The Curatorial Eye

Joan Rivers on the red carpet for Fashion Police

                    Joan Rivers has a keen eye for great popular culture. Not only did she re-invent herself on the red carpet, she also invented the red carpet as a pop culture moment. But when it became stale—the fiefdom of stylists, she complained, who carefully choreographed their stars—she left it to hacks and moved on to other more interesting things.

                    At 81, she started an Internet show called In Bed with Joan consisting of intimate interviews, literally in her bedroom. (Well, a mock bedroom.) Here, she and Bob Saget discuss the comics they liked: Lenny Bruce, Louis CK, Sam Kinison. Then Saget suggested George Carlin, and here’s what Rivers had to say:

Saget: I love Carlin a lot. Did you like Carlin?

Rivers: Up to a point. Because he’s so studied. Every word was thought out. And if you tell me one more time how many HBO specials he had, and how smart he was, and how he was a man of the people–with his fifty thousand dollar watch. You know… Don’t give me that bullshit.

Saget: But he was a philosopher, and that’s really what he was. He was a guy standing on his rock and saying what he wanted to say. For that… I mean, it is a practiced stand up, and it’s a rehearsed stand up, and it’s verbatim stand up, but he also… He appreciated the people that were… you know…

Rivers: The little people. And he would wave to them from his Porsche. 

In Bed with Joan (Episode 52)

                    She had an ear for comedy, and an eye for the absurd. She once got in hot water for her comment on Heidi Klum's red carpet look: “I haven't seen a German that hot since they were pushing Jews in the ovens.” That is comedy unfettered by political correctness. It may have seemed banal curating who should be in the best- and worst-dressed lists, but Rivers real gift was a razor-sharp eye, and the wit to wield it to deflate the self-important. 

(Santa Barbara, 2014 — Boston, 2021)