She became a buyer for Bond Clothing Stores, at that time the most successful men's outfitters in New York. She fell in love with the owner's son but the marriage lasted only six months, annulled on the grounds that he didn't want children but had failed to inform her of this.
She began performing stand-up comedy in the coffee houses of Greenwich Village alongside other hopefuls such as Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor. After seven gruelling years, during which she was repeatedly told she was too brash, too wild and too unladylike, on Cosby's recommendation she got a break performing on The Tonight Show, at that time hosted by Jack Paar.
Three weeks before this appearance her agent told her, "everybody's seen you, it ain't gonna happen". But despite Paar disliking her she went down well with audiences, and won regular work as a gag-writer and performer on Candid Camera.
In 1965 two men changed her life. She returned to The Tonight Show when new host Johnny Carson took over, and he told her on air: "You're gonna be a star". She was also hired by the producer Edgar Rosenberg, at Carson's suggestion, to help him rewrite a screenplay. She married him four days later. Carson carefully mentored her, and she became a regular on the talk-show circuit, as well as hosting one of her own, with Carson as her first guest.
She dabbled in acting but was kept busier with television, appearing on shows hosted by Dick Cavett, Sammy Davis jnr and David Frost, releasing Grammy-nominated albums and best-selling books, and writing minor films, including The Girl Most Likely To ... (1973) starring Stockard Channing, about a girl who undergoes plastic surgery and, armed with a new beauty, takes revenge on all those who ever called her ugly (Rivers herself became a plastic surgery addict in later years), and Rabbit Test (1978), a dud which she also directed. She was a crowd in herself, and the clutter of a movie clearly obstructed her directness. She regularly referred to Carson as a father-figure and "the man who handed me my career", and she became his regular guest host in 1983. But three years later the relationship collapsed when the newly formed Fox network hired Rivers to host a late-night talk show that started half an hour earlier than Carson's. He never spoke to her again.
The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers started well despite the sour publicity, but when ratings dropped, Fox fired Rivers' husband, the producer, and then, after she fought back angrily, fired her too.
Rosenberg had already suffered a heart attack two years earlier and had been blighted by depression ever since, something she believed had been induced by the medication he had been prescribed. Several months after being fired he took his own life.
She threw herself into her work, hosting a new daytime talk show, scooping an Emmy and earning herself both a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and a Tony nomination for her performance on Broadway in Sally Marr ... and her Escorts, which she co-wrote.
Rivers' colossal workload only increased as the years went on, and as she grew old, disgracefully but ever more glamorously, despite too many appearances on reality shows and a scruffy film career, there were some triumphant moments from the old firecracker, such as when Brigitte Nielsen stormed off when interviewed on the Channel 5 show The Joan Rivers Position (2004-06). When a furious argument broke out on Radio 4's Midweek programme in 2005, Rivers managed to get Darcus Howe to admit he was wrong after he had hastily accused her of racism. The documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (2010) was a valuably frank portrait of her that is now an appropriately unsentimental and inspiring epitaph.
She subscribed to the belief that comedians were clowns crying on the inside and claimed that deep down she was a sensitive soul but also argued that, "I would never make fun of a civilian sitting in the audience. It's not fair. They don't have the comeback. They don't have the F-you money. But celebrities are open game."
She was scattergun but often hit a bullseye: she described Nicole Kidman, in a red dress with a pale face, as resembling a ketchup bottle, and said that "you don't need big boobs to be feminine — look at Liberace". But above all it was anger that fuelled her comedy: she strove to laugh at what troubled her, often quoting the old adage, "if you make someone laugh, you give them a little holiday."
She was once asked, "Don't you want to be loved just for yourself?" She replied: "I just want to be loved. Who cares what for?"
