by Joan Rivers
The only thing tasting menus are good for is the homeless, because the meal never ends. They bring item after item and it goes on and on and on like a Jay Leno monologue. A friend of mine once ordered the tasting menu at a restaurant in L.A.; it took so long that she went through menopause. They started with soup and by the time they got to dessert she was so fucking cranky she had lost her appetite.
I hate restaurants that serve steak tartare. Steak tartare is a scam. Steak tartare is nothing more than raw chopped meat and onions. Tuna tartare is a can of cat food with pepper. And sushi is just a guppy with rice.
Tartare is considered a delicacy, so it costs a fortune. Explain to me again why should I pay you to not cook my food? If I want raw meat I’ll take a bite out of a passing Kardashian.
I hate when your food is charged by the weight. It’s food, not jewelry. I don’t need a three-carat rump roast. The only person in the world whose jewelry and food weighed the same amount was Elizabeth Taylor, and you know where that got her? Forest Lawn Cemetery, that’s where.
Fast-food restaurants actually serve things that are only sold by their size, like, “the Whopper,” “the Double-Double” and the “Quarter Pounder with Cheese.” I say, if they’re going to offer you meals by the pound the least they could do is offer free angiograms for dessert.
At steak houses they always have two sizes of prime rib: “the regular” and “the king’s portion,” which is about half a cow. If you order the smaller portion you look a like a cheapo and if you order the king’s portion you look like the self-centered, gluttonous narcissist you are. For me, that’s a lose-lose.
I hate lobster houses, too. I hate it when they say, “Pick your lobster.” Lobsters are like the Japanese— they all look alike. And just like steak houses, lobster houses serve by size, which I really don’t understand because all lobsters weigh about the same amount; they all weigh-in somewhere between one and a half and three pounds. In my entire life I’ve never once been served an obese nine or ten pound lobster. I don’t know how it’s possible that every single lobster fits within that narrow weight range, but they do. When it comes to body weight, humans have an enormous bell curve to work with, ranging from Kate Moss on one end to the cast of The Biggest Loser on the other.
Yet lobsters are all thin. Did Richard Simmons get them to tone up by releasing a Working Out with Mollusks DVD? (Don’t kid yourself, if anybody could corner that market, Richard Simmons could. The man is a genius. Back in the day he got kids to work out, he got old people to work out… he even got pregnant women to work out—remember that video, Abortin’ to the Oldies, where you exercise to “Bye, Bye Baby”? Just fantastic, one of my faves
You can’t tell me that there are no depressed, overweight female lobsters who sit around the reef in filthy nightgowns eating Fritos and watching Flipper reruns.
The other reason I hate lobster houses is that they make you wear a bib. I think that if you have to wear a bib to eat you shouldn’t be in a nice restaurant; you should be in assisted living.
I hate children’s menus because their presence implies that children are welcome. (See the chapter “For the Children” for more on this.)
Infants should never be allowed in nice restaurants. They smell like dairy cows and they’ve always got Zwieback crackers stuck in their hair and their parents can’t shut them up.
If you want children to be quiet in restaurants, I say change the names of the items on the children’s menus. Instead of “The Popeye” or “The Dora the Explorer,” the meals should be named things like “The Mommie Dearest” or “The Casey Anthony.” I assure you, they’ll be quiet.
I hate how chefs dress. What’s up with the pants? For no apparent reason every chef, cook or kitchen worker wears grotesque, polyester, black-and-white checkered pants. Is this an ego thing so everyone knows that you’re the chef? We know. You’re already wearing a giant white hat and you smell like day-old veal.
I hate sitting at a table near the bathroom. I don’t want to see the chef coming out, zipping up. The only thing worse than seeing the chef in a restaurant coming out of the men’s room is one going in, then stop, say, “Too late,” turn around and return to the kitchen.
I hate it when the cook in a diner refers to himself as a “chef.” Anthony Bourdain is a chef; Daniel Boulud is a chef; Emeril Lagasse is a chef. But the sweaty guy behind the counter in the diner? That’s Nick from Astoria.
