Diary of a Mad Diva

by Joan Rivers

  APRIL 7

  Dear Diary:

  I hate—not dislike; not am mildly annoyed by—really hate that irritating, pasty-faced girl who plays Flo in the Progressive insurance commercials. Those commercials run during every show on every network at all hours of the day. They run so often I’m starting to miss that sexually frustrated couple that sits in separate bathtubs on the side of a cliff waiting for his hard-on medicine to kick in. Or that old couple that rides up and down the stairs endlessly on that easy-lift chair and never once seems to enjoy it and go “Wheee!”

  I hate Flo. I hope she gets run over by a car . . . driven by an uninsured driver. And while she lies there waiting for an ambulance (that, god willing, is stuck in traffic), I hope the Aflac duck walks by and poops on her, just as the Geico gecko comes over and starts nibbling on her exposed, pulsating flesh.

  APRIL 10

  Dear Diary:

  Reading the New York Times obituaries and I am so sad. For the fifth day in a row, not one celebrity who I’m jealous of has died. I get so annoyed reading about the untimely passing of a crossing guard, or the death of a pieceworker after a lengthy illness. These “losses” do nothing to start my day. Unless the crossing guard was run over by a school bus, or the lengthy illness was leprosy and the pieceworker died, so fittingly, piece by piece, all those obits do is waste my time and bore me half to death.

  We’re in desperate need of a good, tragic celebrity death. Or two. And to make it really work for me, it has to be unexpected, not like that Andy Griffith shit. Andy was three hundred fucking years old and hadn’t whistled in Mayberry since 1971. I like shocking. A “Why did Whitney have cocktails in the bathtub before the Grammys?” kind of a death. A “stunning starlet and her hunky boyfriend mutual suicide pact” kind of thing, where the boyfriend “accidentally” forgot to drink the Kool-Aid and is seen “mourning” at the starlet’s funeral with his arm around her best friend, who turns out to be her younger, prettier brother.

  What really kills me is that with all the procedural crime shows these days, it’s getting harder and harder to get away with murder. In the good old days, you shot some son of a bitch, pressed the smoking gun into his hand and you got away with it. I don’t want to sound like a complainer, but nowadays, between DNA, cleaned-up blood that shows under luminol, minute crumbs from popcorn the murderer was eating six days before the crime, carpet fibers from a lesbian brothel and that nosy hag Nancy Grace who never stops prying, there’s just no way a nice person like me can get away with murdering someone who really annoys me. (I personally will never forgive Nancy Grace for her treatment of Casey Anthony. Casey and her kid sat behind me on a six-hour airplane flight a week before the kid vanished. Casey had a point.)

  APRIL 13

  Dear Diary:

  Watched Melissa McCarthy on SNL last night. She’s hilarious. She commits to every single moment. She’s more committed than Lindsay Lohan, which makes sense, since when Lindsay’s committed it’s usually by a court order. I hope Melissa doesn’t do what a lot of stars do, and forget what made her famous. In other words, I hope she stays fat. As long as her ratings are higher than her cholesterol, who gives a shit if she smells like government cheese or has to have handlers come in twice a week to hose her down between her folds? Ruth Buzzi of Laugh-In decided she wanted to be pretty-ish, so she took off the hairnet and threw away the dirty sweater, and today she lives in Texas and makes a living selling nude photos of Arte Johnson on eBay. Carol Burnett went under the knife, got cheekbones and lost her series. Sonny Bono decided to “get in shape,” so he took up skiing. He lost both Cher and his head. Luckily I have changed nothing. The parallel scars running up the back of my head are the result of too-tight forceps when I was delivered—as happened frequently in the fifteenth century. (And you wonder why Torquemada was always in such a bad mood?) I say, dance with the one who brung you. And in Melissa McCarthy’s case, that would be Colonel Sanders and Sara Lee.

  APRIL 14

  Dear Diary:

  I read a story in the Times about how John Hinckley, Jr. is behaving much more normally these days when he’s out of the nut hatch, tooling about town on his day passes. I’m guessing he saw Jodie Foster’s “Yup, I’m a dyke” speech on the Golden Globes and finally realized that his love for her would be unrequited. I hope he moves on with his life and from now on only obsesses about Queen Latifah, Dana Delany and Holland Taylor.

