A Year in the Life of a Semi-Legend

by Warren Day

During the opening of this fascinating and often funny documentary, I was reminded of something Steve Martin once said, “Comedy may be big business, but it isn’t pretty.”

The first shots of this movie are not “pretty.”  They are extreme close-ups of Joan Rivers without make-up as they begin the process of applying the foundation, the lipstick, the eyelashes and all the rest. Only then are you allowed to see her full and famous face.  Plastic surgery or not, for a woman in her mid-seventies, she looks amazing.

The directors (there are two of them) are proclaiming their POV at the very beginning, that the real Joan Rivers is the one you see on the stage armored in a glittering cocktail jacket, coiffure hair, and a cosmetic mask.  The woman is the act and

the act is the woman.

This non-reality reality can also be seen in her swaged and gilded Manhattan apartment that doesn’t look so much like a home as it does like a stage set that screams out, “the woman who lives here is successful!”

The year that’s covered is quite a year, even by a semi-legend standard.  She has a book published (her eighth), is roasted on Comedy Central, writes and appears in an autobiographical play staged in Edinburgh and London, wins Donald Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice show, continues selling her line of  jewelry on QVC, and cooperates with this cinéma vérité documentary (which is receiving rave reviews).

Like a shark, Joan Rivers would die if she ever stayed still.

She’s as driven as Ben-Hur’s horses, and her daughter says “The Career,” as it was known around the house, was like having an imperious sibling who was always mother’s favorite.

Like other strong-willed women cut from survivor’s cloth, Joan has a huge gay following.  On her way to an appearance in the rural Midwest she worries the audience will not be receptive to her and quips, “they’ve probably killed all their gays.”

These larger-than-life, Auntie Mame type dynamos are best seen from Row S.  Up close and day-to-day they can wear you out and leave you looking for an exit, as her husband Edgar did with suicide, and as her long-time manager does in this film when he disappears and doesn’t return phone calls.

They say there’s no such thing as a good comedian who’s had a happy childhood.  Hurt and anger create a Petri dish for a sense of humor, and the secret to Joan’s continual success is that she lacks for neither, even in her eighth decade.  To retro fix a famous quote of Frederick Nietzsche’s, “that which doesn’t kill us, makes us funnier.”

If you ever thought a stand-up comedian’s life was a barrel of laughs, this movie will correct that impression.  Being funny for a living is hard work … and often not very pretty for the one standing alone on the other side of the microphone.

This film is rated R for language and opens June 25 in south Florida.

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