I hate people who refer to chocolate cake as “decadent.” Sara Lee licking the chocolate off of your thighs is decadent; the cake is just fattening.
I hate restaurants that have drive-thru windows. Unless you’re a cult member on a killing spree you shouldn’t be able to drive through a restaurant. Remember the nut job who shot up the McDonald’s in Texas? My first thought was, How bad could the onion rings have been?
I hate McDonald’s. I don’t want to order dinner by yelling into a plastic clown’s mouth. If I want my face in a clown’s mouth I’ll tongue kiss Glenn Beck.
I hate “Happy Meals.” McDonald’s seems to think that eating these meals will make you happy. It won’t. It may make your cardiologist and his accountant happy, but all it will make you feel is fat and bloated.
If McDonald’s wants to make a really happy meal, they ought to make it two cheeseburgers, large fries and Prozac. Your arteries will still clog, but you just won’t care. In fact, you’ll be the happiest one in the morgue.
I hate the slogans in cheaper restaurants. Like “Have it your way.” “My way” would be in a better restaurant where the tables and chair are not cemented to the floor. Unless the restaurant is located on the side of the San Andreas Fault, the tables and chairs should be movable. If I can’t move, turn, breathe or burp, then it’s not fine dining, it’s a Scientology social.
I also hate it when restaurants lock their bathrooms and you have to get a key from the manager to get in. Why are they locked? Do their customers tend to steal the urinals when their meals are done? And what’s with the gigantic key rings? The keys to the bathrooms are always attached to huge sticks or hangers that clank and make noise. Give me a normal-size key ring and I promise I’ll alert all the other patrons by yelling, “I have to pish, now.”
I hate the sign in the window that states: “Shirt and shoes required.” Is that really necessary? Does that mean pants are optional? That as long as you have on some kind of footwear and sleeves, it’s okay to have your cooz hanging out or your balls stuck to the chair? I experienced that in a restaurant one day and not only was it disgusting and unattractive and unhygienic, I also got very cold.
And finally… I hate vegans. God gave you incisors, so what’s the problem? Not only are vegans annoying, they look sickly. Right now, fast, name twenty vegans you’d like to bang. They don’t eat meat, they don’t eat poultry, they don’t eat fish, they don’t eat anything with a face.… You know what? They can eat me.
THINGS NOT TO SAY AT A DINNER PARTY
The table looks great; most of the place settings match.
There’s a pubic hair in my soup and it looks like Uncle Jack’s.
Does anyone know the difference between the early signs of chlamydia and syphilis?
This steak is delicious! Ever been to a slaughterhouse? They kill the cow by driving a nail between its eyes.
You’ll never guess who lost a baby and left it in the toilet? No, really, c’mon, try to guess. I’ll give you a hint.…
Are these capers or droppings?
Did anyone ever notice that all Down syndrome kids look alike?
They said it was SIDS, but to perfectly honest, I never trusted the mother.…
How come you never see really old midgets?
Fuck the Jews.
Is it just me, or does foreskin taste funny?
Please, if I start to smell just tell me and I’ll change the bag.
LOCATION. LOCATION. LOCATION …
… Are the three most important things when you’re buying a house… or looking for my G-spot.<
br />
I have a love-hate relationship with a lot of cities and countries. As a rule, I love places that pay me to be there and I hate places that don’t.
By the way, when I speak of cities I mean real cities. I don’t go to “cities” where being mayor is a part-time job. Or where people brag that it’s safe to leave their doors open at night. These people obviously don’t have good jewelry. I don’t do towns, villages, burgs, hamlets or grottos. I’m a comedian, not an elf. If Hillary Clinton wants to do a village that’s her business—I just hope for her sake she finds a village where mannish women in pastel pantsuits are all the rage. The only village I love is Greenwich Village in New York City, and that’s only because (a) it’s not actually a village, it’s a neighborhood, and (b) it’s where I started my comedy career playing little clubs like Upstairs at the Downstairs and The Duplex. If it weren’t for those little clubs in Greenwich Village I’d have had to pursue one of my other passions in life and instead of being the beloved star of stage and screen you are reading now, I would have become either a dental hygienist (I’ve always loved the thrill of a putting my hands in a strange man’s mouth) or a fetish model, posing nude for magazines like Pavement Princess, Gutter Gals, and What Do You Expect for a Quarter?
