The late, great comedy legend Joan Rivers would have turned 90 years old today, and no one’s more stunned by that than her daughter.
“Holy fuck, she would’ve been 90!” Melissa Rivers exclaims during a phone conversation with The Daily Beast earlier this week, before sharing her mother’s apathetic approach to milestone anniversaries. “She never liked her birthday. Which doesn’t mean she didn’t like getting nice gifts.”
“She hated getting older,” Melissa adds. “She hated it once she had to actually not be able to wear the highest heels anymore. That was what would get to her, is not being able to walk as fast and lap people in the airport. And she always used to laugh, she said, ‘I look in the mirror and I say, why is one of my mother’s friends looking back at me?’”
ADVERTISEMENT
For Joan’s 80th birthday in 2013—the year before she died following complications from a minor throat procedure—Melissa planned a huge surprise party for her mom. But after her aunt, Joan’s only sister, died just days before, the whole soirée had to be canceled. When Joan found out, she was livid at her daughter.
“She literally flipped her shit on me because she doesn’t like surprises,” Melissa explains. “She was so mad at me and hung up on me. So we’re at my aunt’s house in Philadelphia, and I said to my mom, ‘Do you want to see the invitation?’ ‘No, I'm furious at you.’ I said, ‘Mom, look.’ I had these beautiful invitations made on heavy card stock with gold writing. And she said, ‘Well, there should have been a proper RSVP card.’ And she continues looking at the card, and of course there’s an RSVP card. So now she’s happy. And when we got back to New York she’s like, ‘Well, who was coming?’ And when I started reading her the list, she started to cry. She couldn’t believe how many people wanted to come out and celebrate her.”
“She was still mad at me,” she continues. “But then she wanted all the details, and she was really touched after that. But in general—and I was raised the same way—the best thing that can happen is working on your birthday because it means you have a job.”
So perhaps Joan would be relieved to know that her 90th birthday is coinciding with a career announcement: She will be inducted this year into the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, New York, with a new exhibit dedicated to her life. It’s a full-circle moment, as Joan headlined the famous Lucille Ball Festival of Comedy in 2011 for Ball’s 100th birthday, at which plans for the National Comedy Center were first unveiled. The year after Joan died, Melissa attended the ground-breaking ceremony at the Center, which opened its doors in 2018 and also houses the archives of late legends like George Carlin and Carl Reiner.
“For her to have been there when it was announced, and now for her 90th, she’s moving there… I don’t think she’d be happy with the weather in upstate New York, but nonetheless, I think she’d be happy with the table she’s sitting at,” Melissa says.
Included in the exhibit are never-before-seen photos, handwritten jokes, personally compiled scrapbooks, and wardrobe pieces including gowns and boas from Joan’s pioneering career, along with her famous collection of joke cards, which she filed and stored via an elaborate index card system. Joan once said, “When I die, Melissa can sell it to some lucky comedian.” But her daughter hung on to the library of laughs, parts of which will soon be publicly viewable at the Center. (You can also see some of the previously unseen joke cards embedded below.)
“It is very much a history when you start going through those cards,” Melissa says. “It reaffirmed so many things I knew, like how disciplined she was with her work. It reminded me of how prolific she was. And it reminded me of how observant of society and even pop culture, and just of being so aware of the temperature of the country and of the world. It reminded me that even at 80, she was still on the cutting edge, and her material was incredibly current. She wasn’t one of the people that you go and see for nostalgia. She was always current.”
So much so, that you can’t help but wonder what the acerbic, controversy-stirring motormouth would have made of the recent turbulent years in U.S. culture—especially as celebrities and comedians are expected to always say the right thing about social issues, politics, or whatever hot-button issue they’re asked to comment on.
“I think on first blush, she would have been happy with #MeToo, definitely, and with all these men getting busted. I think she would have been pleased with the idea of all these different communities standing up and insisting on being recognized,” Melissa says. “But then it all went way too far. I mean, the far left and the far right went fucking bonkers. I think, like everybody in comedy, the pendulum swung way too far. She always used to say, ‘Can we all just please take a deep breath?’”
“She always used to say, when you make someone laugh, you give them a mini vacation,” she continues. “And, boy, oh boy, did we need a lot of those mini vacations in the last couple of years. My mother was so… a laugh was a laugh was a laugh. You want to say she was an equal opportunity offender, but she wasn’t offensive. What you want to say is, she just believed that even in the most grim of times, everybody needs to stop, take a breath, and laugh. Laugh at our own ridiculousness.”
Almost nine years removed from Joan’s death, Melissa says that “just like anything, the noise fades of everyone constantly discussing” her mother’s legacy and impact on the worlds of comedy, fashion, and pop culture. She does, however, get a kick out of the raunchy, petite firebrand being invoked on shows like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Hacks, which Melissa calls “very heightened portrayals” of women like her mother.
“I mean, how can you not see it?” she says. “By the way, Jean Smart is brilliant. When she won the Emmy I sent her an orchid saying congratulations and my mother was such a huge fan and she would have been thrilled. My mother would have been so happy that this beautiful, statuesque, blonde, WASPy woman was playing a version of her. I think that would have been the biggest compliment of all.”
More understated but no less gratifying is the impact Joan seemed to have on the legions of fans who followed her five decades of caustic comedy on The Tonight Show, Fashion Police, and beyond.
“All of these years later, people come up to me and say, ‘when I met your mom,’ or ‘your mom did this, your mom helped me with that.’ It’s always nice. It’s nice to know that her legacy isn’t just in comedy, but in being a nice and good person,” Melissa says, before pausing and quipping, “I can’t promise she’d still be nice at 90.”
“What she always used to say was, ‘I’m 80, what are they going to do to me that they haven’t already done?’” Melissa continues. “She’d be 90 now, saying, ‘What else are they going to do to me that they haven’t already done?’ So I’m not sure it would have given her more of a filter. I’m guessing she would have been a little crabbier, a little crankier by now.”
