Joan Rivers was born in Brooklyn, to immigrant Russian Jews, grew up in suburban New York and educated at Connecticut College and Barnard College, Manhattan.

She started comedy in the Fifties, and spent a decade ‘enduring humiliation and privation playing tawdry clubs, Borscht Belt hotels, and Greenwich Village cabarets’.

But her persistence paid off, and in 1965 got her first TV break when she appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

Within three years she was given her own daytime talk show – That Show With Joan Rivers – and by the Eighties she was the permanent guest host on the Tonight Show whenever Carson was away.

In 1986 she had an ill-fated six-part chat show for the BBC, taking its title from her 'Can we talk?' catchphrase, a registered trademark in the US. Today the show is mainly remembered for Peter Cook being wasted as her sidekick.

That same year, she was given her own late-night chat show on the new Fox network – but Carson was so upset by what he saw as her betrayal after a 20-year friendship that he banned her from his show forever. The two never reconciled before Carson’s death 2005.

That was followed by another self-titled daytime talk show, which ran from 1989 until 1994, and won her an Emmy award.

In 1987, she suffered personal tragedy when her husband Edgar Rosenberg, a British TV producer, killed himself, devastating Rivers, who developed bulimia and contemplated her own suicide. But she eventually turned the tragedy into typically uncompromising and uncomfortable comedy

She took a diversion from comedy in 1990, launching her own line of jewellery for the QVC home shopping channel. It was widely seen as a tacky move, but it was certainly a lucrative one – achieving more than $500million of sales.

Rivers is also known for her bitchy commentaries about celebrity fashions on the red carpet before glitzy showbiz events. She worked with her daughter Melissa for the E! channel from 1996 to 2004, then moving to the TV Guide channel for two years. In Shrek 2, she cameoed as an animated version of herself, parodying this role.

Rivers is an unashamed advocate of plastic surgery, which became a staple of her self-deprecating stand-up, and led to two guest appearances in the cosmetic surgery drama Nip/Tuck.

In 2002, she brought a one-woman show Broke And Alone to the Edinburgh Fringe, which then transferred to the West End.

In August 2007, Rivers began workshopping her autobiographical play, A Work In Progress By A Life In Progress, which opened at the Geffin Playhouse in Los Angeles in February 2008 to mixed reviews, before transferring to the 2008 Edinburgh Festival, then on to the West End and Broadway.

Joan Rivers At The South Bank Udderbely
Live Review
Udderbelly South Bank

The day after Sandra Bernhard opens in London, a grander, older dame of American comedy opens across the river, marking the start of the seven-week programme in the purple upside-down cow that is the Udderbelly.

There can be few who don’t know what to expect from the vitriolic Joan Rivers by now. With her bitter Jewish bitchiness, she might be considered Sarah Silverman’s spiritual grandmother, sniping viciously, provocatively and even offensively at any target in her sights. At 75 she may be the only star to look less lifelike than her Madame Tussaud’s waxwork, but she’s lost none of her bite.

Gays, Mexicans, the Chinese, fatties, old people, deaf people, blind people and countless celebrities are all fair game, covered by the usual allowance: well, she has a go at everyone. And if anyone has carte blanche to be throw good taste out of the window, it would have to be a woman who can make cruel jokes at the expense of her own beloved husband’s suicide. She has all the tact and compassion of Kim Jung-Il.

Some of her victims may seem dated and obscure – who would have thought that 79-year-old former American TV host Dick Clarke or Jimmy Carter’s daughter Amy would be on the receiving end of a savage diatribe in London in 2009? In another evocation of her past, she performs – as she would have done in the nightclubs of the Sixties – in front of a bad, Four people employed simply to sit there and laugh at her jokes, then play a funky Bonzos-style version of Rule Britannia at the show’s end.

The uncompromising viciousness of River’s delivery means the brutality never stops, as the septugenerian draws energy from her own barbarism – a sort of comedic blood lust that keeps her vibrant. It means she’s not too old – or too embarrassed – to writhe around on the floor to illustrate a routine about sex. Getting to her feet is more of a struggle.

Can we talk? Well, she certainly can. Rivers is a verbal streetfighter, and her onslaught is relentless. If the wit behind the gags can sometimes be left wanting, the sharpness of their impact never is. So while many comics have mocked the likes of Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitism, Madonna’s English pretensions or Angelina Jolie’s Third World adoptions, few do it with such short, sharp stabs. And it’s given an extra edge as it’s highly likely she knows these people.

There’s little new here from Rivers’s last visits to the UK – despite the cue-cards to prompt her taped to the stage floor. But you can’t be a comedy fan and not want to see this legend, still in full force after all these years.

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