SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2014

In this April 30, 2012 file photo, , left, and , center, co-hosts of the In this Feb 14, 2012 file photo, Joan Rivers tours backstage with her camera crew for E!’s show “” and show producer Melissa Rivers pose at an E! Network upfront event “Fashion Police,” before the Badgley Mischka show during Fashion Week in New York. in New York.

28, thousands of people tweeted that she deserved her illness years with secretarial work until she got her big break on the pop- because of her controversial remarks on Palestine last month. ular “Tonight Show” program in 1965. Four months after landing “Karma at work there. Without a doubt,” one person tweeted after a regular gig, she married one of the show’s producers Edgar her death. The hashtag #karma saw a large spike on Twitter for a Rosenberg. They had Melissa in 1968. brief period Thursday. Rivers used to say that no subject was off-limits in her comedy: In August, Rivers was at the center of an Internet backlash not even her husband’s suicide in 1987. “That’s how I get through when TMZ posted a video of her commenting on the Gaza con- life. God has given us this gift of humor,” she told New York flict in which she said that because the Palestinians voted for Magazine. “Animals don’t laugh.” In her 2013 book “I Hate Hamas, they were getting what they deserved. While Rivers never Everyone... Starting With Me,” Rivers joked about her own funeral, apologized for her remarks - fellow edgy comedian Anthony saying she wanted “a huge showbiz affair” with Meryl Streep “cry- Jeselnik tweeted that she once told him “she would die before ing in five different accents.” she’d ever apologize for a joke” -she did offer a clarification on her But she also sparked controversy over the years with outspo- Facebook page. ken remarks on the Middle East and, on one occasion, when the butt of her humor was the survivors of the 9/11 terror attacks. In ‘Can we talk?’ later years, Rivers became as well-known for her love of plastic The daughter of a well-off Jewish family, Rivers enjoyed a stun- surgery, taken to excess with her exaggerated cheek bones and ningly successful career that lasted decades and worked right up her preternaturally wrinkle-free face. until falling ill last week. Born Joan Alexandra Molinsky in She reinvented herself as the host of “Fashion Police,” a show Brooklyn, she graduated from New York’s Barnard College and that offered running critiques of the red-carpet attire worn by the worked in the fashion industry before starting out in stand-up glitterati at the Oscars and other A-list events. Rivers, who admit- under the stage name Joan Rivers. She spared no one her razor- ted to being a workaholic, said she hoped never to have to cede sharp wit and was considered one of the best at delivering a cut- the stage. “I’m an addict. It’s my drug. I love my work, This is ting one-liner, and perhaps the most foul-mouthed of a break- where I’m happiest,” she once said. US media reported that her through generation of US “comediennes.” funeral would be held on Sunday at Temple Emanu-El synagogue She took aim at celebrities and public figures, joking about in New York. modern America’s obsession with image and neuroses. Her signa- Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television ture catch phrase was “Can we talk?”-an icebreaker she used and Popular Culture at Syracuse University called Rivers a pioneer. before verbally drop-kicking the object of her ridicule. She told an “She demonstrated 30 years ago that a woman could be a com- interviewer that she thought it up while on the stand-up circuit in petitive player on a late-night show,” he told AFP. — AFP Las Vegas during the 1980s. The joke at the time, she said, “was probably about Elizabeth Taylor being fat, and people gasped and I went, ‘Can we talk In this July 26, 1989 file photo, comedian Joan Rivers poses here?’ “What you’re really saying is, ‘Come on, are we going to next to her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame during her talk the truth?’” Tough and tenacious, she supported herself for induction ceremony in Los Angeles.

This Sept 5, 2013 photo shows co-hosts, from left, Joan Rivers, Kelly Osbourne, Giuliana This March 27, 2014 photo released by NBC shows comedian Joan Rivers, left, with host Jimmy Rancic and George Kotsiopoulos from the E! series “Fashion Police,” during an appearance on Fallon, during an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, in New York. the “Today” show in New York.