Joan Rivers, Can We Talk? [Re-release Transcript]

Jen Richler: 00:00
Hi, Jen Richler here. While the podcast is on hiatus, we're listening back to some of our favorite Can We Talk episodes. This time, an episode featuring a 2006 interview with Joan Rivers from JWA's documentary Making Trouble: Three Generations of Funny Jewish Women. This is the first episode in a two-part series about Joan Rivers. We hope you enjoy it.

Joan Rivers: 00:32
There. And very often you have to say the audience, oh come on, can we talk? All right, let's stop this nonsense.

Nahanni Rous: 00:47
Welcome back to Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women's Archive, where gender, history, and Jewish culture meet. I'm Nahanni Rous.

Judith Rosenbaum: 00:55
And I'm Judith Rosenbaum. We're so excited to welcome you back for our spring season.

Judith Rosenbaum: 01:00
And we're kicking it off with a two-part series on none other than the outrageously talented comedian Joan Rivers.

Nahanni Rous: 01:05
Joan Rivers' career spanned nearly six decades. She started with cabaret and off-Broadway shows in the late 50s, and then became a star of late-night television, hosting the Tonight Show and The Late Show with Joan Rivers, and eventually the Daytime Joan Rivers show. In the 90s, she was best known for her comedic and sometimes mean-spirited interviews with celebrities on the red carpet.

Judith Rosenbaum: 01:29
Joan's style was self-deprecating and abrasive. Everyone was fair game, including herself. She charted new territory in comedy by telling stories from her own life, combined with her willingness to talk about taboo subjects like hot flashes, sagging bodies, bad sex, and marriage problems.

Nahanni Rous: 01:48
You may have noticed that we borrowed our podcast name, "Can We Talk?", from this hilarious, talented, and complex Jewish woman.

Judith Rosenbaum: 01:55
"Can we talk?" was Joan's signature tagline. Sometimes she used it as a punchline, sometimes it was a setup. It was an invitation to her audience, a signal that she was about to confide in them.

Nahanni Rous: 02:05
Here's Joan on the Tonight Show in the early 1980s.

Joan Rivers: 02:16
I would not cheat, because I think, you know why? Can we talk? Let me tell you why. 
I think my husband's fooling around, okay? Which is very hard to say, but I feel very close to you. I feel [audience laughs] especially you at home.

Nahanni Rous: 02:28
"Can we talk?" was also Joan's way of calling attention to her flaws and other people's. Her way of saying, "let's stop pretending and tell the truth here."

Joan Rivers: 02:37
Can we talk? Let me tell you something [audience laughs]. Let me tell you something. The reason I have nothing happening up here and the way I'm glad is because I'm getting old. At least nothing's there to drop. Because, oh, do you know you don't know what it's like to get older? [gasps] Do you know what it's like to go in the morning to take off a facial mask and realize you're not wearing one?

Nahanni Rous: 02:55
So why did we borrow her tagline from our podcast?

Judith Rosenbaum: 02:58
When we started the show, Joan had recently died, and we were all steeped in the debate about her role and her complicated legacy, as brilliant and hilarious, but also crass and sometimes cruel. We love that she had so many dimensions, and that she believed in telling the truth about women's lives and expanding the range of models we see. All things we knew we wanted to do too.

Nahanni Rous: 03:19
We also liked that "Can we talk?" was an invitation to our audience to join us in this project of storytelling.

Judith Rosenbaum: 03:25
And with that, here's a wonderful interview from JWA's archive, recorded in 2006 for our documentary on Jewish women in comedy, Making Trouble.

Nahanni Rous: 03:33
Joan talks about her early days at the Chicago Comedy Club Second City, being a woman on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, and playing Midwestern clubs as a New York Jewish comic. Later in the interview, she talks about going back to work after her husband's suicide in 1987. She starts by telling interviewer Rachel Talbot about a fight she had with her parents over her decision to go into comedy.

Joan Rivers: 03:58
I left my house in pedal pushers in an old car that I used to drive and went to New York and didn't speak to them for a year. And it was just awful. And my dad wrote me a letter saying that we are going to—you better come home or we're going to have you committed. And I was living in the Barbizon Hotel for Women, and my dad went upstairs and pulled me out. It was a scene I don't think they ever forgot, dragged me out. It was just a horrible scene. Horrible scene. They just thought I was ruining my life. There's no question about it. They just couldn't accept that this is what I was going to do, and this is all I could do.

Rachel Talbot: 04:40
So they got you back home?

Joan Rivers: 04:42
I went back home and then I went away again. Yeah. It was just awful.

Rachel Talbot: 04:46
And then you went to Second City.

Joan Rivers: 04:50
Yes, that was great. Second City was very competitive. It was six of us thrown on stage, and it was "make up your own lines and get your own scenes going." And everybody wanted to be the star of Second City, and everybody wanted to get their stuff in. So it wasn't like being gracious. It was like, you know, "Oh, I got a better idea. I want to do that." It was very competitive. And that was great too. I learned in Second City, you have to talk up. And I learned the freedom [of] if you think it's funny, try it. Don't wait. Don't think about it. Do it. I still do that. It freed me. It taught me to be tough. It taught me to fight. If you thought your scene was good, you went in and fought for it. And it taught me, go with your instinct. Only do what you truly think is gonna be funny. It changed my life.

Rachel Talbot: 05:44
And then you you came back to New York and you said you learned so much from Second City. So how had your comic persona changed when you came back?

