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She kept trying. In Connecticut, she had to follow a Hungarian violinist who made everyone cry; one night in the Catskills, her routine was interrupted by round-by-round reports on the Patterson-Johansson fight; in Quebec, she was foil to Kudabux, the Man with the X-Ray Eyes; in Bridgeport, Conn., the manager blared over the loudspeaker: "Get her off."
Then, late in 1964, Manager Roy Silver took Joan in tow. "He cut out every piece of esoterica," she recalls, "a lot of the homosexual references, a lot of the ethnic references. For 51 years, I had been telling jokes about my Kafkaesque past. I didn't make a dime, so now I'm looking for universals."
New Material. One universal was a shot on the Johnny Carson show in February 1965. From that point on, Joan says, "the board was lighting up again." She has since played nearly every TV variety show, made her first movie (a small serious role in Frank Perry's forthcoming The Swimmer), played the Downstairs four times in one year, and now, an indeterminate 30, has upstaired her income to six figures. She has written a movie for United Artists called, almost inevitably, How Are We Feeling Today. But most of all, Joan wants a child. "When I'm pregnant," she says, "think of the material I'll have."