Before She Won ‘Celebrity Apprentice,’ Joan Rivers Was ‘A Piece Of Work’

Our favorite movies and music we can go back to whenever we want to find comfort, solace or escape. Comedians do that for us, too, in the here and now – although comedy, unlike other performing arts, doesn’t always hold up the same over time. Some jokes reference fleeting fads that make little sense decades later. Some work once or twice but lose their impact upon repeated listening. Some pushed envelopes then, but don’t seem so edgy or revolutionary now that everyone else does it; while others feel outdated or behind the times of current society. With that in mind, we bring you Humor in Hindsight, an ongoing column devoted to stand-up specials and comedy documentaries streaming online that, much like wine or cheese, give us more texture and better perspective with age.

Joan Rivers would roll over in her grave knowing how many celebrities went out of their way to avoid celebrating Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration.

Except, naturally, Rivers wouldn’t roll; The late comedy icon was cremated after her death in 2014. And if she were still alive today, she would’ve leapt at the opportunity to perform for President The Donald. She certainly expected to still be here. Rivers told documentary filmmakers how Don Rickles kept performing into his late 80s, George Burns and Phyllis Diller into their 90s. “And I’d like to beat them all,” Rivers said in 2009. “And I think I will. That’s so sick. I think I will.”

She turned 75 while Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg followed Rivers for 14 months for their critically-acclaimed documentary, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (available on Netflix), a year and change that opened with Rivers staring at a potentially blank appointment calendar, and ended with her winning Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice on NBC, then feted and insulted by all-star comedians for Comedy Central’s Roast of Joan Rivers.

The 2010 doc follows Rivers through it all, shadowing her outside her TV obligations and buttressing their character study with footage from both NBC and Comedy Central, and it looks on as an ABC News crew interviews Rivers over their documentary’s end credits, with the comedian wondering if it’d give them a “great hook” for their doc if she died right then and there.

But they already had their hook, bookending the shots of the empty calendar with an overflowing one, multiple appointments begging for Rivers’s attention every day, and the comedian on the phone excitedly announcing a show of hers had gotten picked up. Which show, though? The year after A Piece of Work stopped following Rivers, she hosted both How’d You Get So Rich? for TV Land, and launched Fashion Police on E!

In 2008, though, Rivers felt desperate enough to take any gig – from hawking her merchandise on QVC to pitching anyone else’s products in a commercial – and as her longtime personal assistant, Jocelyn Pickett, told the filmmakers, Rivers also had booked Apprentice and written a new stage production, “so she’s hoping one of them hits and puts her back on top.” Pickett had begun working with Rivers in the mid-1990s, after Rivers’s Emmy-winning daytime talk show had gotten cancelled and her Tony-nominated performance of Lenny Bruce’s mother in Sally Marr…and Her Escorts, had completed its run.

That’s when Rivers reinvented herself as the Queen of the Red Carpet. She and her daughter, Melissa, began interviewing celebrities at the Golden Globes for E! back in 1994, bolting in 2003 for a three-year contract with the TV Guide Channel (since rebranded as Pop). People didn’t seek out the TV Guide Channel and her presence on the small screen diminished to venues such as QVC or a few episodes of her playing herself seeing the plastic surgeons of FX’s Nip/Tuck. Or live performances in cabarets and casinos.

Take another look at this opening montage, more haunting now, a drastic close-up on her eyes and facial features, before and during application of makeup – bringing you back to a time you likely forgot, because it was the brief moment in time when we all sort of forgot about Joan Rivers.

When she takes the stage at a Manhattan nightclub, she fires potshots at herself by way of the venue’s stool, covered in duct tape. “I mean, how depressing is this? Forty years in the fucking business and this is where you end up.” Back then, she chastised Melissa for turning down a $400,000 offer to pose for Playboy. “I’m a 75-year-old woman up here playing to drunks and queens. What do I think?”

She conveyed the emotions of someone staring into the entertainment abyss, wanting to continue her reign as the queen of stand-up comedy but feeling more and more like someone past her prime and put out to pasture. Rivers felt herself losing prime gigs to Kathy Griffin and settling for afternoon shows in the Bronx or a slow weekend at Harrah’s in Atlantic City. All just to keep going. To keep living in opulence as well as financially supporting several employees, relatives, and friends, even sending the children of her employees to private schools. “I don’t want to retire. I don’t want to go and sit in the sun. I don’t want to go and learn to garden,” Rivers confides late in the film. Early on, though, she’s focused on that appointment book and filling it back up. Otherwise? “It would mean that nobody wants me, and that everything I ever tried to do in life didn’t work, nobody cared and I’ve been totally forgotten.”

