Nothing travels faster than a speeding comedian. The critically acclaimed documentary, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, is a mere 86 minutes long. But in it, the fast-talking, 77-year-old comedian somehow manages to cover her entire career - the wilderness period doing stand-up in Bob Dylan's Greenwich Village; her breakthrough on Johnny Carsonin 1965; the good and the lean years; the facelifts; the night she partied with Marilyn Monroe.
Hold on. The night she partied with Marilyn Monroe? Joan, can we talk?
"Sure," Rivers says over the phone from Manhattan, pronouncing the word, like most native New Yorkers, in two syllables: Shoo-uh.
"It was a 1951 dinner party. I was a first-year English student at Barnard. My father was a doctor and so was the guy who hosted the party. Marilyn was very shy, so they sat her next to the least threatening person in the room - me."
Growing bold as the night progressed, Joan Molinski (Rivers's given name) found the courage to advise Monroe that she, too, hoped for a career in show business.
" 'Honey, let me tell you a secret,' Marilyn told me," Rivers continues, adopting Monroe's feathery voice. " 'Men are stupid and they like big tits.' "
"That's still true," Rivers adds, suggesting that she's spent her entire career proving overconfident men wrong. "Oh, my first agent, listen to this, this is in 1965, he told me that I was too old - too old!"
That was a week before her triumph on Carson's Tonight Show, a breakthrough that led to two seemingly prosperous decades.
But the illusion of prosperity was shattered when her husband-manager, Edgar Rosenberg, committed suicide in 1987, leaving Rivers unexpectedly broke. Joan has been on the comeback trail ever since - hustling jewellery on specialty TV channels; critiquing award shows and their red-carpet guests for cable networks; taking home the crown on Celebrity Apprentice; appearing everywhere, and, all too often, anywhere.
A Piece of Work, which opens Friday, includes a segment in which Rivers travelled to Wyoming for a club date. It was a prospect that alarmed her. "When I say, 'Where are the gays?' " she jokes in the film, "they're going to say, 'Dead, we killed them.' "
The comedian, who has been too old for 45 years and counting, says she agreed to participate in a documentary - being followed by cameras for 14 months - because she wanted to prove to the world that she's still standing.
"I didn't want a puff piece," she says. "The girls' last film was on Darfur," she notes, referring to filmmakers Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg's The Devil Came on Horseback. "I knew they were serious. And I wanted a serious film about my life, about a person who has been knocked down and picks herself back up. Again and again. That's what life is."
Rivers hopes the film is also a blow against ageism - "The world hates old people, it's true" - but that doesn't mean she's above old-people jokes. "Viagra, that's so dangerous," Joan laugh-shouts in the documentary. "He's got a 36-hour erection. She's all dried up. My God, they could start a fire."
Rivers balks at any insinuation that she's the Queen of Mean, insisting she merely says in public what dishing girlfriends say in private.
Does she think her reckless candour means she won't be beloved, the way comedians Bob Hope and George Burns are beloved? "Probably not, but who cares?" Rivers fires back. "Beloved has nothing to do with being lovable anyway. Bob Hope was a miserable son of a bitch."
Curiously, Rivers's indelicacy has made her an admired figure to one particular demographic. "I've always had a big gay following, it's true," the performer allows. "When I was performing for no money in Greenwich Village in the early sixties, gay people were my only audience, the only ones who laughed."
Why do gays appreciate her? "Because I'm different and I tell the truth," Rivers says quickly and with passion.
Although crowding 80, Rivers remains a frantic, electrifying performer. It's all still there - the verve, the timing, the pith, the vinegar. She's still so good, so funny, that you hate bringing up the "R" word.
"You retire when the audience stops laughing," Rivers says. "At its best, being onstage, performing well, it's like everyone falls in love. No, it's true. Me, the crowd, all of us together, we fall in love. If you've ever seen my show and I say 'I love you' to an audience, I really mean it. I don't always say it. But when I do, it's true.
"Listen, I don't want to go to lunch with people," Rivers says. "I don't want to take cooking lessons. I want to be onstage, making people laugh. That's where I belong."
Special to The Globe and Mail