Joan Rivers Wins Dubious Trump Honor: 75 and Still Scrappy

Look at her. The very picture of the self-made woman. Well, self-made with the help of a squad of cosmetic surgeons. (Sound: rim-shot.)

Sorry. Couldn't help myself. When I start thinking about Joan Rivers I slip into hacksaw-one-liner mode.

UPDATE, 5/10/2009 8:05PM PDT: East coast Twitterers are crowing about Joan Rivers winning Celebrity Apprentice. Good, I don't have to watch; I can watch Amazing Race, then Wallander on PBS. Can you imagine three hours of Trump and Co.? So nice to be on the winning side. As I say below, it's nice to see an old fashioned shark beat a 21st Century barracuda. DN

Watching Celebrity Apprentice the other night, I realized I was watching a great performer whose energy and drive is just as white hot as it was forty years ago when she seared the stage of Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. Not much later she became Johnny's first "permanent" guest host.

Joan was a new kind of New York comic. First, she was a she, and beautiful she, at that. When she opened those ruby lips, you were the one who gasped. Her frequently self-immolating rapid-fire joke-stream was, to say the least, to the point. She was perfect for her edgy, tumultuous times.

"A man can sleep around, no questions asked, but if a woman makes nineteen or twenty mistakes she's a tramp."

— Joan Rivers

Seventy-five-year-old Joan Rivers is also the perfect contestant for the over-the-hill Trump TV property, The Apprentice. Did the producers realize what they were getting themselves into when they cast her and daughter Melissa with a field of C-list "celebs" for this attempt to glam up the fading, quasi-reality TV oldie?

To my mind, Joan provides the freshest energy the show has generated in years. Here's why. She's not a snake. Her comedy personna was always of the insult variety — many of which skewered her. When she compared her Apprentice arch-rival Annie Duke to Adolf Hitler, the cast gasped, but we, the audience, laughed. It was pure Rivers — acid about as dangerous as orange juice.

I was rooting for Joan Rivers to win Celebrity Apprentice, and I think it could be worth winning for her.

— Dave Newton