At the Red Robinson Show Theatre, Coquitlam, on Friday, December 8

Many comics bill themselves as edgy and/or politically incorrect. They’re usually young and male. Joan Rivers is neither, but I daresay there’s not a raunchier or more offensive comic working today. And I mean that in a good way.

The 73-year-old grandmother hit the stage at the Red Robinson Show Theatre in full force, screaming at the six-man band, who played her on with Duke Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train”: “Shut up! I hate fuckin’ jazz!”

And that was just the start of the things that pissed her off. Utilizing the whole stage for more than an hour—including a stint lying down in which she acted out receiving oral sex from Aristotle Onassis (“As long as I can see the TV, do to me what you want,” she shrieked. “Enjoy yourself; just keep your head down.”)—Rivers’s rants hit just about everyone, including herself.

Since 1983, when she was the permanent, and only, guest host for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show for three years, Rivers’s stock-in-trade has been celebrity abuse. She’s the one who started the Elizabeth Taylor fat jokes. Today, she still gossips gleefully about everyone in the entertainment pages. Angelina Jolie’s lips, she says, look like “an inflamed anus” and Anderson Cooper’s sexuality is at best suspect: “The man shits gerbils.” Her impression of a post-stroke Dick Clark struggling through “Happy New Year” had us laughing through our shame: “C’mon, Dick, you can do it,” she coaxed. “It’s March.” Michael Jackson, though, she defended: “Like nobody here ever fucked a kid.”

But the diva didn’t stop there. She hates ugly people (“Anyone that’s ugly in this room, I want you the fuck out!”), the elderly (“I hate and despise old people. And I’ll say it louder because half of you assholes are deaf”), Jesus freaks (“I want you to look in the mirror and tell me Jesus loves you. I think he hates your fucking guts”), and dating old guys (“one guy left his teeth in my neck”).

She’s not all deprecation, however. Rivers is more than willing to make fun of herself and her current career of yelling out “Who are you wearing?” on the red carpets of Holly­wood. She plays the stereotypical Jewish-American princess to perfection, especially when it comes to money. When her daughter Melissa was offered $300,000 to pose topless in Playboy and refused, Rivers responded: “What do I think? I think you ask for another hundred grand and you show your pussy.”

And that’s not even mentioning the material on race and religion. Best not, lest the irony-challenged mainstream media gets hold of it. Although knowing Rivers, she’d handle it beautifully. Instead of an apology, it would be something like, “Oh, grow the fuck up.”