“It’s great to put a face to a voice,” Joan Rivers told me when I met her after her show last night at the Winspear (I’m pictured, from left, with her her and Voice contributor Howard Lewis Russell). “Phone interviews are hard, but you were a good one.”
Even if she hadn’t paid me a compliment, it would have been easy to say nice things about Joan’s 65-minute act, where she stays in constant motion and talks even faster. (After the set was over, Howard and I were exhausted from laughing; only then did we realize Joan never so much as took a sip of water the entire time.) At 79, she’s an unstoppable force, going to far as to do a sight gag involving climbing on top of a piano — what septuagenarians do you know that still do physical comedy?!?!
But that’s Rivers, who famously never slows down — not in her career, and not onstage. The jokes were more rapid-fire than a sub-machine gun: Some induced groans from audience members uncomfortable with jokes about pedophilia (read: Michael Jackson) and how Chaz Bono needed liposuction more than a new penis. But, as Joan says, if you don’t get some walkouts, you’re not doing your job right.
Of course, she embraced “my gays” — her shout-out to them (“Where are you?”) resulted in a roar and nearly the entire front two rows standing up and hollering. “I love my gays — my one great disappointment is my grandson is not gay,” she joked. “Who else is going to say to me, ‘Really, you knew Judy Garland?!'” Still, she said, gays don’t like two kinds of jokes: Those that poke fun at Princess Di and at Barbra Streisand. She did jokes about both.
And she was right: The gays were out in force. The line at the men’s room before the show looped around the lobby. “Why is the line here longer than at the ladies’ room?” wondered one man aloud. “Because,” I said, “Joan Rivers has turned the Winspear into Dallas’ largest floating gay bar.” “Oh, right,” he agreed.
Hilariously, Joan spent most of the act promising to get to the act … as soon as she got a few things off her chest. That resulting in riffs about how ugly Americans are (outdone only by Mexicans and Haitians); how she hates blind people and the handicapped; how — although she loves lesbians — she prefers they sit in the back row cuz they never laugh; how disgusting old people are … including herself and her fallen vagina. I’m not kidding.
Indeed, although she’s not technically famous as an insult comic (a term reserved mostly for Don Rickles, Jeff Ross and Lisa Lampanelli), her best bits involve attacking celebrities “including the adorable little lesbian — what’s her name? — Justin Bieber.” But she turns the hose on herself as well. “Every month, Kathy Griffin, Cher and I get together at Cher’s house without doing any hair or makeup — we look like the three witches from Macbeth,” she said to thunderous laughs.
The gays love her. Even those who don’t love her, kinda love her. She says whatever she wants. She’s earned the right. And we’re glad she’s still around, a walking poster for “It Gets Better.”
