Growing Up Laughing_ My Story and the Story of Funny - Marlo Thomas [57]
Marlo: Like Elizabeth Taylor. What did this woman ever do to you?
Joan: I truly feel that a comedian is the one who says that the emperor is not wearing clothes. I succeed by saying what everybody else is thinking. I was the first to say that Elizabeth Taylor is . . . huge! Remember that picture of her getting out of a limousine with David Geffen and she couldn’t fit through the door? That was my first Elizabeth Taylor joke. Then I just kept going: “She has more chins than a Chinese phone book.” “I sit in McDonald’s just to watch her eat and see the ‘How Many Served’ numbers change.”
Marlo: And you never let up.
Joan: Oh, I let up. When she got in a wheelchair, I said, “Okay, let it go.”
Marlo: I’m so impressed with your drive. You’ve never lost that, have you?
Joan: No, no, no, no, you don’t. You can’t.
Marlo: As harrowing as your survival stories are, they’re also very touching. Like when you first appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, you were so frightened and felt so unsupported, that you wrote “Break a leg” on one knee and “Good luck” on the other. They were covered by your dress, so you could touch them while you were on the air. That was so moving to me.
Joan: Yeah, well, you’ve got to bolster yourself. I had been brought up so many times for The Tonight Show and was always turned down. And, you know, the humiliation of getting up in front of a secretary . . .
Marlo: You auditioned for a secretary?
Joan: . . . who’s eating a sandwich. And she rejects you! I wasn’t brought on the show to anybody’s expectations. I was just thrown on in the last ten minutes, the worst spot. And three weeks before, my agent had told me, “You’re too old. If you were gonna make it, you’d have made it by now.”
Marlo: That’s nice—and that’s your agent. So how did he get you on the show?
Joan: He didn’t. I went on because Bill Cosby had been on the show with a comedian who was so bad, he said to the bookers, “You might as well use Joan Rivers. She can’t be worse than that guy.” And that’s why they finally put me on.
Marlo: What a recommendation.
Joan: No one had faith in me. They didn’t even think I was good enough to do stand-up, so they brought me out as “a girl writer.”
Marlo: And it went great, right?
Joan: Yeah, I was funny out there—and Carson, right on the air, said, “You’re going to be a star.” But it wasn’t until the next day, when every critic came out and said something wonderful, that the phones went off the hook. It was like an overnight sensation, really. Amazing.
Marlo: So you were on your way.
Joan: Not yet, because I knew one thing—and no one told me this, I just knew it was true: that it wasn’t the first shot, it wasn’t the second shot, it was the third shot that establishes you and proves you weren’t a fluke.
Marlo: So how far apart were your three shows?
Joan: About six weeks—and, every night, I went to a club in the Village with my Wollensak tape recorder and continued to do exactly what I had been doing—working on the shots, working on the shots. That’s all I did—I wanted to show them. Anyone can be funny once. We’ve all got seven good stories in us. But can you come up with 160 good stories?
Marlo: I love that you taped it. It’s the craft.
Joan: Yeah, I still do that. Nothing has changed. I work in a place on Forty-second Street in New York every Wednesday night. I go in, ad-lib, and tape the whole thing.
Marlo: No kidding.
Joan: Nothing has changed—just the machine is smaller.
Marlo: Are you creating material to use on television?
Joan: To use on television, to use on a roast, to keep me relevant. Right now, I’m going over last night’s transcript so I can pull stuff together for Vegas next week.
Marlo: What joke is in front of you right now?
Joan: My “Helen Keller Was My House Guest” routine.
Marlo: Tell it to me.
Joan: Oh, please.
Marlo: Come on, tell me!
Joan: It’s still so new. Okay—here’s one joke: Barbara Walters wrote in her book The Art of