[su_brk] Joan Rivers, 1933-2014

Breaking on NBC, 3pmEST: Members of her family have confirmed that Joan Rivers has passed away.

The New York Daily News reports:

The native New Yorker, who became almost as famous for her unapologetic love of plastic surgery as her barbed humor, never recovered after going into cardiac and respiratory arrest Aug. 28.

Rivers was immediately rushed to The Mount Sinai Hospital from an Upper East Side doctor’s office, but her condition only worsened.
Joan Rivers and daughter Melissa Rivers at an event at the 92nd Street Y on January 22. Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images Joan Rivers and daughter Melissa Rivers at an event at the 92nd Street Y on January 22.

She was placed into a medically-induced coma and then life-support before daughter Melissa finally moved Rivers from intensive care into a private room.

The New York Times obit contains several of her funniest and most notorious punchlines:

Vivacious even as a nipped-and-tucked octogenarian, flitting from coast to coast and stage to studio in a whirl of live and taped shows, publicity stunts and cosmetic surgery appointments, Ms. Rivers evolved from a sassy, self-deprecating performer early in her career into a coarser assassin, slashing at celebrities and others with a rapier wit that some critics called comic genius in the bloodletting vein of Lenny Bruce. Others called it downright vicious. But if she turned the scowlers off, she left millions in stitches.

“Can we talk?” she demanded in her signature call to gossip and skewer — the brassy Jewish-American princess from Flatbush, Brooklyn, and Larchmont, in Westchester County, leveling with the world.

She would take the stage in a demure black sheath and ladylike pearls, a tiny bouffant blonde with a genteel air of sorority decorum. Then she’d stick her finger down her throat and regurgitate the dirt on the rich and famous, the stream-of-conscious take on national heroes and sacrosanct cultural idols.On Nancy Reagan’s hairdo: “Bulletproof. If they ever combed it, they’d find Jimmy Hoffa.”

On Charlton Heston: “He told us, ‘I got Alzheimer’s.’ Surprise! He’s been wearing his wig sideways for 19 years.”

On Donatella Versace: “That skin! She looks like something you’d hang off your door in Africa.”

I became a fan some four decades ago, when I caught her as a guest on NBC’s game show Hollywood Squares. Peter Marshall had asked he a quiz question about contraception, and she slightly changed the subject, mentioning a type of IUD that had just been approved by the FDA, asking the audience: “Show of hands, how many of you have tried ‘the coil’? … Okay, and the women?”

It was amazing that it got by the “program standards” people at the time, and the reaction shots of Marshall, Paul Lynde, and the other celebrities doubled over with laughter remains strong in my memory.

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