What I Found in Joan Rivers’ Filing Cabinet Full of Jokes

Can we talk? Joan Rivers’ iconic catchphrase inspired a rich vein of confessional, observational comedy, giving voice to the frustrations of women in times of radical cultural shifts. But when Joan Molinsky struggled to break onto the scene in the 1960s, the phrase was more of an urgent plea to explode the field beyond the men complaining about their mothers-in-law.

“You were either funny-looking, and then you could do your jokes,” Rivers said in the 2006 PBS comedy series Make ‘Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America, “or you were attractive and you were a singer.” Her dilemma: She wanted to hone her craft, but she also sought a husband, “so I wanted to look pretty.” She also yearned to perform (and eventually did perform) material that was scandalous by the standards of the time: about her gay friend Mr. Phyllis (“when I get married, he’s my chief bridesmaid”), interracial marriage (“I’m so glad you like my husband,” she told a stunned audience in the Borscht Belt after they clapped for a Black singer), her family’s desperation for her to get married (“My mother put up a sign on my lawn in Larchmont: ‘Last girl before freeway’”).

“Nobody laughed [for] the first three years,” she says on the PBS series. It was only when Ed Sullivan embraced her (literally) during an early appearance in 1966 that she gained acceptance, not to mention a shock-absorbent platform. “I said, ‘When I was having my baby, I screamed and screamed. And that was just during conception.’ Well…Iowa sat up. Kansas City wrote letters. But because it was Sullivan…it was okay.” 

Rivers proved that self-deprecation could be a weapon, a way to puncture and drain stereotypes of gender, beauty and Jewish womanhood—and she didn’t deploy that weapon haphazardly. She kept decades of 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. This August, the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, NY, acquired Joan Rivers’ joke file: almost 70,000 original jokes on topics from “Beverly Hills” to “New York”; from “Diets” to “Fat”; from “Baby Names” to “No Sex Appeal.” I visited last month to comb through the cards displayed for visitors, filed as others might catalog recipes. In fact, tagged under RECIPE was the first card I read, a bracing whiff of Rivers’ humor: “If I want Lemon Chicken, I spray it with Pledge.”

Rivers drew from the joke file throughout her career. She was a guest on The Tonight Show throughout the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, often leaving Johnny Carson speechless with laughter. She hosted The Late Show with Joan Rivers in 1986; The Joan Rivers Show from 1989 to 1993; and red-carpet celebrity interviews as well as hawking jewelry on QVC. She co-hosted the E! show Fashion Police for four years before passing away in 2014. “She often reminded critics that ‘punching up’ at the powerful was not cruelty, but catharsis—a release valve for a culture obsessed with status,” reads the exhibit text at the National Comedy Center. 

Courtesy of Melissa Pheterson

And she herself always remained enough of an outsider to feel aggrieved, which sharpened both her edge and her self-deprecation. “I think my mother tried to have an abortion,” she once told a startled Carson. “She never said so, but I was born with a hanger in my ear.” 

Rivers insisted that comedy without risk wasn’t comedy at all. Her material eviscerated double standards, sexism, ageism and narcissism by speaking truth to propriety. The era’s second-wave feminism pulses through the cards and TV scripts from her early career on display in Jamestown:

“A girl…you’re thirty years old…you’re not married…you’re an old maid. A man…you’re ninety years old, you’re single…you’re a catch.”  

“Why should I cook and clean? Housekeeping is futile. You make the beds, you clean…six months later you have to do it again.”

“Show me in the Bible where it says we have to cook…Show me where it says, ‘Bathsheba went forth and basted…’”

This marked the start of her lifelong engagement with the stereotype of the Jewish American Princess: a lazy, frivolous shopaholic whose parents have placed her on a pedestal. “Rivers took that sexist bogeywoman and made it her own, raging at society from inside the stereotype: she was the Princess who did nothing but call herself ugly,” Emily Nussbaum wrote in The New Yorker. Her joke categories attest to this: “Parents Hated Me,” “Fat Child,” “No Bazoom,” “No Sex Life,” “No Sex Appeal,” and of course “Ugly.”

‘When I was having my baby, I screamed and screamed. And that was just during conception.’

Joan met her husband Edgar Rosenberg, a TV producer, on the set of Candid Camera. He appears in many joke drawers; even “Income Tax” (“Edgar writes off having sex with me as a charity contribution”). After his unexpected suicide in 1987, Joan was left reeling and racked with guilt; when Fox fired her from The Late Show with Joan Rivers, they also fired Edgar as producer. But she didn’t miss the chance to channel her emotions. Upon returning to the stage, she became increasingly audacious and raw. “I scattered Edgar’s ashes at Neiman Marcus, so now I can visit him five times a week.” 

Life went on, yielding new material. One index card that made me laugh out loud, filed under “Older Men,” reads: “I hate dating at my age. I was out with a guy, he said, ‘I love your teeth.’ I said, ‘And I love yours!’ So we exchanged them.” 

She meticulously revised her own jokes to keep them relevant and relatable. “My vagina is like Newark. Men know it’s there, but they don’t want to visit,” became, in a later card, “My vagina is just like MySpace. It was popular in the ’90s but now nobody wants to go there.” Her frankness about plastic surgery predated Snapchat filters or Instagram face, anticipating the aesthetic gloss of our digital, best-face-forward culture. “Proud I don’t look my age…I don’t even look my species.” 

Joan’s file, of course, has drawers for her daughter (“Melissa,” “Melissa’s dates”). After Edgar’s death, Joan leaned heavily on her only child as both emotional anchor and creative partner. In her final years, from 2011-2014, Joan starred with her daughter in the reality series Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best? 

The cards riffing on her relationship with Melissa’s son vastly differ from those about Joan’s parents. For example: “My parents were cruel to me: I woke up and learned that I was Jewish on Christmas morning.” Compare that to: “I have to spoil him. How would it look if I came over every week with a new face and nothing for him?” or “I’m so glad we’re Jewish. If I’m going to spoil the kid, I don’t want that bastard Santa getting the credit.”

Before leaving the National Comedy Center, I had to take the elevator down to the museum’s Blue Room, despite the sign posted: “Don’t say we didn’t f___in’ warn you.” The Blue Room’s timeline begins with party records for private, in-home entertainment, the only source of risque jokes before Joan brought them to prime time. A video montage of modern comedians performed their edgiest material, with a voiceover describing comedy as “a mirror held up…about what offends you, what annoys you, what pisses you off, what makes you uncomfortable, because that’s really when you find out who you are.” Also in the montage is fellow Jewish comedian Sarah Silverman, who cites Rivers as an influence. “It’s always just about busting things that are taboo,” Silverman reflects, “because when things are out in the open, that’s when they become not scary anymore.” That’s the true catharsis of Can we talk?

(Top image credit: David Shankbone [CC BY 2.0])