On February 17, 2014, Joan Rivers appeared on the premiere episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon–49 years to the day after her first appearance with Johnny Carson.

In 1978, she became one of the first women ever to write and direct a comedy feature–Rabbit Test, a cult classic about a man (Billy Crystal) becoming pregnant.

Melissa Rivers also announced today the launch of a special edition 4-disc CD box set collection titled “Joan Rivers – The Diva Rides Again” that will feature five hours of never-before-released recordings of Joan’s comedy, including six decades worth of hilarious material and a special 16-page collector’s book of liner notes with never-before-seen photos. The box set is currently available for preorder on Amazon, Target.com and Walmart.com and will be released on August 18, 2023 on streaming platforms such as iTunes and Spotify. The set is produced and distributed by Comedy Dynamics in partnership with the Joan Rivers estate.

564 jokes are filed under PARENTS HATED ME (see: NOT WANTED) and over 300 within the STEWARDESSES category.

a file cabinet containing over 65,000 original jokes spanning from the start of her career in the 1950s to 2014 when she passed away.

As much as I wish Melissa had more talent, it ain’t easy being Joan’s daughter. She tried to segue Melissa into the jewelry collection, but Melissa just wasn’t very good at it.

I turn to Joan and say, “My word, Joan. I’m so impressed. Melissa knows Yiddish?” Joan goes, “No. She doesn’t know Yiddish and I don’t know Yiddish. But anybody who’s speaking to you in Yiddish is telling you a joke so you laugh at the end of it. I’ve taught her that much so nobody will think she’s stupid.” That was Joan in her 50s. She’s almost 80 now and she still treats her daughter the same way.

Help With Hecklers

“And yeah, it goes on, and on, and on. And one day, we’re going to get a little intern who thinks they’re in show business and is going to sit and put each and every one of these cards onto a computer so that when I’m in England and I need a joke about doctors, I can just go into my computer and come up with a — oh, this is a tramp. This tramp donated all her organs for transplants, which should make the recipients happy because her body has never rejected anything. [LAUGHS]: So. But it just goes on, and on, and on. These are just jokes over the years, years, and years, and years of jokes. And when I die, I can sell this to some lucky, lucky comedian who will then, if they’re smart, have enough to keep them going for their whole life.”

In a scene from the documentary “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work,” the comedian explains how she kept a record of her jokes and cross-indexed them.CreditCredit...Break Thru Films/IFC

Rivers, who wrote gags at all hours, paid close attention to setups and punchlines, typing them up and cross-referencing them by categories like “Parents hated me” or “Las Vegas” or “No sex appeal.” The largest subject area is “Tramp,” which includes 1,756 jokes.

When it comes to the Joan Rivers joke collection, “I don’t know that another exists that is nearly as vast,” Gunderson said.

Joan Rivers’s card catalog of jokes and include material covering a vast swath of comedy history, from the 1950s to 2015.

Instead, Rivers is donating the extensive collection to the National Comedy Center, the high-tech museum in Jamestown, N.Y., joining the archives of A-list comics like George Carlin and Carl Reiner. The fact that the jokes will be accessible is only one of the reasons for Melissa Rivers’s decision.

Take a look at some of the artifacts from her archive, which includes 65,000 cross-referenced gags and is headed to the National Comedy Center.

The drawers are jammed with jokes typed on 4-by-6-inch cards — 52 drawers, stacked waist-high, like a card catalog of a certain comedian’s life’s work, a library of laughs.

But Ms. Rivers did do some arranging. She arranged the 52 drawers alphabetically by subject, from “Annoying habits” to “Zoo.” In the T’s, one drawer starts with “Elizabeth Taylor” and goes as far as “teenagers.” The next drawer picks up with “teeth” and runs to “trains.” A drawer in the G’s begins with “growing older” and ends with “guns.” It takes the next drawer to hold all the cards filed under “guys I dated.” Inevitably — this was Joan Rivers, after all — there are categories with the word “sex,” including “My sex life,” “No sex life,” “No sex appeal.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyImage

Direct access to the list box: table of contents , directly to ZK I: List 1 or ZK 2: List 1 – or to the "Jokerzettel" ?

"I always get my jokes down on pieces of paper right away—backs of matchbos, whatever. No one is allowed to throw a piece of paper out in my house, because on the back of a laundry list there may be a joke."

For the past thirty-some years, Rivers has been filing each and every joke she's written (at this point she's amassed over a million) in a library-esque card cabinet housed in her Upper East Side apartment. The jokes—most typed up on three-by-five cards—are meticulously arranged by subject, which Rivers admits is the hardest part of organizing: "Does this one go under ugly or does it go under dumb?"

To comedians, “material”—their jokes and stories—has always been precious, worthy of protecting and preserving.

In the documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, the comedian showed off a similar “joke bank”: For the past thirty-some years, Rivers has been filing each and every joke she’s written (at this point she’s amassed over a million) in a library-esque card cabinet housed in her Upper East Side apartment. The jokes—most typed up on three-by-five cards—are meticulously arranged by subject, which Rivers admits is the hardest part of organizing: “Does this one go under ugly or does it go under dumb?”