Joan Alexandra Molinsky, the “Queen of the Barbed One-Liners,” was born to a Jewish family on June 8, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York. A doctor’s daughter, she was raised in Westchester County. After briefly attending Connecticut College for Women, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Barnard College where she earned a BA in Anthropology in 1954. She worked in the shoe department of Lord and Taylor before turning to a career in stand-up comedy where she used the stage name “Pepper January.”
She made many television appearances in the 1960s on “Candid Camera,” “The Tonight Show” and “The Ed Sullivan Show.” This trend continued into the 1970s and in 1978, she directed and wrote the film about a man who gets pregnant, “Rabbit Test,” which starred her friend, Billy Crystal, and bombed at the box office. She became a “stand-up star,” and continued to perform into the 1980s. She was often brought in as a guest host on “The Tonight Show.” Her trademark comment, “Can We Talk?” derives from the title of her first live stand-up album, which was very popular.
In 1986, she hosted her own evening talk show, “The Late Night Show Starring Joan Rivers,” and it here where the rift between her and Johnny Carson began. At the time, she had been a permanent guest on his show, and he was furious that she never discussed her decision with him. The two were never friends again. She lost her husband, Edgar Rosenberg, to suicide in 1987, and despite the personal devastation, she managed to return to television with a daytime talk show of her own, “The Joan Rivers Show,” which ran from 1989-1993, and for which he received a Daytime Emmy for “Best Talk Show” in 1990.
Of her success, she remarked: “Once I was having lunch in a fancy restaurant with Lily Tomlin and Richard Pryor. We were all struggling comics together and the day we had lunch, any one of us could have picked up the check. That’s when I knew I had made it.”
And you have. Keep it up, Joan!