Word: joans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Glue Poisoning. In format, Joan Rivers owes much to the likes of Shelley Berman and Woody Allen, but her style and material, to say nothing of her femininity, make her something special. Snapping out her lines, bobbing and weaving around the stage like a pug in the last throes of brain damage, she is an unindexed handbook on how to be neurotic about practically everything...
Take wigs. The ordinary woman puts a wig on her head and that's that. Joan's wig gets run over by a car-and then the driver gives her $10 and his sympathy for having killed her dog. Or airplanes. "There's this guy standing next to me, and he's saying such things as 'If God wanted man to fly, he'd have given him wings.' And it's our pilot." Or trading stamps. It seems a girl friend saved 1,345 books of stamps toward an African safari. When...
...Daughter of a Larchmont, N.Y., doctor ("He calls himself an internist, which is really a G.P., but he charges a little more"), Joan made her debut in 1960 in a Boston nightclub. She was billed as "Pepper January, Comedy and Spice." She was fired the first night...
Then, late in 1964, Manager Roy Silver took Joan in tow. "He cut out every piece of esoterica," she recalls, "a lot of the homosexual references, a lot of the ethnic references. For 51 years, I had been telling jokes about my Kafkaesque past. I didn't make a dime, so now I'm looking for universals...
...Material. One universal was a shot on the Johnny Carson show in February 1965. From that point on, Joan says, "the board was lighting up again." She has since played nearly every TV variety show, made her first movie (a small serious role in Frank Perry's forthcoming The Swimmer), played the Downstairs four times in one year, and now, an indeterminate 30, has upstaired her income to six figures. She has written a movie for United Artists called, almost inevitably, How Are We Feeling Today. But most of all, Joan wants a child. "When I'm pregnant...