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Comedian Joan Rivers has died after following complications during surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. She was 81.Getty Images

Joan Rivers, who died in New York on Thursday at the age of 81, was one of the most caustic comedians to ever pick up a microphone. From her earliest days as one of Johnny Carson's favourite performers, through her late- career resurgence making fun of fashion, no target was safe. She was sharp-tongued to everyone and everything, including fellow celebrities, although she sometimes saved harshest mockery for herself. Some of her best one-liners:

On relationships

"Women should look good. Work on yourselves. Education? I spit on education. No man is ever going to put his hand up your dress looking for a library card."

"When you first get married, they open the car door for you. Eighteen years now … once he opened the car door for me in the last four years – we were on the freeway at the time."

"The only time a woman has a true orgasm is when she's shopping."

On her sex life

"I have so little sex appeal my gynecologist examines me by telephone."

"My sex life is so bad, my G-spot has been declared a historical landmark."

"I have no sex appeal. If my husband didn't toss and turn, we'd never have had the kid."

"All my mother told me about sex was that the man goes on top and the woman on the bottom. For three years my husband and I slept in bunk beds."

Celebrity putdowns

"The whole Michael Jackson thing was my fault. I told him to date only twenty-eight-year-olds. Who knew he would find 20 of them?"

"Madonna is so hairy. When she lifted her arm, I thought it was Tina Turner in her armpit."

"All babies look like Renée Zellweger pushed against a glass window."

On children

"Grandchildren can be so [expletive] annoying. How many times can you go, 'And the cow goes moo and the pig goes oink?' It's like talking to a supermodel."

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