Melissa Rivers reflects on red carpet days with Joan: 'You're not allowed to have fun anymore'

With the 2024 Emmys airing Sept. 15 on ABC and countless fashion hot takes to follow, we can't help but reflect on awards shows past — and how it's been 30 years since Joan and Melissa Rivers changed red carpets forever.

It all began in 1994 with a simple question posed to celebrities arriving for awards shows: “Who are you wearing?” The trailblazing comedian, who died in 2014, couldn’t resist launching into her off-the-cuff, often campy banter on topics ranging from Botox to body odor. She was the loose canon to Melissa’s eye-rolling straight (wo)man.

You’d always get at least one truly jaw-dropping moment — did Joan really say that to an A-lister? There were also so many LOLs as the preshow, which first aired on E! and later TV Guide Channel, became the real must-see event of the night. That was what you tuned in for and what you couldn’t look away from.

“The difference with the red carpet was we were allowed to have fun,” Melissa tells Yahoo Entertainment while promoting the Nov. 7 comedy event Dead Funny: A Living Tribute to Joan Rivers Benefiting God’s Love We Deliver. “It was full guerilla television. It was the rise of cable. It became destination viewing. It was the right time, right place, right team.”

Their inimitable bond — moments of exasperation, sighs and all — was behind that.

“We had such a unique relationship,” the Melissa Rivers' Group Text podcast host says. “We were both professionals in our business, but the things we could say to each other fell into the mother-daughter relationship. If a co-host rolled their eyes, shook their head or said, ‘I can't believe you said that!’ at another, it would be rude. But between me and my mom, it was different. To this day, people come up to me and say, ‘That was my relationship.’ It struck a chord. We didn’t pull punches. You saw the frustration. You saw the annoyance. You saw the humor.”

Today, “you're not allowed to have fun anymore,” Melissa says of red carpet coverage with polished production values and polite banter. “The interesting thing is, no one has asked me to go back on a red carpet. Probably because I've also very publicly said I would never. It'll never be as fun. It'll never be the same. We'll never be able to do what we did."

The Rivers red carpet act was such a sensation that E!’s Fashion Police, co-created by Joan and executive produced by Melissa, was born in 1995. While there were different co-hosts and iterations of the show, Joan would lead the group in critiquing the outfits of A-listers — while firing off zingers. Melissa says that show, which ended in 2017 following Joan’s death three years earlier, wouldn’t work today either.

“If I could figure out how to do it, I would, but you can't,” says the producer. "You can't say anything. Not only can you not say anything funny, you can't say anything honest. You can't say you don't like someone's dress. You have to qualify it with what a wonderful person they are, and that they're so beautiful, and they're kind to small animals, and they're fabulous, and they usually look amazing.”

“Would you not fall asleep within the first 30 seconds?” she asks. “I would change the channel.”

Another thing that’s changed about awards shows in recent years is that producers are finding it increasingly difficult to secure a host for the ceremony, which used to be a coveted gig.

This year’s Emmy Awards ceremony will see father-son duo Eugene and Dan Levy sharing hosting duties, but Jimmy Kimmel and John Mulaney both turned down the 2025 Oscars. This year’s Golden Globes didn’t land host Jo Koy until 10 days before the show — and the reviews were rough. What would Joan, who hosted the 1983 Emmys, think about comedians declining the gig?

“She’d think: ‘It's about time y'all smartened up,’” Melissa says. “It's a horrible job. Well in advance, people decide who they're going to like and who they're not. Some of the best hosts were never asked to do it again because they were criticized. Why put yourself out there? It’s a thankless job.”

After Joan co-hosted the Emmys with Eddie Murphy, she said, “I'm never going back there again,” Melissa recalls. “It’s a lot of work and you run the risk of it being a disaster.”

Melissa is currently planning the comedy tribute show in her mom’s honor, having recently marked 10 years since Joan’s death, at age 81, during a routine endoscopy. She teases that they have “amazing people committed, which I can't announce yet” for the event at the Apollo Theater during the 20th annual New York Comedy Festival. She and her son, Cooper, 24, will be in attendance.

There’s also a play, Joan, at the South Coast Repertory Theater in Costa Mesa, Calif., running Oct. 27 to Nov. 24 about the famed comic’s career.

Next summer, the National Comedy Center, which acquired Joan’s comedy archive, including her famed card catalog of 65,000 typewritten jokes, will debut an interactive exhibit in its galleries in Jamestown, N.Y.

“It just seemed like the best fit,” Melissa says. “The Smithsonian and Library of Congress contacted us immediately upon her passing” about obtaining the archive, “and I kept thinking about the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark in that giant warehouse” where the Ark of the Covenant is put in a wooden crate in a vast storage room with thousands of other crates. “I thought: I can't have her in a box” between exhibits. “It really haunted me.”

A museum that educates about the comedic arts “felt like the right place,” she says, to include her mother’s work along with the archives of other greats like Carl Reiner, Don Rickles and George Carlin. “Because, if I put her in a warehouse, oh God. I mean — this was a woman who appreciated a good view. I couldn’t have her looking at boxes.”