Joan Rivers: Joan of snark, warts and all

The new documentary on Joan Rivers is so in your face, so fraught with harrowing, oversized personal stuff, you might want to get a theatre seat a couple of rows behind where you normally sit, to safely take it all in.

The film begins with the 77-year-old comedian staring without makeup into an unforgiving mirror. Then we follow her plodding down the steps of a nightclub dive, weighed down with jewellery and wraps. Hitting the stage, she launches into a rancorous account of how daughter Melissa turned down hundreds of thousands of dollars to bare her breasts for Playboy.

"Is she nuts?" Rivers shouts in her familiar barking Chihuahua voice, and then (I'm paraphrasing here, for decorum's sake): She should've offered to drop her pants for another $200,000.

Brooklyn-born, Barnard-educated Rivers, née Joan Alexandra Molinsky, was a fringe comedian when Johnny Carson invited her onto NBC's Tonight Show in 1965. She killed, as they say, and afterward the host whispered to her, "You're going to be a big star."

Carson's benediction was a blessing and a curse, as the film Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work makes clear. By the mid-sixties, the world was hungry for an impolite comic to dish about sex. Sample clip from film:

Carson: "Some men prefer smart women."

Rivers: "Oh, please, Johnny. No man ever put his hand up a woman's dress looking for a library card."

Rivers indeed became a star. Was nominated for a Grammy. Wrote bestselling books. But she was still a woman – one deemed too big for her britches when she challenged Carson, accepting her own Fox late show.

Carson never spoke to her again. NBC and other networks cut her off. Manager-husband Edgar committed suicide in 1987, leaving her broke. The Fox show stiffed. No one wanted her. A show-biz lifer who craves applause the way addicts need crack, Rivers went through agonizing withdrawal pains.

It's all here, every masochistic detail. After a while, you get used to staring at evidence of mutilating cosmetic surgery. But then there's Joan sitting in her Versailles-style New York apartment with an underemployed assistant, staring glumly at an empty daybook. Joan accepting humiliating gigs – playing bull's eye on a cable TV roast as blue-jeaned comedians fire spitballs.

It goes on: Joan sitting in a limo, her eyes red, listening to negative reviews of her autobiographical play. Joan complaining how Carson, and then her husband, and then her manager, Billy, quit on her. (Billy Sammeth, who mysteriously disappears in the middle of the film, recently announced he is suing Rivers.)

Through it all, Rivers keeps plugging along a comeback trail that is now almost 25 years long. "To get hit by lightning, you have to stand out in the rain," an agent comments. "And Joan will stand out in the rain longer than anyone."

The question is: Do we want to stand next to her? And there are times here, when Rivers is nagging daughter Melissa about smoking, or begging her assistant to find her work – "I will do anything – wear a diaper" – when we feel like running for cover.

But we hang in because Rivers is too canny an entertainer to drown in self-pity. Depression, even real tragedy, are mere set-ups for another gag. And so we see Joan perform an annual charity, delivering Thanksgiving meals to the sick.

"Put the turkey over there, I'm going to the gym," she recalls one recovering AIDS patient telling her. Rivers twists her face (a task that recalls real effort), recalling the slight. "I said, 'Mister, either AIDS is going to kill you this afternoon or I am!' "

Fuh-dump-tissshhh!

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work succeeds because the subject knows she's a showbiz monster and plays her role to the hilt. She's Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd. or Mommie Dearest'sJoan Crawford up from the grave.

She's also hilarious, and dangerously so. You could break both funny bones watching her new documentary.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work