- When I started, it was a very difficult thing for a woman to be fairly good looking and funny.

It just was not accepted.

You were either funny looking (jeers) and then you could do your jokes.

That was the tradition I came out of.

Or you were attractive and you were a singer.

Every place I would go, they'd say, "You're the singer."

And I'd say, "No, I'm the comedian."

So that started badly for me.

So I had to come on stage and look like a nice girl, but still do jokes and I didn't know where to go.

I had one agent that said, you gotta have a funny name and a logo.

So for a while I was Pepper January, comma, Comedy with Spice, comma, and I would be booked in all these strip joints.

So I thought it was funny, I bought pasties and put them on over my dress and I walked out and nobody thought that was funny but me.

I didn't go in the tradition of the ladies that wanted to look ugly and be clowns because I wanted to get married.

So I wanted to look pretty.

I always had my hair looking good.

I always wore my good dress and my good pin.

So that started.

And I just didn't wanna do and couldn't do, "Take my mother-in-law, she's so," whatever.

So I told the truth about my life and I spoke things that they gasped at.

I spoke at having an affair with a married professor.

And this was a nice college-educated girl that was standing there and saying, one of my lines was, "While he was engaged to me his wife became pregnant, so I figured he wasn't sincere."

You would hear gasps in the audience.

I spoke about my very good friend who was gay, Mr. Phyllis, and that when I do get married, he's gonna be my chief bridesmaid.

Well, people couldn't believe.

My mother, again, those days, mothers wanted you to get married.

And I was talking about my mother had a sign up "Last girl before freeway."

And people would say, "Oh, that can't be."

And you just, you don't talk, we don't talk about these things.

It was all about, we don't talk about these things.

And my closing part of my act, the last thing was, "I am Joan Rivers.

I am desperate to do well in comedy, so what can I tell you?

For a job, I put out."

Well, I got, "What?

What did she say?"

Nobody laughed the first three years.

And I got, it was so bad.

I would perform in clubs and I would say, "Tonight my lecture is going to be about my life."

I wouldn't even say I'm a comedian, because they weren't gonna laugh.

- [Interviewer] There was one thing in your book about you were at a Yiddish place and they were translating.

Oh, they would book me all over, mainly because I had a car.

So I would go and everyone would be in the car with me, the magician, the the dog act.

It'd be like a barking car when we'd stop to pay the toll.

And we would play these places in the Borscht circuit.

Many of them didn't speak English.

And there was one place they had a translator for me.

So, I would do the joke in English and bomb, bomb, and then someone would repeat it in Yiddish.

So I bombed twice on every joke.

(laughs) They hated you double the amount.

They had a lot of Black singers in those days and they would go to a Jewish place and they would sing Yiddish songs, "Ali Ali," "Yiddishe Momme," and the place would cry, you know, and they put on a yarmulke.

I mean, it was just the lowest form of pandering.

And I came out after one of these Black singers and I said, "I'm so glad you," 'cause they had applauded him so amazingly.

I said, "I'm so glad you love my husband."

Well, (laughs) I could have just gone home right there.

I did that.

I stole off of television.

I had nothing that really related to me.

And it wasn't until I got into Second City that I realized I'm funny in what I think is funny.

Second City was this little group of snobs in Chicago.

Most of 'em would come outta the University of Chicago.

They were beyond smart.

And they just did improvisation, almost to top each other.

I went into a company that we were doing a scene on owning a lekythoi, which is the Greek vase.

Now, if you didn't know what a lekythoi was, you were in the audience, (laughs) it took you four minutes to know what we were talking about now, didn't it?

So they were so brilliant and so smart, and the comedy was up here and they never pandered down, ever.

And it became such a breeding ground for the most brilliant, Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Alan Arkin, Shelly Berman.

Then the second group came and that was Barbara Harris.

And then I came outta that and David Steinberg came outta that.

Then the third group was the John Belushi group and the Gilda Radners.

And it was all smart asses.

We were all a bunch of smart asses.

And if we had read the dictionary, well, we were gonna talk about what we found the word in the dictionary.

I did a scene where it was Christmas and my husband gave me a bowling ball and I didn't know what it was.

And it doesn't sound very funny, but it was two snobs on stage trying to figure out, was it global?

Was it this, was it a wonderful thing by Miro?

Was it?

And that's what Second City, it was brilliant.

And you were also able, in Second City, you were able to say what you thought was funny.

You never had to say, will the audience get it?

You didn't care.

You went to each other's level.

And the things that came out of it were absolutely glowing.

Second City was the beginning of improv and what we did every night, remember we were all young, smart, and thought we were smarter than we were.

So you'd say to the audience, "Give us a first line, give us a last line, give us two characters, and give us the way you want us to do it."

Tennessee Williams, Shakespeare, you tell us how we should do it, the art form.

And then we would improvise scenes.

And the scenes were wonderful.

That's what was so amazing.

We got one review with the critic in Chicago, said they couldn't have improvised that.

I mean, everybody was so bright.

And you were also, they opened the doors for everybody because you didn't have to worry about anything.

You could say what you thought was funny and you had a friend to bounce it back at.

It was an amazing time.

It took them seven years for me to get through.

All my friends got through ahead, George Carlin, Woody Allen, everybody moved ahead.

And I think it was because I was a woman looking back, they couldn't put me together with a woman.

And finally they brought me on the Carson Show as a girl writer.

They couldn't say I was a comedian.

And that was my breakthrough.

And on camera, I was telling Carson how my mother didn't want me to get married.

I was telling him that time I had bought a wig, which was true, and it fell out the window and somebody ran over it and I had a dead wig.

And at the very end of the evening, he said to me on camera, "You're gonna be a star."

And that changed my whole life.

Turned my life in one day.

There were two things that could happen to you in the late sixties to make you a star.

First, you went on Carson.

And Carson in those days, that was where the intellectuals and the smart ones went.

So you could go, Woody went on Carson.

I went on Carson.

We were a little avant-garde.

We were different and we were smart.

Then, if you really did well, they put you on Sullivan.

I was only put on Sullivan by mistake.

He announced me instead of Larry Rivers, the guitarist.

So, they had to put me on.

Next week, Joanie Rivers instead of Larry Rivers, so I was on.

And when Sullivan accepted you and put his arm around you, America accepted you because Sullivan told America this is okay.

She is funny.

It's okay.

She's a little outrageous, but she's funny.

I said one joke on Sullivan in those days that got such mail, I thought I was gonna be put on again.

I said, "When I was having my baby, I screamed and screamed.

And that was just during conception."

Well, America, Iowa sat up.

Kansas City wrote letters.

It was amazing.

But because it was Sullivan and Sullivan said, "She's a funny girl," it was okay.

I was very lucky because I was the only woman at that time coming up.

And we'd all sit at a place called The Bitter End.

There'd be George Carlin and Woody Allen and Bill Cosby and me.

And there was a whole new wave, but we didn't know we were a new wave.

We didn't realize we were all the first generation of American-born comedians.

We weren't mockies, we weren't, you know, we were born and we were educated and we all had our own voices and our own things to say.

And none of us wanted to be Bob Hope.

None of us wanted to say, "My mother-in-law," 'cause we didn't have a mother-in-law.

And so we all spoke so differently and it's a totally different personas that we could sit and watch each other and never think for a second that I could use your line or you could use mine.

There was no stealing, 'cause I couldn't do Woody and Woody couldn't do me.

It was an amazing time.

And we all rushed to the surface within a period of five years.

We were the ones that said, I wanna talk about my life.

I'm educated, I'm smart, I'm attractive.

What's wrong?

And that's what I was talking about.

(bright music)