TVSquad

A couple of years ago, I interviewed Joan Rivers for the Boston Globe. She was playing a local theatre, and I hadn't yet had a chance to talk to her, and I wanted to talk a bit about her past in Second City and as a pioneering female comic. But since a lot of her shtick is slamming celebrities, and she helped invent what I guess you'd call "red carpet comedy," I thought I'd try to find a couple of people to do a point/counterpoint. Funny thing is, I couldn't find anyone for the counterpoint, anyone who wanted to go on record saying anything uncomplimentary against Rivers.

You can find plenty of people who will make jokes about her plastic surgery, or her failed talk show from the 80s, or her TV marketing, but that all seems a bit superficial. No one seemed to have a terribly valid criticism outside of those clichés. And that's what I think you'll see at the Comedy Central Roast of Joan Rivers Roast Sunday (10PM). From the clips I've seen, some of the sharper comics have found a new approach to those tropes, and you'll see plenty of plastic surgery jokes. And I'm sure you'll hear plenty of them from Rivers herself (a debt, there, I think owed to Phyllis Diller).

Greg Giraldo, who has a special premiering next week on Comedy Central, has become a staple of these things, along with Jeffrey Ross, and both have had a couple of shots in the promos. I'm especially happy to see Carl Reiner on the dais. And, as we covered in an interview already, Kathy Griffin is hosting, and she says she knows where the bodies are buried. Presumably, Rivers' old, pre-plastic bodies (see how easy that is?).

It's good to see a comic with a long history being roasted. And when I said in the Kathy Griffin interview that I thought Rivers would outlive us all, I wasn't exaggerating (at least not much). When I called her for that interview a couple of years ago, I had been up for twenty minutes, enough to wake up and pull up my questions and research and pull myself together before calling (the interview was at 9AM, the pleasures and dangers of working from a home office). Rivers was already on a treadmill working out, and did the whole interview from there, about an hour's worth of questions. And she was never out of breath. So if a fist fight breaks out at the roast, my money's on Rivers.

Here's a quick sample of Kathy Griffin roasting Rivers:

Roast of Joan Rivers	Sun, Aug 9 10pm / 9c
Preview - Kathy Griffin
www.comedycentral.com
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