Joan Rivers 'Throat Wide Shut'

Comedy fans throughout the world mourn the death of Joan Rivers, the woman who almost trumped Jay Leno to replace Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show.  Last night I was watching the opening game of the NFL season as the Seattle Seahawks mauled the Green Bay Packers when there was this announcement for some TV show (paraphrasing):  "...Joan Rivers dies due to complications with her throat."  That's an odd way of saying it.  In fact, it had a certain eerie, Eyes Wide Shut quality to it.

Eyes Wide Shut was Stanley Kubrick's last movie about a powerful secret society that Tom Cruise's curiosity gets him involved with.  He decides to crash a mansion party where masked elitists partake in a bizarre ritual that leads to an orgy (Tom and co-star/wife, Nichole Kidman, are having marital problems).  When he's discovered it's only through the aide of a mysterious masked woman that his life is spared.  Amazingly, he awakens the next day to find the headline in the New York Post "Lucky To Be Alive."  Turning to the inside story, Cruise finds that the young lady who saved him didn't fare so well.

So is it possible that Joan Rivers' throat problems were some of her more controversial statements?  Rivers recently caused quite a stir in the media when she suggested that President Obama is gay and Michelle Obama is actually an transvestite.

Now, the President may have swung both ways during his younger years (an accusation that was sometimes made toward George W. Bush), but I'm not so sure that should really matter.  The accusation against Michelle Obama seems pretty absurd and racist.  You can find it on YouTube and it usually centers around her athletic physique as not belonging to a woman.  By that logic Serena Williams, Angela Bassett, and Jackie Joyner-Kersee must also be men.  I would date any one of those ladies.

I think much too much was made of Rivers' comments, which may have been nothing more than jagged cynicism and impromptu comedy for which she felt no need to apologize or explain herself to anybody.  That shouldn't tarnish her career or injure her reputation.  Joan Rivers' shtick has always been the brash, outspoken woman living in a man's world, as you can see in this stand-up routine on the Ed Sullivan Show from 1967.  At that time, she would have been branded a "Women's Libber."  Now she's attacked as a fur-wearing conservative pariah.

So maybe both sides of the elite wanted her to shut up.  Throat wide shut.  That would explain the creepiness behind the strange and unexpected death of Joan Rivers.

"No, no.  The password is Fidelio.  Fye-Del-Eee-Oh.
 I'm all dressed up for an orgy and the limo was supposed to pick me up and hour ago."