Name a female comedienne who's had a 40-year career. She's played dives (and still will to get the gig), written movies, written and performed on the Broadway stage. She's appeared in Las Vegas and on television as a permanent guest host on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. It was a busy job. He took a lot of nights off. When Joan left The Tonight Show to host her own show in 1986 on Fox, Johnny was livid and never spoke to her again. She still gets no work on NBC. She's written 10 books. She's a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Barnard College. She won Donald Trump's "Celebrity Apprentice."
This movie shows Joan on the stage (carefully doing jokes you haven't heard), and there are several moments when the whole theater is laughing. Loudly. Luckily she pauses briefly, or you'd never hear the next one. (Listen for the Bin Laden joke. It brought the house down.) You actually see Joan in tears about a staffer who abandons her. He was the one who shared most of her memories. As young comediennes credit Joan as a trailblazer, she gives credit to Phyllis Diller, who appears briefly. She's still funny.
Joan's biggest nightmare is to look at her schedule and find an empty page. That happened four times in her life (!), and now she often has four or five bookings or appearances in a day. She also shows her joke file, which she started 30 years ago. Drawers and drawers hold alphabetical cards, each with a joke, each in its appropriate category.
Look for an Academy Award for this documentary. The movie theater I arrived in had seats in only the first three rows. The place was jammed. Remember "March of the Penguins?" Remember "An Inconvenient Truth?" If a documentary finds an audience, an Oscar is usually not far behind. It'll be fun seeing Oscar go to this documentary. And to Joan Rivers.
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