I’ve gone around the world a number of times (often in the backseat of a Buick) and, having been everywhere from Bayonne to Berlin, I can say with certainty that Dorothy said it best when she said, “There’s no place like home.” (Meanwhile Auntie Em is thinking “Listen, bitch, we agreed to let you move back in with us after you graduated from college and couldn’t find a job, but that was only supposed to be temporary. Fact is, your uncle Henry and I were going to turn your old bedroom into a sex dungeon and then maybe do a little traveling. After all, it’s not like you’re our real daughter, right?”)
I live in New York City (except for when I live in Los Angeles with Melissa, which I’m willing to do anytime I can get a network to pay me to do it). But before I tell you all of the places that I hate, let me tell you that I love New York. (And by “New York” I mean Manhattan; anything west of Amsterdam Avenue I consider to be part of “the heartland.”) Here are a few reasons why New York is the greatest city in the world:
In New York, if someone stabs you in the head, chances are they have a very good reason to do so, i.e., you jumped in front of them on a lease application for a rent-stabilized apartment.
New York is the fashion center of America. Even the homeless have style—and its not just knowing how to make a shopping cart into an accessory. Little do people realize the homeless have a great eye for layering. Usually I am not a fan of layering but the homeless can pull it off—a wool scarf over a bathrobe on top of a flak jacket over a pair of cargo pants with three pairs of socks but no shoes? It’s a look. Again, not for me, but I’m not an autumn.
You don’t have to visit a nursing home to smell urine. Just walk down any street and the bouquet is in the air, like night-blooming jasmine with a very high acid content.
I hate cities where people are nice. In New York you walk down the street and you hear, “Fuck you, die!!” And I love to scream right back, “Fuck you, Sister Mary Louise!”
David Letterman is in New York. Even better—Jay Leno isn’t.
We embrace diversity: Our past five mayors were Jewish, black, tiny, gay, or had speech defects. Fabulous!
Finally, if someone drops dead of a heart attack in Saks Fifth Avenue, the salespeople are trained to move the body out of the way so that it doesn’t impact the customer flow or purchase points.
I hate Houston. It’s crawling with bugs. Oh wait, that’s Whitney Houston; I’m sorry, my bad. (Can I just mention that Whitney looked fabulous at the Grammys? She was in mahogany from head to toe.)
I hate Arizona. It always eight hundred degrees outside and everybody’s always saying, “But it’s a dry heat!” So’s the inside of my microwave. You wanna grab your bronzer and spend a couple of hours tanning? Arizona is filled with old people, asthmatics and prisoners, as well as old asthmatic prisoners. By the way, do you know what they call people in Arizona who eat dinner after 4:00 P.M.? Night owls. Arizona is the prison capital of America. Eighty percent of the population is incarcerated and the other twenty percent are on parole. In Scottsdale a prison cell is considered an efficiency apartment. The upside to Arizona is that your tax dollars go further because you don’t have to buy the convicts blankets and coats or warm food.
I hate the great northwest because it’s gray and rainy and depressing. The only good thing is everybody’s so depressed there are thousands of suicides and that really opens up the housing market and makes it easy to buy a cheap condominium. The high suicide rates also make it easy to find parking, especially during the holidays. In Seattle there is a six-month waiting list if you want to jump off a tall building. It rains so much in Seattle the leading cause of death is mildew, followed by reading The Bell Jar.
I hate Savannah. It’s beautiful but there’s a paper mill on the river that makes the whole city smell like vomit. Spending a week in Savannah, Georgia, is like spending a weekend in Mary Kate Olsen’s mouth.
I hate Florida. It’s all old people, trailer parks, drug dealers and Disney World. I can handle the old people, drug dealers and trailer parks. But screaming children and a giant mouse with three fingers? Am I in Orlando or Saigon?
