Joan Rivers television critic Jack Gould called Rivers "quite possibly the most intuitively funny woman alive". In 2017, "Rolling Stone" magazine ranked her sixth on its list of the 50 best stand-up comics of all time, and in October the same year, she was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame. Joan Alexandra Molinsky was born on June 8, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian Jewish immigrants Beatrice (née Grushman) and Meyer C. Molinsky. She had an elder sister named Barbara Waxler. Rivers spent her early life in Prospect Heights and Crown Heights in Brooklyn, where she attended the progressive
Joan (Louie) tells him that you can never quit and that you just have to appreciate that you have a job in the first place, because things change, and in a year, even she might be out of the theater and back in the lounge. Louie agrees with Joan but claims that he is sick of all of the bullshit. Joan refuses to accept this as well, exclaiming that she is a woman, and asking Louie to guess how many blowjobs he thinks she had to give to get where she is. After a long pause, Louie posits 40 as a guess.