When Rivers, with her tirelessly blaring, paint-scrape voice, tells an anecdote like that one, she does it with a merciless appreciation for the comedy of her own misfortune. Yet there's never a hint of self-pity; her ruthless mockingbird personality wouldn't allow it.
A Piece of Work opens with extreme close-ups of Rivers' surgically enhanced, bruised-china-doll face minus its traditional coat of cosmetic varnish. It then follows Rivers as she riffs, performs, worries, complains, and preps her act with an index-card readiness that belies its Jewish-firecracker spontaneity. She's a teller of hilarious gutbucket truths as surely as Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor ever were. Yet while they were consumed by their demons, Rivers is just the opposite. Letting her demons run wild is what saves her, every day.
