From Rivers Flows a Crude, Catty Show

Small, gray-haired Anne Selvin looked a little stunned at the end of Joan Rivers’ show Friday night at the Celebrity Theatre. Leaning against her husband, Jerry, the 69-year-old gave her appraisal: “Well, I really like the Joan I see on TV, her (daytime talk) show and all, but this was a bit much. I think we were embarrassed by some of it.”

But Jerry just made one of those faces that says, “She’s the sensitive one here,” and laughed and said: “It didn’t bother me at all. That’s how people talk, y’know?”

Indeed, Anne’s response seemed to be in the minority. The large (though short of sold-out) crowd, which (surprisingly) included trendy youngsters and (not so surprisingly) more reserved oldsters, appeared to relish every bald insult, hissing aside and nasty-to-crude one-liner.

It was easy to understand Anne’s queasiness, though. Rivers didn’t just push the limits; she barged right into the land of bad taste and cruel thrills. Recall all those acerbic, sometimes coarse things she says on television, multiply them by two or three, and you’ll get an idea of what a Rivers concert is like.

The caustic intimacy she generates on her talk show is similarly amplified during a live performance. Rivers’ “Can we talk?” shtick is both an entreaty and a demand to share in some mischief; even when she was giving a dig to Barbara Bush, Rivers couched it in the attitude of a pal leaning across the coffee table and winking, implying that you’ve been thinking the same things yourself.

She barely got a giggle with her Barbara Bush jokes (proving once again that likable folks aren’t nearly as funny as unlikable ones), but there appeared to be an almost cathartic joy spreading through the audience when Rivers abused such people as Imelda Marcos, Leona Helmsley and Christie Brinkley. As Rivers and apparently others see it, the first two are just too rich, the third is just too beautiful.

After brief impressions of Marcos singing and Helmsley stomping around in her imperial way, Rivers said of Brinkley: “Men like them stupid, stupid, stupid. Look at Christie Brinkley. Every time she shakes her head, a little of her brain falls out. I went to a restaurant with her and (husband) Billy Joel. He’s stupid, too. He kept saying how great she was. The girl’s an idiot! She couldn’t remember the word for peas!”

She later turned to Kirk Douglas and plastic surgery (“He’s had so much lifted and tucked, they took the extra skin and made a little man out of it. Here’s Michael!”). Her own famous bouts under the cosmetic knife were not discussed, but she found other opportunities for self-deprecation, taking an I’m-not-beyond-a-shot-at-myself stance that did take some of the hostile edge off her cattiness.

She talked way too much about her own bodily functions (does anybody really want to know about her problems with gas?) and sagging breasts, but a few other confessions were amusing--like what a drag it is to be getting older and still dating. She recalled a recent romantic dinner with a wild and crazy guy:

“This one I went out with, I thought he liked me, he kept looking at me, looking at me, looking at me. . . . He was dead from a stroke.” She continued: “The guys I go out with, I’m not saying they drive up in hearses, but . . . “

As for her own domesticity, Rivers admitted that she’s not much of a housecleaner: “The last time I cleaned my attic, I discovered Anne Frank.” When her house really needs dusting, Rivers just calls “the police to report a robbery. They come over and dust for fingerprints.”