«I JUST READ EVERYTHING"

Born in Brooklyn and raised in Westchester County, Joan Alexandra Molinsky graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Barnard College in 1954. She bounced around in minor advertising and fashion jobs until she discovered her vocation as a comic in Greenwich Village coffeehouses during the early 1960s.

After World War II, it was Jewish comedians -- Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl -- who transformed stand-up comedy into social commentary, a legacy of Jewish political activism in the unionization and civil rights movements. Before that, stand-up on the vaudeville circuit was just a string of harmless gags. Bruce also had a beatnik edginess, which he uncomfortably turned against the audience, as in avant-garde theater.

In the 1950s, the only woman daring to do stand-up was Phyllis Diller, who dressed like a clown in a fright wig to erase any hint of sex appeal but whose body language was as coolly contained as her mentorBob Hope's. Joan Rivers, in contrast, took Lenny Bruce's slouching, surly menace and converted it into a hyperkinetic prowling of the stage, from which she launched abrasive provocations. She lambasted the audience for its sentimentality or hypocrisy and insisted on comedy's mission as a vehicle of harsh truths: "Please. Can we talk?"

-Camille Paglia on Joan Rivers