royal pain

Joan Rivers drags Princess Diana in viral resurfaced clip: “Watch the gay men get quiet!”

Joan Rivers at her 2013 Just For Laughs gala.

Matron of insult comedy Joan Rivers is once again gagging the girls from beyond the grave. In a newly resurfaced viral clip, the comic took aim at a gay fave — and the gays who defend her.

In her 2013 Just For Laughs Gala set, Rivers took a moment to go after someone who’d simply had it too good for too long: Princess Diana, the people’s princess who had passed away sixteen years prior. The opener isn’t even a joke, she just flat out says “I didn’t like Diana.”

She follows up with, “Watch everyone get quiet.” She quickly corrects herself and says, “Watch the gay men get quiet.”

In the resurfaced clip, she even points out the gays in question:

“Either [gay men] or strong women,” she adds.

Even Babs caught a stray, with the comic joking, “You can never say anything to gay men either about Barbra Streisand being ugly or Princess Diana.”

The princess was, of course, beloved by gay men in part for her advocacy during the AIDS crisis. She treated men suffering from HIV/AIDS with dignity and respect when many were afraid to be in the same room as patients at all. She even personally opened the first AIDS ward in Britain in 1987.

Rivers reasons for hating her can’t quite leverage themselves against the reasons to love her, but she held them all the same.

Among her reasons were that the princess “didn’t know when the good times were with her.”

“‘I’m not happy, I’m not happy, I’m not happy.'” Rivers mocked with her tongue out. “She was tall, she was thin, she was gorgeous, she was young, she was rich, she had a husband who didn’t want to sleep with her. She had a crown!”

This was far from Rivers’ first time throwing shots at Diana posthumously. As a friend of now-King Charles and Camila, she was vocally critical of Diana as Charles’ ex-wife. In a 2005 interview with Larry King, Rivers defended the pair’s union by airing out Di’s dirty laundry.

“She was also — everyone forgets, as I said on your show once before, she was sleeping around,” she said. “We all know this. There were many affairs when she was married to him. This was not a girl sitting there. This was a girl going, tsk, tsk, call me later.”

The now-viral clip from her Gala has now been viewed almost 1 million times. However, the comments have been conveniently turned off.

Understandably so; the general TikTok audience isn’t really set up to receive Joan Rivers, even in her more modern years.

In the same year as her Gala, just a year before her passing, the comic was still as specific a taste as ever. Lest we forget her diatribe in support of Alec Baldwin from that November, in which she told TMZ, “What do I think about Alec [Baldwin]? Everybody just relax. Everybody’s either a [anti-Italian slur], a [anti-Black slur], a [antisemitic slur], a [sinophobic slur], a [homophobic slur], a [anti-Irish slur] — everybody’s something, so why don’t we all just. Calm. Down.”

Comparably, she was downright courteous to Princess Di!

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