Joan Rivers was a comedian known for her hard-hitting insults and one-liners. Joan was a special kind of comedian, in which she made fun of everybody. Every stereotype, every race, every body type, she made her audiences laugh at each other and then at themselves, making us realize the pain after we had just laughed at someone else’s. There aren’t many female comedians, especially when Rivers was starting out, then filling in on the Johnny Carson show. When Carson was retiring, Rivers claimed she wasn’t on the list of possible successors, they were only men. When Rivers was offered her own talk show host spot competing with The Tonight Show, things got ugly and the two never spoke again. She was looked down upon for being a woman, especially an attractive woman, with power.
Debra Gimlin discusses the ideas of women creating an identity for themselves through body work, “…women attempt to renegotiate identity by changing their bodies, their perceptions of their bodies, or both” (7). Joan Rivers had many cosmetic surgeries through out her life, and her jokes followed suit. Her jokes became about her old age, her wrinkles, her flab. If you laugh at yourself first, people can only laugh with you not at you. She wanted to create her own identity, have control over how she was looked at by her audience. Her look of “success”, became a middle-finger to the men in her life that tried to stop her, a “Fuck you, I paid for this face-lift.” She wanted to stay looking like the young woman who went through the blatant misogyny, depression and hardships to get onto that stage. Even though Susan Douglas isn’t exactly stating this the same way I mean it, in her work Narcissism as Liberation this quote holds true for Joan, “The ability to spend time and money on one’s appearance was a sign of personal success and breaking away from the old roles and rules that had held women down in the past” (246). Joan’s plastic surgery was a stab in the back by keeping her a young attractive woman with a slicing tongue and bitter chill when she spoke, you don’t expect a woman that looks like her to have a pottymouth like that.
Her start of Fashion Police is in a sense even a branch off of this, insulting women, the way they dress, the way they look, express themselves, she is saying it before anyone else can. She wants to be in control of the situation, talk about it first. She is doing to others what was done to her, she is in a strange way almost making fun of herself vicariously through these celebrities. She is creating an escape, an escape of humor. Douglas says, “I don’t ‘read’ Vogue or Glamour…I enter them. I escape into them, into a world where I have nothing more stressful to do than smooth on some skin cream, polish my toenails and lie on the beach” (251).
Joan entered the reality of Vogue or Glamour and commented on it firsthand, with her nasty jokes and sharp wit.
If we get someone to laugh first, they’ll cry harder later.
violetovern 