Playboy Laughs by Farmer Patty;

Author:Farmer, Patty;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beaufort Books
Published: 2017-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

“Why should a woman cook? So her husband can say, ‘My wife makes a delicious cake’ to some hooker?!” —JOAN RIVERS

Circling back to where we started—with Joan Rivers—she was probably the biggest comedy superstar to launch her career at the Playboy Clubs. She started performing at roughly the same time that the clubs were opening and worked at most of the early ones, most frequently Miami, as part of a trio billed as, “Jim, Jake, and Joan.” As her frequent television appearances began to raise her profile, her stature at the clubs rose commensurately. The trio broke up and Joan continued working the circuit on her own—one of the few women standups to do so. Ultimately, she headlined at the resorts, putting her in a league with Bob Hope and Milton Berle.

Joan always pushed the envelope of what was acceptable, with her material as well as her presence in a male-dominated industry. As a young woman appearing on The Tonight Show and The Ed Sullivan Show, she joked about her marital and domestic woes, going so far as to appear on the air visibly pregnant. This just wasn’t done in the 1960s. In the 1970s, she made us laugh about the plight of unwed mothers and the future of women’s reproductive rights; in her own sixties and seventies, she was always the first to make a joke about the aging process, and found an almost unending source of humor in the obsession with plastic surgery—mainly her own.

Joan made fun of her difficult relationship with her own mother and was the first to admit that she was never able to be the parent she wanted to be to her own daughter. As pointed as her barbs could be—including endless “fat jokes” about Elizabeth Taylor and, more recently, Adele—we always felt compassion for her. No other comic more skillfully employed humor as a coping mechanism to contend with the difficult losses she experienced when her trusted friend Johnny Carson turned on her and her beloved husband Edgar committed suicide. It was almost as if Joan had earned the right to make fun of others by making herself her own biggest target. She refused to take herself seriously, and expected others to do the same.

One anecdote will serve as evidence of how much the world has changed since the 1960s, when both Joan’s career and the Playboy Clubs were new. In 1965, when she was still holding down a day job, Joan was contacted by an agent who’d managed to get her a brief spot on The Jack Paar Show. As always, she made herself the butt of the jokes. In addition to jokes about her own unsightliness as a child (“My father was a doctor…His first words when he saw me were, ‘Does that look right to you, nurse?’”), she talked about working in an office. As she told it, she was in the habit of stealing stamps from somebody else’s desk and selling them for half price. In an interview many years later, she insisted that was a true story.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.