Free Still Talking by Joan Rivers, Richard Meryman

killed by parachuted food supplies. He says all old people should be put to death after eighty-five, and brought a crippled dwarf onstage to call Jerry Lewis a son of a bitch. He insults Christians. Kinison pounds on the floor and shouts Christ’s last words: “Ouch! Ouch!” He’s outrageous but brilliant.
    But Kinison and Clay are not being new. The public is just more tolerant, more accepting. And every generation rediscovers the past. Comedy does not change. We just dress it up differently. Men and women, our bodies, does money matter or doesn’t it-I’m so ugly that … these themes are still universal themes. On my show I recently had a hot young performance artist talking about how it felt to be pregnant. Robin Williams talks about his wife being pregnant. 1 talk about being pregnant. In the forties, the joke might have been “My wife’s so fat that when she sits around the house, she sits around the house!” In the nineties it might be, “My wife’s so fat that you don’t walk
     
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    with her, you walk among her!” Comedy addresses the daily problems we all face. So thirty years ago we laughed about the dishwasher. Today we laugh about the fax machine.
    In the sixties my breakthrough joke came just after Melissa was born. I said on Carson, “When I had my baby, I screamed and screamed. And that was just during conception. ” That joke was quoted all across America. People were calling Edgar to ask, “What did she say?” That’s how repressed we all were in those days.
    But those jokes also shocked because they came from a winning young girl in a nice little dress and pretty little pearls, her hair in a cute flip. I was everybody’s married daughter saying things no lady would ever talk about in public.
    In those days funny women were expected to look weird and ugly and therefore nonthreatening to the ladies out front. At that time the two top female comediennes were Phyllis Diller and Totie Fields. A major part of Phyllis’s act was her wild drag-queen outfits, the gloves, the long cigarette holder and crazy hair, and that mad, cackling laugh.
    When she came to see me at the Downstairs, I had no sense that she might have been envious of me. She laughed the loudest and afterward was gracious and charming. That night she looked as if she, could have been the head of the Mellon family, so chic and pulled together and understated. Little did I know that twentyfive years later, people would be saying “She’s so different in person” about me.
    Totie was a throwback to the tough, vulgar Catskill comics-a chunky woman with pudgy hands and silver nails and Sammy Davis Vegas rings. She was probably sorry she did not have twelve pinkies so she could have a ring on every one. She was a brilliant comic, singing a couple of songs, talking, doing routines about panty hose, about her husband, George, about being fat. She came out of the lowest levels of show business, from toilets, a fat girl doing strip joints. And she was a total professional who knew how to work an audience, how to sell a joke.

52 JOAN RIVERS
    Totie was a gutter fighter who must have been contemptuous of this earnest college graduate with a circle pin and a small delivery, this comedy parvenue who she thought had never paid any real dues in comedy, never done three shows a night in Sheboygan-and was coming into her territory. I could not understand why certain major clubs around the country refused to book me, and I learned later that Totie Fields was spreading the word that I was dirty and vicious, not funny.
    Much later, in the mid-seventies, she lost her leg to diabetes and sent me a sweet letter from the hospital telling me she had watched me on Carson and liked my routine. A few months after that, when I was performing at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, there was a knock on the dressingroom door and it was Totie, alone, a hundred pounds lighter, limping badly, going blind, and brave, brave, brave. She had climbed two