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Thank
heavens for Joan Rivers for breathing a bit
of sanity into our world – which is a
testament to how far the world has descended
into madness when the voice of Joan Rivers
appears to be a voice of reason. Which is
not to imply that Rivers has lost any of her
fabled edge, only that with each passing
day, the world more closely resembles her
acidic take on life. Nothing is sacred, and
never has been for Rivers, but in a society
where celebrity and money are the only real
goals, Rivers makes it clear how mistaken
we’ve been to believe otherwise. It’s always
been about looks and money – and we were
fools to have imagined that integrity,
honor, goodness and virtue ever mattered.
When a magazine offers your daughter $400
grand to appear topless on the cover, you
tell that daughter to counter-offer with her
pussy for a cool million. And given how
successful Monica Lewinsky’s purse line has
become, shouldn’t every mother be
instructing her daughter how to take it down
the throat? This is a world where all of us
should have sent our children to Neverland
Ranch – in order that we might live happily
ever after on the $35 million pay-offs.
And as Rivers reminds us, the closer to
death you marry, the more you stand to gain,
as Jackie O. taught the nation in marrying
Ari. Meanwhile, Rivers’ own daughter,
Melissa, wants to set her up with Robert
Blake, telling her to just sit in the car
with the window open. No fool Melissa, she
knows Mom has a successful jewelry line on
QVC.
No one’s off-limits, not even Rivers’ good
friends. Babs Streisand is such a skinflint
that she’d offer a blind man a buck, only if
she can get change from his tin cup. It’s
all about the money; it’s all about the
goods. Either you’ve got them or you don’t –
and if you don’t, there’s no hope for you in
the mirror of America that Rivers holds up
to us.
Fueled with such ammo, it’s little wonder
that Rivers cracks herself up. This is life
in the looney bin and laughter the only
recourse. In an incomprehensible world of
genocide and terrorism, even the Holocaust
and 9/11 have to be rendered with humor to
attempt any kind of understanding. If you
knew what we know now and there was no way
around it, Rivers asks, who would you
breakfast with at Windows on the World on
that fateful morning? It’s a Beckettian
question that Rivers volleys perfectly: how
to make sense of the senseless?
As Rivers says, Death trails all of us, and
while she hardly looks her age, she contends
her tits have become her bedroom slippers.
Because of course there’s no stopping the
march of time, or gravity’s pull, and
knowing this as we do, and with Rivers as
our guide, it would appear the only way to
live is to laugh all the way to the grave –
with a side trip to the bank, for good
measure.
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