  APRIL 15

  Dear Diary:

  Today is tax day—my favorite day of the year. Not because I like paying taxes—no one does, except for that jackass Warren Buffett, who keeps saying he wants to pay more taxes. Great, Warren, go right the fuck ahead—pay mine. My accountant’s name is Michael Karlin; he’ll be in touch, so have one of your five hundred servants sit by the phone.

  I love tax day because I like to see fat, bald actuaries and the dumpy homely girls with bad shoes who work for them sweat like pack animals carrying supplies across the Pyrenees.

  If I have to pay thousands of dollars for some lazy farmer in Kansas to not grow corn, or for some teenaged mother in Houston to feed her five kids by seven different baby daddies, then I want somebody to be as miserable as I am when I write the checks. I want to share the pain. Why? Because I’m a giver.

  APRIL 16

  Dear Diary:

  Today is the day after taxes were due and I’m feeling very poor. So I decided to go out and treat myself to lunch at the Olive Garden and lose myself in their bottomless pasta bowl. And so I did. At lunch today, when I asked the waiter for coffee, he said, “No problem.” What does he mean, “no problem”? If I had asked for decaf would it have been a problem? Would green tea have been an issue? If I ordered a latte would he have considered it an international crisis requiring emergency aid from FEMA, the Red Cross and a couple of recently molested Boy Scouts doing good deeds in an effort to wash away the trauma?

  APRIL 17

  Dear Diary:

  There are a lot of other expressions along with “no problem” that I hate:

  GOOD JOB: I hate it when a parent tells a toddler “good job” after the little moron makes potty in the toilet instead of his diaper. It’s not a job; it’s nature. Little Billy’s not on your payroll; he’s not getting a matching 401(k) contribution; he’s not invested in a confusing, mediocre pension plan. He’s two, and potty training is the parents’ job, not his. When my dementia-riddled ninety-six-year-old aunt Sadie takes a shit in the toilet instead of the sink, that’s a good job. And if you don’t believe me, ask her caregiver, who has OCD and washes her hands six hundred times a day. And now that we’re talking about potty training, what’s wrong with this picture? It takes years for a kid to learn the simple task of elimination (which I feel is one of nature’s few mistakes) and we’re applauding? Homo sapiens are supposed to be the smartest ones on the planet; how come it takes the dogs three weeks—I repeat, three weeks—to get the hang of it, and Junior is walking around with a load in his pants on his way to geometry class?

  GIVE ME THE 411: If you want information from somebody, just do what everybody else does: say, “What do you know about that?” Or do what every black person does: say, “Let me ax you somethin’.” But don’t say, “Give me the 411?” It’s not cute. It’s stupid. It’s like visiting a hospital ward filled with terminal cancer patients and saying, “Who’s on the clock?”

  . . . NOT: I hate it when people say, “I like her . . . NOT.” I hope people who say that get hit by a car, and then I can go to the hospital and keep them on life support . . . NOT.

  MY BAD: Just because you’re admitting you made a mistake doesn’t make it okay. My bad is not an excuse or a defense. I have taken the time to trace the origin of it. It started at the Nuremberg Trials when Adolf Eichmann, who sat shackled in his bulletproof glass booth, was asked by the prosecuting attorney, “Sir, is it not true that you alone are responsible for the cold-blooded gassing of six million Jews?” He
replied, “Mein bad.”

  HAVE A GOOD ONE: Have a good one what? What the fuck are they talking about? Be specific! Bowel movement? Bank heist? Three-way with my cousin Charlotte? When someone says “Have a good one,” I assume they mean “day,” but how lazy do you have to be that you can’t finish the sentence without becoming exhausted? “One” and “day” have the same number of letters, so why switch them at all? It’s not like they’re replacing “colostomy” or “terrorist uprising.” And if you’re in that kind of rush, then close your piehole and move on and don’t talk at all. If it’s an emergency, just scream and point and jump up and down and I’ll get the message. That’s what Gandhi did.

