Her signature catch phrase was “Can we talk?” — an icebreaker she used before verbally drop kicking the object of her ridicule.
She told an interviewer that she thought it up while on the stand up circuit in Las Vegas during the 1980s.
The joke at the time, she said, “was probably about Elizabeth Taylor being fat, and people gasped and I went, ‘Can we talk here?’
“What you’re really saying is, ‘Come on, are we going to talk the truth?’”
Tough and tenacious, she supported herself for years with secretarial work until she got her big break on the popular “Tonight Show” program in 1965.
Four months after landing a regular gig, she married one of the show’s producers Edgar Rosenberg. They had Melissa in 1968.
Rivers used to say that no subject was off limits in her comedy: not even her husband’s suicide in 1987.
“That’s how I get through life. God has given us this gift of humor,” she told New York Magazine. “Animals don’t laugh.”
In her 2013 book “I Hate Everyone, tarting With Me,” Rivers joked about her own funeral, saying she wanted “a huge showbiz affair” with Meryl Streep “crying in five different accents.”
But she also sparked controversy over the years with outspoken remarks on the Middle East and, on one occasion, when the butt of her humor was the survivors of the 9/11 terror attacks.
In later years, Rivers became as well-known for her love of plastic surgery, taken to excess with her exaggerated cheek bones and her preternaturally wrinkle-free face.
She reinvented herself as the host of “Fashion Police,” a show that offered running critiques of the red carpet attire worn by the glitterati at the Oscars and other A list events.
Rivers, who admitted to being a workaholic, said she hoped never to have to cede the stage.
“I’m an addict. It’s my drug. I love my work, This is where I’m happiest,” she once said.
US media reported that her funeral would be held on Sunday at Temple Emanu El synagogue in New York.
Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University called Rivers a pioneer.
“She demonstrated 30 years ago that a woman could be a competitive player on a late-night show,” he told AFP.
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