Joan Rivers, one of the most accomplished comedians in modern history, passed away in 2014, leaving behind a vast archive, including a meticulously catalogued collection of 65,000 typewritten jokes. Several organizations expressed interest in acquiring her archives, including the Smithsonian Institution, but her daughter, Melissa Rivers, wanted her mother’s jokes to have a permanent home. In 2015, Melissa Rivers attended the groundbreaking ceremony for the National Comedy Center, a high-tech museum in Jamestown, New York, and later decided to donate Joan Rivers’s joke collection to the museum’s archives, joining those of other A-list comics like George Carlin and Carl Reiner. One of the reasons Melissa Rivers chose the National Comedy Center was because of its interactive exhibition plans that center on Joan Rivers’s card catalog of jokes, allowing visitors to explore her files in detail.
Joan Rivers had a unique sense of humor, often making herself the butt of the joke by using tight, snappy punchlines to describe herself as unwanted, ugly, or old. However, the self-deprecating japes came from a character Joan was using “as a position of power to comment on the plight of women,” according to Journey Gunderson, the executive director of the National Comedy Center. This position made people laugh at themselves through Joan’s humor. Additionally, the Joan Rivers joke collection is unparalleled mostly because of the manner in which she organized it. Rather than scraps of paper organized into Ziploc baggies like Carlin’s archives, Rivers cross-referenced her jokes under categories like “Parents hated me,” “Las Vegas,” or “No sex appeal.” The largest subject area in Joan Rivers’s catalog of jokes is “Tramp,” which contains 1,756 jokes.
As Joan Rivers was a fixture on television and never stopped performing live, she especially loved sparring with a crowd. Early in her career, she prepared for rambunctious audience members with comebacks that could be weaponized to mock hecklers without losing the tempo of her set. For example, when a heckler was offended by a joke she made about Helen Keller, she famously said, “Don’t you dare! My mother was deaf. She lost her hearing early. Don’t tell me what’s inappropriate.” Before she became a comedian, Joan Rivers aspired to be a dramatic actress. After graduating from Barnard College in 1954, she commissioned headshots that displayed her range. Although she did not make her Broadway debut until 1972 with “Fun City,” which she co-wrote with her husband, Edgar Rosenberg, and Lester Colodny and starred in, she remained a stalwart fan of the stage, regularly attending shows and occasionally appearing on television series like “Theater Talk.” Whenever she went to the theater, she would dress up, insisting that her family do the same, saying, “This is church.”
Finally, as Joan Rivers was leaving her position as the permanent guest host of “The Tonight Show” on NBC to start her own version in 1986 on the then-fledgling network Fox, she became the first woman in the modern era to host a late-night talk show. This move was a bold career landmark that preceded the painful period in her life. She made an enemy of the “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson, who saw her departure as a betrayal. Her departure made her angry, and she often said, “if it had been a man, it would have been the great send-off to my protégé.” Moreover, Joan Rivers was banished from the Carson show and fired from her own show the following year. Her husband, a producer on “The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers,” died by suicide months later. As a reminder of her high and low moments, Joan Rivers saved her ticket from the show’s debut, which will be included in the collection that the National Comedy Center will display.