  HOOKING UP: Teenagers who have casual random sex refer to these magical moments as “hooking up.” This doesn’t sound romantic; it sounds like you’ve got a boat tied to the back of your Jeep and you’re dragging it down the freeway. Or, another way to put it, like you’re butt-humping Carnie Wilson.

  APRIL 18

  Dear Diary:

  Speaking of butt-humping, my friend Larry brought over a bootleg copy of Behind the Candelabra, and we watched it in my den under a blanket. It’s the HBO movie about Liberace and his boy toy, Scott Thorson. It was touching and sad and the sex scene was so sweet. The sight of a sixty-eight-year-old Polish immigrant getting drilled through the headboard by an underage street urchin brought a tear to my eye. This is what makes America great.

  Michael Douglas, who plays Liberace, and Matt Damon, who plays his boyfriend, Scott (maybe just a bit too convincingly as a homo), are in bed having just finished a marathon fuck-fest and Scott, who is supposed to be sixteen, asks Liberace how he managed to stay hard all night long. And Liberace tells him he’s had penile implants. I don’t know if that means his junk will rust during a blow job, but I was quite impressed.

  Implants just take the worry out of sex. If only I could have had something comparable, like a drawstring on my vagina. My marriage would have been so much happier. “Wanna little nookie, Edgar?” I’d just pull it tight. Time to pop out Melissa? I’d loosen it up! I wish I had known God when he was creating us (I was born two years later)—I don’t think the man was paying attention. Maybe he was preoccupied watching Gwyneth Paltrow jamming a gluten-free cupcake into her skeletal frame and thinking, “My bad.”

  APRIL 20

  Dear Diary:

  Tonight I watched Game of Thrones on TV. I’m tired of hearing what a great actor Peter Dinklage is. “He’s so good you don’t even know he’s a dwarf!” I don’t even know he’s on the show half the time ’cause he’s below the frame in medium shots. And in the long shots when they dress him in dark colors I often mistake him for a tree stump or a large family pet.

  You definitely know Peter’s a dwarf. I saw him in The Sound of Music. He’s one third the size of the smallest von Trapp child. When Marie sang “Climb Every Mountain,” he begged for a Sherpa to help him hike across the lip of the stage. I read an interview with Peter where he said that as a dwarf he would never demean himself by playing a Christmas elf. Hey, Tiny, here’s a newsflash—you’re the only famous dwarf in Hollywood. Whatever part you want, you get. When there’s a casting call for a dwarf, your name’s the only one on the sign-up sheet. What are you, crazy? I’d play a mean, humpbacked old Jew in a second if they asked, except that Christian bitch Jane Fonda always gets those roles. Your fellow dwarves would be happy to work at the North Pole, so get off your self-righteous booster chair and have a moment of gratitude. Although I must admit he is a fabulous actor.

  APRIL 21

  Dear Diary:

  And while we’re at it, why are there no dwarves on The Walking Dead? Are there no zombie dwarves? Something is very wrong. Why is it that when they all come tumbling toward me, bloody as shit, they’re all five-foot-eight and over?

  I also started wondering if dwarves are well hung. Midgets are probably not because everything about them is in proportion—it’s all the same size, all small.

  Dwarves are another case. They have little arms and legs, but sturdy torsos and massive heads. They must fit into the bell curve like the rest of humanity—some are well hung, some are not, and I’m sure that Japanese dwarves look like Brillo pads with buttons. A lot of dwarves are very virile, case in point, the late great Michael Dunn, who said to Tina Louise, “If you’ve never been with a dwarf, get ready, because I am going to make the most passionate, wildest, craziest love to you.” And she said, “If you do and I find out, I’m going to be very upset.”

  APRIL 22

  Dear Diary:

  When I’m stressed I do one of two things: I draw a warm bath, get in, take my teeth out, put on Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady” and just drift. Or I watch old movies for comfort. Today I chose the latter and went to bed early and watched Children of a Lesser God on Turner Classic Movies. I’d forgotten how moving it was. And I’d forgotten that Marlee Matlin won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. And I’d forgotten that I couldn’t understand one word she said. Even last night, the second time around, I couldn’t figure it out. She’s moaning, she’s grimacing, she’s signing . . . I didn’t know if she was an actress in a role or a gangbanger having an orgasm.