Joan Rivers: 05:52
When I came back from Second City, I was myself on stage. Good, bad, or indifferent. I was what I was, and I was a divorced—annulled, Jewish, smart college graduate, not particularly attractive girl on stage. And I was telling about my life. It wasn't about my mother-in-law, it was about what I'm going through. My mother is hysterical because I'm single, and I'm having an affair with a married man, and  my gay friends, and what happened to my gay friends, and it was all about truth. The first routine that really worked, I had a wig. I had hair pieces, and I was driving into New York to perform at this little club, and the wig flew out of the window, and a car drove over it, and I said, "There I was, walking down the West Side Highway with a dead wig in my arms that says Firestone on it, and no one stops." And it was all about truth and taking the truth and exaggerating it. And it just opened me up. And I never went back. I never went back to"He's so fat that..." unless I really believe it.

Rachel Talbot: 07:08
When did you find out you were gonna be on Johnny Carson?

Joan Rivers: 07:13
Nothing in my career—and I think that's why I have such a long career—has come easily. Ever. I have never been the first on anything. All my friends, and that time I was working in the Village with George Carlin and  Richard Pryor, all these wonderful men. Everybody got through. Everybody was on Carson and on Griffin, and I was brought up seven different times to the Carson show. I was finally rejected by a secretary who was eating lunch while I was performing. I mean, beyond humiliating. I got on because the night before some comic bombed. So they called me up and they said, "You can come on, but not as a comedian"— they had no faith in me. They brought me on as a girl writer, and at the end of the show, at the end of that night, on air, Johnny Carson said to me, "You're gonna be a star." It was amazing. And I looked behind me, I couldn't believe. And the next day my life changed. Changed overnight.

Rachel Talbot: 08:15
Now you were getting all these calls and stuff. Was there ever a feeling of like, "Oh, you're too New York to play in different parts of the country?"

Joan Rivers: 08:22
I was doing Carson regularly. I don't think I was hosting yet, but really I was, you know, the golden girl on Carson. And the agents would come back and say, "You're too New York, you're too Jewish, you're too New York." And my husband was— I was married by that point— Edgar said, "This is ridiculous." He said, "Pick the worst city in the country." And they said, "Milwaukee. They still have Bund meetings there."  [Laughs]. This is 1970. There's still enclaves, they dress up in their Nazi uniforms and saw that Adolf's dead. He said, "Send her to Milwaukee, and let's see." And they sent me to Milwaukee, and I was— they had to change the size of the room  and put me in the ballroom  where I was putting originally in a little—in a wonderful hotel called the Pfister, in their little comedy room, and they had to open up the ballroom and put me in. So  that changed everything. They said, "Okay, America will get her." I mean, people begin to put you in such little pockets, and it's so stupid because funny is funny.

Rachel Talbot: 09:28
What were your—after your husband committed suicide, you had to go back on stage. What was that decision to go back on?

Joan Rivers: 09:36
The decision was a very simple one. I had no money. I had to go back to work. I didn't have the luxury of being the widow in the house on the hill. So I had to go back to work. And nobody wanted me. And Vegas gave me back my contracts because they said nobody wants to see anybody that has that kind of—you were just fired, terrible publicity went out that I was very hard to work with. It was just all wrong, all wrong. I was banned from late night and I've never been brought back ever. Not one late night show. So I was really struggling with my career. And I had all these bills, and Melissa was in college. I mean, it was just a bad time. So I went back to little nightclubs. I just said, "Well, I'll start again." And I went back and started doing little nightclubs. And out of that came the red carpet, which I only went on because nobody else wanted to do it. They said, "You're gonna stay with paparazzi and talk to people?" I said, "I'll do anything."

Nahanni Rous: 10:39
And she did do everything: a fashion line, a season on Celebrity Apprentice, a TV show called The Fashion Police, and of course, her celebrity interviews on the red carpet. Some people saw this phase in her career as a sign of her desperation. But Judith, could you read it in a different way, do you think?

Judith Rosenbaum: 10:58
You know, even though Joan said that she went back to work because she needed the money, I think what she really needed was to work. She was someone whose identity was defined by her work. She was ambitious, and she was always up for reinvention.

Nahanni Rous: 11:13
Joan Rivers died in 2014 from complications after a routine surgery. She left a full and varied legacy, including decades of stand-up comedy, a dozen books, and an unforgettable persona.

Judith Rosenbaum: 11:28
Stay tuned for our next episode, a charming interview with Joan and her writing partner and close friend Triva Silverman.

Nahanni Rous: 11:37
Thank you for joining us for Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women's Archive. Sarah Ventre helped edit this episode. Our team also includes Becky Long and Shira Kraft. Our theme music is by Girls in Trouble.

Judith Rosenbaum: 11:52
We dedicate this episode to the memory of Nancy Schwartz Sternoff, a brilliant and hilarious woman who was a great mentor, a talented leader, and a founding board member of the Jewish Women's Archive. Like Joan, Nancy was outspoken, creative, and often surprising. Thank you to Olivia Cohen Cutler for her generous support of this episode in Nancy's memory.

Nahanni Rous: 12:13
This episode is also sponsored by Adventures in Jewish Studies, the official podcast of the Association for Jewish Studies. The AJS podcast features engaging and entertaining episodes on Jewish culture, religion, and history, including a recent episode about the 1950s Jewish female comedian Jean Carroll. Search "Adventures in Jewish Studies" on your favorite podcast platform to listen.

Judith Rosenbaum: 12:39
You can find more episodes of Can We Talk online at jwa.org/CanWetalk and anywhere you get your podcasts. Please take a moment to review us on iTunes and share your favorite episodes with your friends so that others can find us.

Nahanni Rous: 12:52
If you'd like to help us produce more episodes of Can We Talk, please go to jwa.org slash donate to make a contribution. I'm Nahanni Rous.

Judith Rosenbaum: 13:04
And I'm Judith Rosenbaum. Until next time.