A Brief by Doug Draper
In the 2010 documentary film ‘Joan Rivers; A Piece Of Work’, Joan Rivers is seen in the first few minutes of the film looking over her schedule books, at one that is full of dates for a lady then in her mid-70s and saying; “that’s happiness.”
Joan Rivers
Then Rivers, who died this September at age 81, was featured in the same film pointing to a seclude book with dates that were blank.
“I’ll show you fear,” Rivers said as she pointed at those blank pages. “That is fear. If my book ever looked like this, it would mean that nobody wants me, that everything I tried to do in life didn’t work, that nobody cares. I would be totally forgotten.”
If you have never seen the film Joan Rivers; A Piece Of Work, which I saw for the first time at the Amherst Theatre in the Buffalo, New York area at the time it was released (it would never had made the screen in most of the crummy commercial theatres here in Niagara, Ontario) it shows a side of this lady, who some loved and some hated for her brand of comedy) that showed the sad side of the clown.
Like Robin Williams, who hung himself in his home this summer, there is another side to those who deliver funny lines.
Joan Rivers, love her or hate her, was one of those characters – and try to image growing up Jewish in the 1950s and 60s when anti-Semitism was still so rancid across North America, and being a woman doing stand-up commend in what was then a man’s world.
I had my own ups and downs with Joan Rivers with respect to some f the barbs she threw out at the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and others. But my blessings to her at the end of the day.
Her kind of courage in the entertainment world can rarely be found any more.
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Niagara At Large 
That is where both the Brock University Movies and the Shaw Festival movies shine. You could have seen the Joan Rivers one at Brock, and other movies that will never make it to Niagara at one or the other…. But you gotta look for them. And sometimes that’s hard. And they are far less expensive than the Commercial Cinemas.
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She was a ground breaker in several ways & produced a few classic lines but I found her humour often mean spirited & vulgar. I put her in the same category as Don Rickles.
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I would too! I much prefer the comedy of a Carol Burnett or Jean Stapleton. Phyllis Diller was pretty cool too, but it takes a guy’s raw and abrasive talent to get me rolling in the aisles. Other than the obvious standard of The 3 Stooges, I laud the work of Groucho Marx, Rodney Dangerfield, and Sid Caesar, to name a few.
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