CHICAGO — Here’s a joke: “I’ve had so much plastic surgery, when I die, they will donate my body to Tupperware.”

The person delivering that line was Joan Rivers.

Gone since Sept. 4, 2014 — her death from a heart attack during a medical procedure at 81 — she remains entertainingly alive on the internet and an influential shadow on the careers of such female comics as Amy Schumer, Chelsea Handler and Wanda Sykes. Aubrey Plaza calls her “the most badass female comedian there ever was.”

And so, following my recent column about Rodney Dangerfield and because he and Rivers were contemporaries and colleagues, here’s Joan Rivers.

“All my mother told me about sex was that the man goes on top and the woman on the bottom. For three years, my husband and I slept in bunk beds.”

Just as Dangerfield’s legacy has been tarnished and his artfulness diminished by the movies of his late career, so has Rivers’ memory been sullied by the red-carpet antics and what many considered the nastiness of her last decades.

But there is good reason that on Rolling Stone magazine’s 2017 list of the 50 best stand-up comics of all time — a list topped by Richard Pryor, George Carlin and Lenny Bruce — Rivers ranked sixth, just below Chris Rock but just ahead of Jerry Seinfeld.

So let’s go back, back to the woman born Joan Alexandra Molinsky in Brooklyn, New York, on June 8, 1933, one of two daughters of a doctor and his wife. Joan lived at home after attending Connecticut College, driving into Manhattan with aspirations to be a serious actress.

She drifted into comedy, performing at shabby nightclubs and, disastrously, at her parents’ country club, where she flopped so aggressively that her parents snuck out. Rivers ran away to Manhattan, ducking out without paying hotel bills and living with a boyfriend for a while before returning to her family home.

In 1961, she came here, joining the cast of the then-new Second City. She would appear in two months-long revues, “Six of One” and “Alarums and Excursions,” and often hung out at the Playboy mansion. “I really was born as a comedian at Second City,” she would later say.

Back in New York, she became part of the comic crowd performing at The Duplex, a Greenwich Village club, along with such future stars as Dick Cavett, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby and Dangerfield. Female comics were rare at the time (and, frankly, still are). As one writer put it then, “women in nightclubs were either audience members or cocktail waitresses.”

But Rivers worked tirelessly, sometimes paying Dangerfield to write jokes for her, and creating her trademark line, “Can we talk?” There are decades of her material typed onto 3-by-5 index cards in a filing cabinet, systematically organized into hundreds of topics that emerged as defining themes in her career. You can see this at the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, New York. There are nearly 70,000 original jokes.

Her contemporaries felt her talent. One night after she bombed on stage, Lenny Bruce, her comedy hero, sent her a note: “You’re right and they’re wrong.”

And then Johnny Carson came with an offer to be on his “Tonight Show” in the so-called “death slot,” the last 10 minutes of the show. That was Feb. 17, 1965. At the end of her routine, Carson said on air, “God, you’re funny. You are going to be a star.”

That was, she would say, “a miraculous, instantaneous career turnaround.”

There were big-time bookings in Las Vegas and elsewhere, a new self-confidence, real stardom. Carson was her champion and friend. He even introduced her to the man who became her husband, Edgar Rosenberg, a British producer and the father of their daughter Melissa.

By the 1980s, she was Carson’s permanent guest host, filling in on “The Tonight Show” eight weeks a year and widely considered his heir apparent. But the then-new Fox network offered her a late-night show of her own in 1986, and she grabbed it. Carson considered this a betrayal. “The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers” was a disaster, lasting only seven months, but it marked the first time a woman would host a late-night network television talk show.

Her life crumbled. In addition to the death of the show, her husband died by suicide. Their daughter, Melissa, blamed her mother.

Rivers then discovered she was broke. She had earned millions of dollars, but Rosenberg had wasted the wealth on bad investments, leaving her $37 million in debt, and her opportunities seemingly nonexistent.

She started over, invented new opportunities for herself, working like a maniac in her 60s, 70s and into her 80s. She became a cultural icon, an influential trailblazer and a business powerhouse.

Among her many late-career triumphs, she and her daughter Melissa created the concept of red carpet pre-show for E! Entertainment Television, where she also hosted “Fashion Police,” gave wicked critiques of celebrity couture at the Oscars and Golden Globes, won Season 2 of “Celebrity Apprentice,” sold all manner of items as one of the first salespeople on QVC, wrote bestselling memoirs and continued to draw big crowds in Vegas and here.

I reviewed her stand-up show a couple of times and interviewed her in the late 1980s. She was always frank and funny. She was, as before and ever after, a model of resilience and a total pro. Though some of her material still revolved around what I called “the shopping-marriage-axis,” she played energetically off our fascination with celebrities.

But there is no question that Rivers blazed trails for other women in the comedy industry by bringing taboo topics onstage. It is hard to believe that there would be a Sarah Silverman without Joan Rivers.

Interesting to note, too, is that since being banned by Carson so long ago, Rivers never appeared on the “Tonight Show” when it was hosted by Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien. She didn’t appear on the show again until Jimmy Fallon broke the 28-year ban, six months before her death. Sitting next to Russell Crowe and, using the vernacular of the comedy world, she killed.

-----------

©2026 Chicago Tribune. Visit at chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.