33 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2023
    1. 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.
    2. 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.

      For reference, Octavia Bulter's Blood Child was first published in 1984 (and as part of a book in 1985).

    3. 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.
    4. 564 jokes are filed under PARENTS HATED ME (see: NOT WANTED) and over 300 within the STEWARDESSES category.
    5. 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.

      The NY Times blew her obituary date of 2014 when they published material based on this press release.

      Joan Rivers card index of jokes comprised 65,000 cards spanning the start of her career in the 1950s to 2014, when she passed away.

    1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1568150/

      Based on having watched the documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work and the depictions of Rivers' card index in the film and using her hands and a lateral file for scale, her cards seem to have been 3 x 5" index cards.

      cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/RvLTZjCQEe2uuaNwpTBNuA

    1. 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.

      Very similar sounding to the plot lines of Jean Smart's character with her daughter in Hacks.

    2. 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.
    1. Zinoman, Jason. “A ‘Crown Jewel of Comedy’: The Joan Rivers Card Catalog of Jokes Finds a Home.” The New York Times, June 8, 2023, sec. Arts. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/08/arts/television/joan-rivers-archive.html.

    2. Help With Hecklers

      Joan Rivers notes on "How to Handle a Heclker":

    3. “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.”

      standing in front of her card index for comedy, built into a wall of other files.

    4. 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

      In the documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, she explains how she kept and filed records of her jokes.

    5. Example typewritten jokes from Joan Rivers' card index of comedy:

    6. 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.

      Joan Rivers card index of jokes is categorized by topical headings like "Parents hated me", "Las Vegas", and "No sex appeal". The largest subject category in her collection was "Tramp" with 1,756 jokes.

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

      Ignoring Bob Hope's collection or possibly that by Sid Caesar.

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

      Joan Rivers card index of jokes spans material covering the 1950s to 2015.

    9. 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.

      To avoid the Raiders of the Lost Ark problem, Melissa Rivers donated her mother's joke collection to the National Comedy Center so it would be on display and accessible. The New York-based museum is also home to the archives of George Carlin and Carl Reiner.

    10. 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.

      Joan Rivers' card catalog of ~65,000 cross referenced jokes will be housed at the National Comedy Center, a museum in Jamestown, NY.

  2. Dec 2022
    1. 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.

      Joan Rivers had an index card catalog with 52 drawers of 4-by-6-inch index cards containing jokes she'd accumulated over her lifetime of work. She had 18 2 drawer stackable steel files that were common during the mid-1900s. Rather than using paper inserts with the label frames on the card catalogs, she used a tape-based label maker to designate her drawers.

      Scott Currie, who worked with Melissa Rivers on a book about her mother, Joan Rivers, at the comedian’s former Manhattan office. Many of her papers are stored there.Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times


      Note carefully that the article says 52 drawers, but the image in the article shows a portion of what can be surmised to be 18 2-drawer cabinets for a total of 36 drawers. (14 2-drawer cabinets are pictured, but based on size and perspective, there's one row of 4 2-drawer boxes not shown.)

  3. Sep 2022
    1. Is it possible that she kept two separate versions? One at home in 3x5 and another at the office in 4x6? This NYTimes source conflicts with the GQ article from 2010: https://hypothes.is/a/jj5SdNqkEeufEFOWifCRjg

    2. 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
  4. May 2022
    1. Direct access to the list box: table of contents , directly to ZK I: List 1 or ZK 2: List 1 – or to the "Jokerzettel" ?

      Niklas Luhmann kept a portion of his note taking system (ZK II Note 9/8j) specifically for joke related slips. It has been referred to as his jokerzettel.

      This would seem to be in keeping with other examples kept in America by Bob Hope, Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers, George Carlin, and a wide variety of comics like Adam Sandler et al. who have moved to using notebooks.


      This is the first time I've seen the word/phrase jokerzettel in print.

  5. Jul 2021
    1. "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 Joan Rivers scraps of paper, receipts, laundry lists, and matchbooks served the function as waste books. She would eventually transfer them to 3x5" index cards using a typewriter.

    2. 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?"

      Joan Rivers kept a Zettelkasten of jokes in her Upper East Side apartment. They spanned over thirty years and over a million items, most of them typed on 3"x5" index cards and carefully arranged by subject.

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

      Compare and contrast the materials of comedians versus magicians.

      Collection was an important piece. Protection/secrecy was relatively similar, though with a joke, the item was as ephemeral as a magic act which would have been confounding on it's nature.

      Link to Ricky Jay's collection of magic acts and pieces. Other comedy collections include George Carlin, Joan Rivers, etc.

    1. 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?”

      another example of a joke Zettelkasten!