As noted by John Fund and much of the rest of the media, Joan Rivers has died at 81. Rivers was admired as an equal-opportunity insult comic, a staunch supporter of Israel, and a maverick unwilling to let any concerns of politics, friendship, or reverence get in the way of a joke. But I’d like to make a qualified case for her most widely deplored achievement.
The 1978 Billy Crystal vehicle Rabbit Test, a surreal farce in which a man becomes pregnant, was Rivers’s first and last feature-directing job, and with one and a half stars at IMDb, it is almost universally considered one of the worst films ever made. Its jokes are crude in both the sense that they are distasteful and the sense that they are clumsily executed. Its production value is negative. Its staging is as flat as a Witt/Thomas sitcom of that period. It doesn’t bother to explain how the male pregnancy happened (something about a cowgirl sexual position and a supernatural novelty bowling game) with even the kind of movie science deployed in the Arnold Schwarzenegger pregnant-man picture Junior. The timing of the gags is often terrible.
These criticisms are all fair. Rabbit Test is no underappreciated gem, but I must say that when I saw it as a kid on a late show, I thought it was really out there and funny.
It has not exactly aged like fine wine, but it’s still pretty out there and there are still some bits that make me laugh. The great Charlotte Rae, playing a Jewish mother visiting a church for a wedding, points at the crucifix around the neck of the preacher (TV stalwart Tom Poston) and says apologetically, “I personally had nothing to do with that.” When the title rabbit dies (there actually used to be a rabbit test for pregnancy), the OB/GYN played by national treasure Paul Lynde asks Crystal (who is disguised as a Mexican immigrant), “Would you like me to save you a foot, just for luck? Then again, you’re a foreigner, arent’ ya? You’ll probably want to sell it.” A scene where Crystal teaches a continuing-ed class made up entirely of non-English speakers opens with Crystal closing his textbook and saying, “. . . And that in a nutshell is why we don’t like Hitler.” If the mark of an auteur is to stamp a film with his or her personality, you have to credit Rabbit Test with expressing the world view of Joan Rivers. It is shot through with her well-known vision of a mad world inhabited by vain, stupid, physically repulsive people — and leavened only by an extremely high rate of jokes. (Many people, notably the Z.A.Z. team behind the Airplane movies, did the rapid-gags-at-all-costs style with greater success, but Rivers was an early adopter.)
I’m also giving Rivers heavy props for assembling a more-stars-than-there-are-in-Heaven cast of the kind of high-volume character actors you just don’t see anymore. Alex Rocco, Doris Roberts, Billy Barty, Imogene Coca, Alice Ghostley, George Gobel, Rosey Grier, Michael Keaton, Jimmie Walker, Richard Deacon, Norman Fell . . . Those names may not mean much to you, but in my book this is one of the greatest teams ever to play the game.
Rabbit Test was a massive critical and popular bomb, and Rivers was never in danger of directing a movie again. It’s unlikely that her not-untimely death robbed us of any future Joan Rivers joints. But it’s part of her legacy, and one that I still kind of enjoy.