When Joan Rivers died in 2014, ending one of modern comedy’s greatest careers, several groups were interested in acquiring her archives, which contained a carefully organized collection of 65,000 typewritten jokes.
Her daughter, Melissa Rivers, recalled speaking to a Smithsonian Institution representative who wanted the joke catalog but said it would not be on permanent display. Her mind immediately went to the final tracking shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark, in which the golden Ark of the Covenant is locked in a crate and housed in a huge warehouse along with hundreds of other crates.
“I couldn’t do that because there’s so much of her in these files,” Melissa Rivers told me on a video call from Los Angeles. For her mother, a pioneering stand-up critic and critic of celebrity fashion, “the look has always been important.”
Instead, Rivers is donating the extensive collection to the National Comedy Center, the high-tech museum in Jamestown, NY, joining the archives of high-profile comic artists such as George Carlin and Carl Reiner. The fact that the jokes will be accessible is just one of the reasons behind Melissa Rivers’ decision.
The museum is in the planning stages of an interactive exhibit that will focus on Joan Rivers’ card catalog of jokes and will include material covering much of comedy history from the 1950s through 2015. The exhibition will allow visitors to explore the files in depth.
Lucille Ball grew up in Jamestown, and “Joan Rivers was the first headliner I booked for the Lucille Ball Comedy Festival, the year we announced our intention to build the National Comedy Center to the world,” Journey told me Gunderson, the manager by phone. Melissa Rivers, a television personality in her own right, attended the groundbreaking in 2015.
As for Joan Rivers’ joke collection, “I don’t know there’s another one that’s even remotely as extensive,” Gunderson said. In contrast, the jokes in Carlin’s archives “consisted primarily of scraps of paper organized in Ziploc bags and then filed into a binder by topic.”
Rivers, who wrote gags around the clock, paid close attention to the staging and punchlines, typed them up and compared them to categories such as “parents hated me”, “Las Vegas” or “no sex appeal”. The largest subject area is “Tramp”, which includes 1,756 jokes.
Alongside this wealth of material, the collection includes snapshots of other aspects of this cultural figure, including her fashion sense, such as the pearls and little black dress she wore early in her career, as well as the numerous boas of her later fashionista years. Here’s a look at some of the artifacts being brought into the center.
As you can see from these cards, Joan Rivers was often the butt of jokes, relying on terse, scathing punch lines to describe herself as undesirable, ugly, or old. Gunderson said the self-deprecating taunts came from a character “who used her as a position of power to speak out about the woman’s plight.” In real life, Melissa Rivers said, “Every now and then she’d say she looked good at any age. But that’s it.” Rivers added that those jokes came from a real place. “It was part of her, but maybe not as debilitating as everyone assumed,” she said. “But she also knew she was good looking.”
An unprecedented catalogue
Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (2010 release and available on major platforms) is one of the greatest stand-up comedian documentaries ever made: open-hearted, unflinching and vigilant in the face of the brutal amount of work , which is necessary to be successful in show business. It also introduced the world to the joke cabinet that Rivers kept at her home. Gunderson of the National Comedy Center described the catalog as one of the “crown jewels of comedy that exists on planet earth.”
Help at Hecklers
A TV fixture who never stopped performing live, Rivers loved battling with an audience. But early in her career, she prepared herself for wild audiences without losing the tempo of her set with this list of comebacks she could use as a weapon to mock heckling. Melissa Rivers said she only once saw her mother get angered when someone was heckled later in her career by a joke about Helen Keller. “She turned around and said, ‘Don’t you dare! My mother was deaf. She lost her hearing early. Don’t tell me what’s inappropriate.’”
Before becoming a comedian, Joan Rivers wanted to be a theater actress. After graduating from Barnard College in 1954, she commissioned this series of headshots to demonstrate her reach. She didn’t make her Broadway debut until 1972 with “Fun City,” which she co-wrote with her husband Edgar Rosenberg and Lester Colodny and in which she starred. The play ended after nine performances. But Rivers remained a staunch fan of the stage, a regular at shows, and a shrewd commentator on the television series Theater Talk. When she went to the theater, she always dressed smartly and insisted that her family do the same. Melissa Rivers said, “She always said, ‘This is church.'”
Ticket from a momentous time
When Joan Rivers left her position as permanent guest host on NBC’s “The Tonight Show” to start her own version on the then fledgling Fox network in 1986, she became the first woman in modern times to host a late-night talk show . It was a bold step, a milestone in her career that also preceded a painful period in her life. She made enemies with The Tonight Show host Johnny Carson, who saw her departure as a betrayal. “That made her angry,” Melissa Rivers said. “As she often said, if it had been a man, it would have been a great send-off for my protege.” Rivers was banned from the Carson show and fired from her own show the following year. Her husband, a producer of The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers, committed suicide months later. “It took a tremendous toll on her marriage and on our family,” Melissa Rivers recalled, describing the time this ticket represented as a time of “great elation and great horror.”