  APRIL 23

  Dear Diary:

  Last night while trying to find the Sex Toy Channel, which was featuring Japanese rabia tickrers, I watched the news. Some athlete was being interviewed after a game and he said he was “FUstrated” at his team’s losing. What’s with the FUstrated? What happened to the r? It’s not silent. The word is FRustrated not FUstrated. That sort of stupidity drives me cazy.

  Also, I hate it when people drop the g at the end of a word. “He was runnin’ and playin’ and singin’ . . .” Again, the g is not a silent letter. Letters are meant to be used. And where will it end? How would you like it if I walked into Red Lobster and ordered an Angus burger, but I didn’t pronounce the g?

  APRIL 24

  Dear Diary:

  Couldn’t concentrate on anything today. I kept thinking maybe we should just start all over and change the rules of spelling and pronunciation. For example, if we changed the first letter on a lot of words, we’d never have to worry about political correctness again. Example: I wouldn’t be upset if Mel Gibson called me a dike. And Paula Deen surely would be back in business if she said, “I hate Tiggers, don’t you?” Just by changing one letter, making “gook” into “kook,” Ann Curry would have laughed her tight little laugh when Matt Lauer said, “Here comes that dog-munching kook.” And I would not be upset when Father Desmond Tutu called me a punt. This could be the end of hatred, worldwide! If Nelson Mandela was alive I would say, “Somebody get me that old toon on the phone. Tell him it’s the Newish Witch.”

  APRIL 25

  Dear Diary:

  I hate the autocorrect on my computer, phone and iPad. It’s humorless and doesn’t understand nuance; it’s the Jay Leno of apps. Today I was writing a pretty little poem called “I Hope You Die,” about all of the skinny bitches in Hollywood—okay, it was more of an homage to eating disorders—and I wrote that one starlet, who shall remain nameless (and FYI, it’s not Ashley Olsen) looked a little “AIDS-y.”

  The autocorrect kept changing AIDS-y to “antsy” or “artsy.” This starlet doesn’t look nervous or creative; she looks like she has six T cells. I know what I meant; autocorrect doesn’t. So let’s lose that “tool,” shall we? I spent a hundred grand on a degree in linguistics; I don’t need a phone app telling me what to do with my colon.

  Although in fairness, the autocorrect isn’t always wrong. Every time you type the name “Joan Rivers,” autocorrect changes it to “Insufferable Cunt.”

  APRIL 26

  Dear Diary:

  Some day! Sat down on my sunny terrace to enjoy a nice latte and answer my hate mail, which has been piling up since last Valentine’s Day. (Good news is, my house is under consideration to be on Hoarders.) My neighbor Leah came over here hy
sterical because she found out her husband, Murray, has been cheating on her. I felt sorry for her, not because he was cheating but because she’s a dope; everyone knew he was cheating. Friends, coworkers, doormen knew, a blind passerby could figure it out in two seconds. But not Leah. I said to her sweetly, “Leah, you fucking moron, what kind of an asshole idiot are you? How did you not know? For openers, Murray has teeth marks on his dick and you wear a denture. Second, half the kids in the neighborhood have his nose. And third, when you go to a Yankees game and thirty thousand fans yell out, ‘Hi, Dad!’ aren’t you a little suspicious? And let’s not forget the time I got into a taxi and said to the driver, ‘Where can a girl get a little action in this town?’ and he took me to Murray’s office.”

  I can’t stand stupid. Jennifer Aniston has dated, been cheated on and dumped by almost every man west of Phoenix and yet she’s always shocked when the shit hits the fan. And what about that psychotic bitch Mia Farrow? When she found out that Woody Allen was schtupping her daughter, Soon Yi, she said she was stunned. Never saw it coming. How is that possible? Not three days earlier Mia caught him jerking off to Flower Drum Song. He wore soy sauce as cologne. He’d go to the zoo and stare lovingly at the giant pandas, Ching Ching and Ling Ling.