Twitter gave her a lifeline back to the center of the pop-culture conversation. So did this documentary. (She joined as @Joan_Rivers in February 2009, a month before Celebrity Apprentice premiered, and someone still Tweets for her posthumously, somewhat startlingly.)

The documentary, much like Rivers herself, rarely pulls its punches.

We see her ask her manager if she should tell a distasteful joke about First Lady Michelle Obama. She lets us see her sad, frustrated, and tired. She lets us see her go to Washington, D.C., to deliver remarks on behalf of the late George Carlin at his Mark Twain Prize honors at the Kennedy Center in 2008, although she claimed he would have hated it. It’s bittersweet watching her there, so grateful at her inclusion in the ceremony, knowing they’d never invite her back as an honoree herself. Instead the Mark Twain Prize went the following year to (cough) Bill Cosby, then skewed a generation younger to Tina Fey, Will Ferrell and Ellen DeGeneres.

Still, Rivers remained shrewd enough to know she’d need to time her Broadway run of Joan Rivers: A Work In Progress for the Tony nominations in April, only to hold off after the reviews from London’s theater critics counterbalanced a successful run at that summer’s Edinburgh Fringe. Instead, we’d see some of her jokes repurposed for a 2012 stand-up special, Don’t Start With Me (on Netflix).

She remained shrewd enough to know she’d hate most of the jokes hurled her way at the Comedy Central Roast, and to fight with the roast’s director over the integrity of her own comedy choices that night. “They tell you it’s an honor,” she said on the way to the venue. “I’m telling you that if I had invested wisely, I wouldn’t be doing this.”

She remained shrewd enough before starting Celebrity Apprentice to compile a dossier on each of her competitors, as well as demanding Trump and company include daughter Melissa in the cast, too, before signing onto the show.

And she remained compassionate enough to host neighbors and friends in her luxurious home for Thanksgiving, then look up a photographer online whom she had delivered a Thanksgiving meal to.

When Rivers first performed on TV, it was shocking enough for her to mention her pregnancy, or even say the word “abortion.” Some 45 years later, the documentary shows her writing out “Vagina Farts” in big black letters on cue cards in preparation for a show.

Griffin, who tried to replace Rivers on Fashion Police after Rivers died, said in the documentary, “I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t for Joan.” Watching Rivers on TV for the first time, Griffin realized: “She was doing something that no other woman was doing.”

Rivers enjoyed a resurgence in the public eye in her final four years following A Piece of Work, continuing to take on projects other women in comedy weren’t.

With her daughter, she starred for four seasons of Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best on WEtv. She appeared as herself in a memorable season two episode of Louie on FX opposite Louis C.K., her sage wisdom sounding a seductive note.

She even hosted and produced a webseries, In Bed With Joan.

Her one major failing in the documentary: Firing her longtime manager, Billy Sammeth, after making multiple allegations that he had deserted her. Sammeth later sued Rivers and the filmmakers for defamation, settling out of court. He told The Daily Beast in 2012 that he attended Howard Stern’s wedding with Rivers and sat at a reception table with Trump, who told them he wanted to get O.J. Simpson on Celebrity Apprentice. Sammeth also got into a dispute with Trump during Celebrity Apprentice filming when his $18,000 in pledges meant for Joan and Melissa Rivers ended up going to an account owned by Burnett instead. “But Joan worships  Donald Trump — and everyone with money and power — and said she’d give me the money to pay it off, because she wanted to win Celebrity Apprentice and actually thought disputing the charge on my credit card would make her lose Celebrity Apprentice and that Trump would be mad at her … and that this could destroy her career.” Rivers fired Sammeth within days of the Apprentice finale.

So if you don’t think Rivers would perform in a Trump White House, er…Can we talk?

Times changed. Rivers didn’t. She believed she shouldn’t shy away from any subject; rather, “This is what we should be talking about.”

Still words to live by for the rest of us.

Stream 'Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work' on Netflix