My house if filled with books and my life is a continuous book read from classics to prize winners, from murder and mystery to love and challenges and the odd book that makes me laugh. There aren’t too many funny books around, I have found.
I have always been a big fan of Joan Rivers and once trotted along to a crowded theatre full of gay guys when she performed at a Sydney venue some years ago, Pity I hadn’t taken along a spare pare of knickers, I laughed so much… Nowadays, when there’s a big rainfall, I think that they’re all pissing themselves laughing in the great yonder in the sky listening to the newly arrived Joan.
Up until today, I have been having breakfast with Joan on my ipad reading her ‘Diary of a Mad Diva.”
First page dedications “This book is dedicated to Kanye West, (Kim Kardashian’s husband) because he’ll never f……. read it.”
October, 20 – Dear Diary
Going to Wisconsin to do a concert for the annual friends of cheese festival. This is one of my favourite gigs, the pay is great and
There is nothing more challenging than trying to make fifteen hundred constipated people laugh without farting.”
Until I finished reading the diary every morning, Joan brought me the daily laughs with my breakfast. Her acid wit burned across the surface of my ipad making me splutter up my plunger coffee and spit out my peanut buttered Cruskits. Some mornings I cringed at her extreme political incorrectness.
To fully appreciate this entertainer, means to take the cork out of the rear end and laugh with the flow.
October 30 – Dear Diary
Halloween is coming and its my favourite holiday, its also Miley Cyrus’s favourite holiday, she just walks around the neighborhood ringing doorbells, posing and saying “Trick?”
Some of the entries are just so far over the edge that I have had to push my brain very left field to keep myself out of miss judging mode.
December 15 – Dear Diary
Dear Diary- Its Christmas season and we’re Jewish and we shouldn’t care about gifts but if indeed we did kill Christ and I’m not saying we did,
for all we know he could have slipped and fallen onto that cross (maybe he was clumsy, maybe he drank) then something’s got to ease the guilt and the more expensive that something is, the less guilty I feel.”
There were moments however, that I thought, ‘that’s mean’ and had to reshuffle myself into, ‘this is comedy, it’s the open sesame for all things said, whether you like it or not.’
Dear Diary – Why, why, why should blind people have apartments with park views?”
Dear Diary- Just finished watching President Obama’s inauguration speech, it was okay, the ‘we’re in this together stuff’ plus the usual ‘we’re all American’ and the ever popular ‘we’re all equal’ shit went over very well. I like the first two sentiments but boy oh boy is Obie wrong on number three. We’re NOT all equal, I’ve seen nude photos of Tommy Lee and Bruce Lee and no amount of legislation is going to level that playing field.
So… if you’re up to it, get the book. It aint a literary masterpiece and its not for the faint hearted, there are no sacred cows in Joan Rivers’ world “Frankly, I don’t give a shit about Ciria, it bores me so much, I’m not even sure how to spell Syria. Its not like FASHION POLICE is big in Damascus, there are only so many ways to accessorise a burqua.”
And now my morning laughs and indignations are over. I always have withdrawal symptoms when I am between books. Tomorrow I will either go to a real bookshop and buy Helen Garner’s new novel “The House of Grief” or download it on my ipad where traces of Joan are still lingering.
The late, great Joan Rivers’ memoir DIARY OF A MAD DIVA was published earlier this year by Berkeley Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0426269022.