Melissa Rivers Shares What Saved Her After Mom Joan Rivers’ Death

And though to every generation its comedic voices, Melissa feels that Joan would have kept rolling with the punchlines to this day, her as-long-as-they’re-laughing approach to entertainment having proved pretty timeless. 

“I think she would have appreciated the conversations” about the state of comedy and whether some topics have become taboo, Melissa mused, but eventually her reliably brazen mother would have just sighed, rolled her eyes and cracked some more jokes.

“She always said, ‘Making someone laugh is like giving them a mini-vacation,'” recalled the person who was closer to Joan than anybody. “Everyone needs to take a deep breath and remember it’s okay to laugh. But I think at this point, she would just be like, ‘Oh god, everybody, just…’ I can’t say it.”

But if she did, Melissa added, “it wouldn’t be the first time one of us had said ‘f–k’ on E!”