Watching comedy legends die–oof. The eds at RS online have very kindly kept me on the side of laughter, probing available online resources, making lists. This watching and compiling means I didn’t have much time to dwell on the negative…

Rather than pick great jabs out of Joan Rivers’ huge collection of one-liners and post them out of context, we decided to cull from clips we could share, and let many of her Tonight Show appearances stand on their own.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/can-we-talk-joan-rivers-10-best-jokes-20140904

So happy I got to see her in Montreal at Just for Laughs last year, yowling about how she might drop dead on stage, and how we’d all done out on that story for the rest of our lives. She, of course, ripped celebrities, herself and told some questionable jokes that drew groans. But her sort of fearlessness was fun, and her unwillingness to apologize was fortifying.

And I keep thinking about the epic joke file she kept in her home–as featured in excellent Rivers doc “A Piece of Work”–arranged by topic and stuffed with index cards of nearly every joke she’d worked out. Something nice about the idea that, beyond books and specials and Fashion Police re-runs, there’s a still, quiet encyclopedia of Joan’s brain just waiting for someone to pry