Joan Rivers Is Back With a Vengeance : * Comedian: After rough times, she returns to form with a talk show, a line of jewelry and an autobiography. She’ll be at Celebrity Theatre on Friday.

She has been described as acerbic, catty and course, a comic with a mean streak who aims her sometimes-raunchy barbs below the belt.

And how does Joan Rivers herself describe her act?

“Of course, it’s not mean, for God’s sake. That’s the dumbest thing. I call it as it is,” she replied on the phone last week. “I think I say in public what people say to each other in private. How many jokes this week have we heard about Geraldo and Bette Midler? Every office has this stuff going on. I just bring it to the stage.”

For three decades, Rivers--who’ll be bringing it to the stage of the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim on Friday night--has been poking fun at everything from Liz Taylor’s battle of the bulge (“I took her to McDonald’s just to watch her eat and see the numbers change”) to the Queen of England (“Look for a woman in a housedress and a hat. . . . She wears soap on a rope for jewelry.”)

Her candid “can we talk?” approach propelled her from struggling in Greenwich Village clubs to headlining in Las Vegas, and landed her as permanent guest host of “The Tonight Show” until, after a much-publicized departure from the Carson camp in 1986, she got her own late-night show on the Fox network.

Then came the fall: She was fired from Fox in 1987 after seven acrimonious months. Her income plummeted to one-sixteenth of what it had been, and she “couldn’t get a job in this business.” And then, her husband of 22 years, Edgar Rosenberg, depressed and in ill health, committed suicide.

But the scrappy Rivers is back.

Last year her nationally syndicated daytime talk show won her an Emmy as best talk show host. She starred in a TV movie, “How to Murder a Millionaire,” on CBS last May. She’s selling a line of jewelry, the Joan Rivers Collection. And she has just come out with a hot new autobiography, “Still Talking,” which chronicles her recent career and personal highs and lows.

The memoir is as candid as her stage persona. Did the book--which took her and co-author Richard Meryman three years to write--serve as a catharsis?

“Big catharsis. Major,” Rivers answered. “It put to bed a lot of demons. I wanted to set the record straight and also to show you can get through things that nobody thinks you can get through.” Having done the memoir, she said, she now can go on with her life.

Because her talk show and jewelry business take up most of her time, she averages only about one concert a week. But that’s enough, she said, to keep her timing honed and to let her know what Americans are laughing at.

On top of that, “I love it. I get a big charge out of a live (audience) contact. When you say something and everyone laughs, it’s like going to a big, happy party.”

However, anyone planning to attend the Celebrity should beware that “can we talk?” takes on new meaning in concert. Rivers has a knack for getting audience members to reveal intimate details of their lives--involving everything from sex and birth control to marriage and feminine-hygiene products.

“I was talking about gynecologists, having a baby, periods and contraception long before anyone else,” she said. “I think I was considered in those days very, very outrageous. But what you considered outrageous in ’66 is now considered charming.”

With a laugh, Rivers said she recently played her first comedy album for her 23-year-old daughter, Melissa, “and we were just smiling: ‘Isn’t this dear?’ It’s funny to see how America has changed.

“Eddie Murphy and Sam Kinison say things you wouldn’t dream of saying. I think it’s very healthy. The more you talk about things, the more they’re in the open and the less they can hurt you.”

“When I was pregnant with Melissa, I couldn’t even say I was pregnant. Critics in Chicago said I shouldn’t even be performing when I was pregnant. I was four months’ pregnant in a beautiful green dress looking really snappy, and the whole review was, ‘Get her off the stage.’ So everything has changed so much.”

Rivers, who tries to read three newspapers a day, writes about 80% of her material. “Everything can be funny,” she said, “if you see it that way.”

* Joan Rivers performs Friday at 8 p.m. at the Celebrity Theatre, 201 E. Broadway, Anaheim. Tickets: $28. Information: (714) 999-9536.