There are too many old people in Florida. It’s like Arizona with mosquitoes. Just once I’d like to go to a dinner party where every conversation doesn’t start with, “Do you remember…?” followed by the name of somebody who just died. It’s like the Oscars’ death reel played on a continuous loop.
Floridians brag about living with crocodiles—as though building a house on stilts so you don’t wind up without feet is a normal thing. Let me tell you, if I want to live with a scaly creature that has an unhinged jaw and jagged teeth I’ll move in with Lea Michele.
I hate the Plains states. They’re plain. There’s no color, everything is wheat and grain and barley and grass. The whole region is nothing more than a Pottery Barn with cows. The leading cause of death in Nebraska is people falling asleep. It’s so dull the kids go to Kansas for their senior proms.
I hate cities that fight the elements, like Chicago, whose mottos are “It’s great to be inside” and “Shut that fucking door, you idiot.” Their number one export is “things that fell off the truck.” Let’s just hope that one good gust of wind blows Chicago into a better climate and suddenly it’s Chicago, Bahamas.
I hate Austin, but it’s not Austin’s fault. Austin is a great city that’s stuck in Texas. You can always tell when you get inside the Austin city limits because the hair is smaller and you can understand what the people are saying.
I hate New Orleans, but I respect it. You’ve got to respect a city that doesn’t want to hear about building above sea level. Grandpa dies and he’s buried over you. Even hell is up. New Orleans is filthy and dirty; it’s the only city that looked better after it was hit by a category five hurricane.
Mardi Gras is fascinating—you can puke in front of all the really good hotels. In New Orleans you can wear anything and do anything and no one seems to notice; it’s like hanging out at the Braille Institute.
Some people do love New Orleans—Anne Rice loves it, vampires love it; even Lee Harvey Oswald loved it and he was quite the sourpuss.
I hate San Francisco because I not only left my heart there, but my hairdresser. San Francisco is the only city in the world that has a lisp. The whole town smells like lube. It’s built on hills that are so steep that when you get to the top of one of them in a taxi, you can’t see what’s on the other side. Going up a hill in San Francisco is like going down on Kathy Bates.
Enough with the good ol’ U. S. of A. There are whole countries I hate…
I hate Sweden. Well, I don’t actually hate Sweden, I hate Mamma Mia and all the acclaim Meryl Streep received for singing “Dancing Queen” slightly off-key. It’s enough with Meryl, it’s enough wi
th ABBA and it’s enough with all the pretty, smooth-skinned, natural blondes. Give me a couple of skanky brunettes with pockmarks and gunshot wounds and maybe, just maybe, I’ll feel better about the place. Sweden is like the Plains states in that it is totally devoid of color. And I’m talking about the population, not the geography. Sweden is so white even the black people are white. It’s like being at a Klan meeting with supermodels.
I hate the northern lights. Sweden is in absolute daylight six months out of the year. Who needs that? I’m not in daylight for six hours a year. My best feature is total darkness. My plastic surgeon’s office is in the Howe Caverns. The northern lights are actually called the aurora borealis, and I hate that because Aurora Borealis is my porn name. I feel so violated.
The constant daylight has made the Swedes so crazy that there’s a mental illness named for them: Stockholm syndrome. This is when victims of kidnap and torture begin to identify with and protect their captors instead of turning them in to the authorities. Remember when newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army and forced to join their radical cult? They changed her name to Tania and made her wear a beret and forced her to help rob a bank at gunpoint and people were killed, and she protected her captors and went to jail.
And as this was playing out on the news every night, one thought kept going through my head over and over: What kind of idiot wears a beret in April?
I hate cities and countries that change their names. Beijing used to be called Peking. Mumbai used to be known as Bombay. Why did they do that? Are there Google Earth lobbyists trying to make money off of new maps? This name changing thing is a huge pain in the ass; the other night I called up for Chinese food delivery and it took me almost forty-five minutes to order a large Peking duck. In the amount of time it took me to order, I could have flown to Beijing and brought the thing home myself. We don’t do that name-changing crap here in America. Since day one, Los Angeles is still Los Angeles, Chicago is still Chicago. And Detroit is still a shithole.
