Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

Joan Rivers has been around a while. Just how long is made clear by the rows of filing cabinets that line her walls, full of exhaustively catalogued gags that run from ‘Cooking’ to ‘Tony Danza’ and from ‘New York’ to ‘No Self-Worth’. The latter pair are preoccupations as she enters her seventy-sixth year, astonishingly energetic, active and funny. Rivers is all the more engaging for her unapologetic self-obsession and workaholism (‘I’ll show you fear,’ she chuckles, pointing to an empty calendar), but ‘A Piece of Work’ is at least as revealing about the brutality of her chosen line of work.