This documentary followed comedienne Joan Rivers throughout the course of a year, the year she turned 75, and a year which saw her suffer one of her career lows, followed by a return to the limelight in yet another comeback. But she had never been away since beginning her work back in the mid-twentieth century, it's just that she had fallen in and out of fashion over the passage of time and her frankness in all her dealings with those both professional and private around her had not always led to a smooth ride through life...
At the time A Piece of Work was being filmed, it may have apparently been putting the case that this groundbreaking comic was falling into obscurity, as we see her staring forlornly at empty diary pages and reduced to working her stand-up gigs in the smaller New York clubs, but the fact remained she was still a famous face even at this stage. Say the name Joan Rivers and most people who had followed pop culture during the period she was working would know exactly who she was: her personality was so brash that it was hard to forget her, even those who never liked her comedy and found her obnoxious.
Obnoxious because she went to places in her comedy that could seem deeply insensitive, to the extent of cruelty, but that was not what directors Rick Stern and Anne Sundberg sought to portray, and it was this attempt to understand Rivers and look behind the public face which made for a compelling film. She may remind you, at the point this was made, of the way that Mae West - another iconoclast - didn't know when to stop by the time she reached the latter years of her career, but Joan's indignant argument is that why should she, or any other female celebrity, retire simply because she was old?
Nevertheless, there was an air to this of the subject getting away with as being as rude as she could in her material because of her age, and the stuff we see her delivering from her early routines is nowhere near as offensive as what she dreams up in 2009. But is she funny, or is she just embarrassing? That's the question which should apply to whether she was still relevant, and the answer was that yes, she could be very funny depending on your threshhold for offence. There was a telling moment where she moved out of her New York-L.A. comfort zone and is heckled by an insulted audience member about her Helen Keller joke, and she turns the crowd around by making them comfortable about laughing at the darker areas of her comedy because the alternative is too much to bear.
