go onstage. It’s hard not to wish for an invitation to that after-show party. | It’s been a terrible summer for comedy: first Robin Williams, now Joan Rivers. Last month, Rivers posted a photograph of them together – Williams looking like a wild mountain man, Rivers in perfect makeup, jewellery and a fur stole. It looks as if they’re in a dressing room, one or both about to go onstage. It’s hard not to wish for an invitation to that after-show party. |
| Rivers was at the opposite end of the spectrum from Williams. He was entirely in touch with his inner child and his gift was to transfer that childlike glee to a roomful of people at once. He longed for our approval and he got it, time and again. If Rivers had an inner child, she was the meanest girl in school. She didn’t want our love; she forged a temporary alliance for the duration of the gig. She didn’t care if you liked her, she just wanted laughter. | Rivers was at the opposite end of the spectrum from Williams. He was entirely in touch with his inner child and his gift was to transfer that childlike glee to a roomful of people at once. He longed for our approval and he got it, time and again. If Rivers had an inner child, she was the meanest girl in school. She didn’t want our love; she forged a temporary alliance for the duration of the gig. She didn’t care if you liked her, she just wanted laughter. |
| Plenty of people have seized upon her more shocking pronouncements: her recent comments about Gaza; her poisonous description of Adele last year. It was in Rivers’ nature to test the boundaries of even the most liberal audience members. Watch her Comedy Central Roast from 2009 if you want to see her at her most vicious: she downs two large glasses of wine before taking to the stage with a rush of antisemitic, racist and misogynist abuse. She concludes by declaring – before an unfurled US flag – that comedy needs her. | Plenty of people have seized upon her more shocking pronouncements: her recent comments about Gaza; her poisonous description of Adele last year. It was in Rivers’ nature to test the boundaries of even the most liberal audience members. Watch her Comedy Central Roast from 2009 if you want to see her at her most vicious: she downs two large glasses of wine before taking to the stage with a rush of antisemitic, racist and misogynist abuse. She concludes by declaring – before an unfurled US flag – that comedy needs her. |
| And she was right. Comedy needs comedians who push boundaries, whether they are of form, scale or taste. No one is considered universally funny: there will always be someone stony-faced and dry-eyed in a room filled with hilarity, wondering what everyone else is laughing at. In fact, their response is likely to be more negative still. People rarely watch a comedian they don’t like and declare that they don’t get it because they themselves have a limited sense of humour. Rather, they declare the comedian to be “not funny”, despite all evidence to the contrary. So only a hopeless optimist would ever set out to make everyone laugh. And Rivers made the decision to err on the side of shocking her audience, rather than comforting them. Without her, comedy would have been safer and duller. | |
| Comedy has unsettled its audiences from the beginning. The Greek comic playwright Aristophanes was prosecuted for insulting the city of Athens early on in his career – he went on to mention, frequently, how unreasonable this was and carried on taunting Athens and her citizens for decades afterwards. | |
| Tragedy works by rehearsing us for the bleakest moments to come in our lives: we watch a character experience bereavement and isolation, and – among other things – it gives us the message that we won’t be the first to suffer and that others have survived sadness before us. Comedy is cathartic in a different way: it enables us to laugh at the misfortunes of others and perhaps then also at our own. Rivers had a genius for this. When she took to the stage after the suicide of her husband, Edgar, she said she knew she shouldn’t have taken the bag off her head when they were having sex. | |
| No tragedy was too personal or profound for her to puncture. No wonder she found other people’s shock difficult to take seriously. “I’m sorry I fucking swore,” she declared, after apparently offending a British television audience. | |
| The one thing she did share with Williams was a refusal to self-censor. His comedy seemed to well up from within, the words spilling out faster than he could say them. Hers was more considered: she had jokes on index cards, filed according to subject, from which she built her shows. But she never stopped to worry about causing offence or hurting feelings. She trusted her audience to make their own decisions and reach for the remote if they didn’t like what she had to say. Comedy will always need comedians who want laughs but not love. | |