Search - Joan Rivers :: What Becomes a Semi-Legend Most

Uch!

Boxodreams | district of columbia | 02/18/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Are you kidding? Can we talk? This is one of the greatest slabs of comedy of all time. I have a few of Joan's early albums and while she was funny in the '60s, she hadn't gotten rolling yet. A lot of the style was there, but she really began to flower when the wheels began to fall off the culture. Don't forget, as wild as everyone seems to remember the 60s as being, counterculture was just that, counterculture. The regular culture, even for hip, modern, forward-thinking East Coast Jews, was still kind of fusty compared to what began to take shape in the '80s, when all that Mayberry and Happy Days stuff got swept off TV and things just got coarser and coarser until we all went down the sewer. And there, in that stewing petrie dish of "dish," where the stars were no longer stars but shooting targets, Joan Rivers exploded like a supernova. "Can we talk" is pure genius: Here she says, let's cut through the crap and get down to what everybody is really thinking, what everything is really all about. Let's stop pretending. Let's stop being nice. Let's start being so hilarious you want to fall on the floor, and nearly twenty years later, unlike so many other comedy albums, this is still amazingly sharp-edged and knee buckling.

It's sheer ignorance when some people writing here have said that Joan isn't as funny today as she was then. They, sadly for them, have no idea what they are talking about. They are seeing her stretched face on QVC and seeing her swap inane quips with passing celebrities on the red carpet and other junk like that. People, she is just paying the bills (as if she doesn't have enough money) with this garbage. It's the work of an aging workaholic. Let me tell you something and be very clear about it: If you have ever really loved Joan Rivers' comedy and you can stomach the unspeakable, you must rush to wherever she is playing on Wednesday nights in New York and see her show. It is obscene. Midwestern tourists who like her jewelry show do not laugh; they cringe and cower. Joan blazes through her new material, and it is SO WRONG that you worry God will kill you for laughing so hard. I'm not going to run through some of the routines here, but, trust me, she is at the height of her powers right now. Funniest woman in America. If you saw the BRAVO special, you got a taste, but even that was heavily edited and in a theater, rather than in a small room, where you are cornered, naked and at the mercy of her sensationally dirty mind. Why there is no new album of this new stuff is absolutely beyond me. In this age, where anyone can be a record company, she should just put out one of her new shows on her Web site. Until that day comes, though, you must have a copy of this. I don't know about fifty bucks, or whatever, but you know your limits. Essential."