Joan Rivers came up during the Age of JFK when there were no limits and everything was possible.

Music was new. Comedy was being redefined. Now, in the 1960s, your jokes were meant to send a message. Up in the mountains, in the other part of New York, the Borsht Belt, you could still get laughs by sticking a banana up your nose, but in Greenwich Village you wouldn’t last unless your comedy came with an edge.

That’s where I saw her in action. This was at the Bitter End, a café staging ground that at that time served as the center of the cultural universe.

Joan Rivers was part of that revolutionary spirit. Years later to recapture the past I sat down to write the cultural/novel “The Days of the Bitter End.” I described it like this: “Fred Weintraub’s Bitter End had become the hub of America’s spawning subculture. Around it grew cabaret after cabaret as folk singing and blistering stream-of consciousness improv comedy became the rage.”

Competition was fierce. You were up against Lenny Bruce, Shelley Berman, Mort Sahl, Mike Nichols and Elaine May – just for starters.

This was a generation that believed in freedom, most certainly freedom of expression. The term “political correctness” had not yet been invented. Tell it straight or don’t tell it at all and take the next train back to Cleveland. Hypocrites need not apply. Fame was reserved for the truly gifted.

Joan was at odds to find her place among contemporaries who moved as fast as the next one-liner.

But Joan Rivers was a fighter. She was a fighter all right. For some 60 years she made it as a headliner with material that was always fresh.

For Israel she was a woman of valor. Small in stature, she stood tall when it counted.

I’d like to say that I knew her, but I didn’t.  

I was too young to understand that extraordinary people fly by “like the shadow of a passing bird.” You only get one chance.

Yet I was lucky enough to catch a glimpse.


Her greatest skill? Honesty. Telling the truth can be awfully funny.
At the time and at the Bitter End she was the opening act for another struggling comedian, Bill Cosby. But Cosby was moving up fast.

I was the doorman at the Bitter End, between semesters. So I caught the action. Joan was part of a trio that did some songs, some patter, but the act wasn’t working, so far as I could tell. Joan was frustrated. While Cosby was regaling them inside the club, Joan would be outside complaining to Fred Weintraub that she had much more to give, as a solo. 

This had to be the incubation period of her career. A huge talent was being stifled, waiting to cut loose.

Fred believed in nursing along his performers slowly. Joan was in a hurry. Her generation was leaving her behind. Richard Pryor up the street was already making appearances on national TV. Woody Allen only came by on weekends. He was starting to make movies.

When her moment came, she pounced.

I would have no reservations about calling her a genius. You don’t last that long on mere talent. No, it must be something loftier.

Her greatest skill? Honesty. Telling the truth can be awfully funny.

She did not know how to equivocate and if her vigorous support of the Jewish State might come at the cost of losing friends and fans, let them join Hitler in hell. Her humor was that clear… it came from an apprenticeship in the Village, in the 60s, that summoned the young to speak up for justice.

In her call for justice eased with jokes and peppered with humor, she never wavered, she never changed.

After my summers in the Village, I lost track of her. I lost track of all of them. But gradually into the mid-1960s and beyond, people with whom you may have shared a cup of coffee at the Hip Bagel, like Bob Dylan, Dustin Hoffman, were now conquering the world.

If only you’d been smart enough to know that you had been given a front seat at the start of a cultural uprising.

What happened to Joan Rivers?

Next thing I know she’s on Johnny Carson. She’s a success. She’s a sensation…and with bumps here and there, it keeps getting better.

She’s on the mark to be a triumph for a generation we are losing much too fast.

Jack Engelhard writes a regular column for Arutz Sheva. “The Days of the Bitter End” his cultural novel retracing the 1960s, Greenwich Village and JFK is being prepared for film. Engelhard wrote the int’l bestseller “Indecent Proposal” that was translated into more than 22 languages and turned into a Paramount motion picture starring Robert Redford and Demi Moore.  Website: www.jackengelhard.com