No, those are not Joan Rivers’s actual ashes.
Ahead of Joan Rivers: A Dead Funny All-Star Tribute special, airing on May 13 on NBC, Melissa Rivers and an A-list group of comedians and actors struck a pose with a gold urn. Nikki Glaser pretended she almost dropped it. Rachel Brosnahan acted like she was going to pour a martini in it. Tiffany Haddish balanced it precariously on the palm of one hand.
“That’s not the real urn,” Melissa told Yahoo Entertainment as if the idea was unfathomable, even though Joan’s actual ashes were literally shipped around the world after her death in 2014.
“I originally wanted to do a bit in the greenroom called ‘urn point of view,’” said Melissa, who produced the special. “Have a GoPro camera in the urn and have it judging people — looking everyone’s outfits up and down. The urn cam. I got shot down on that one.”
The promo photos for Joan Rivers: A Dead Funny All-Star Tribute include an urn that many of the comedians — and Melissa — posed with. (Stephanie Diani/NBC)
For what it’s worth, Joan’s actual ashes were lost after the special taped. More on that in a minute.
The televised tribute came together somewhat miraculously, said the Melissa Rivers’ Group Text Podcast host. It taped in one night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, during the 20th annual New York Comedy Festival in November 2024, with a talent roster also including Chelsea Handler, Aubrey Plaza, Joel McHale, Jeff Ross, Sarah Silverman, Margaret Cho and Tracy Morgan. Getting the comics there, from their tours and sets, for the brief window was tricky, but they showed up in force for the comedy trailblazer.
“What was amazing was how many people found a way to get there, even if it meant staying somewhere, flying in from somewhere or flying out to somewhere,” said Melissa. “It was a ‘meant to be’ kind of thing, and I’m really proud of my work on this.”
Despite the title and the urn photo shoot, “It’s not a roast. It’s a celebration,” she said. “And yet they do make fun of her.”
Glaser, who’s had a meteoric rise over the last year, “was a huge fan of my mother’s … and thrilled to be asked to be a part of it,” Melissa said, adding that she thinks Joan “would really like” the Golden Globe host’s comedy. She said that “stylistically,” their “timing is very similar.”
Melissa thinks that Joan would have loved comedian Nikki Glaser. (Stephanie Diani/NBC)
How would Joan, who was sharp-tongued with biting wit, have fared professionally in 2025 amid this era of cancel culture?
“I think she would have found a way to make fun of cancel culture,” Melissa said. “She would have turned cancel culture on its head and made fun of what you cannot do … just like Dave Chappelle — and I would hope she would be grandfathered in like Dave Chappelle was.”
Being the gatekeeper for her larger-than-life mother’s legacy is not easy, but it’s something she takes seriously. This summer, the National Comedy Center will open its Joan Rivers exhibition, complete with her famed joke archive. While a limited TV series with Kathryn Hahn never happened, Joan fans may get a biopic — eventually.
“We’ve had a movie in development with Sony for quite a while,” Melissa said. “The conversation started during the very end of COVID. We’ve been going through the script process, the writing process and then we had the [Hollywood writers] strike, so now we’re just getting back on track. Coming out of TV, [where] things go so fast, I don’t know how these movie people do it … having to be that slow.”
As for the former Fashion Police host’s dream casting, “I’m going to keep my mouth shut on that,” she said. There are “conversations in progress.”
Personally, 2025 has been a wild year for Melissa. In January, she lost everything — including Joan’s actual ashes and those of her father, Edgar Rosenberg, who died by suicide in 1987 — in the Palisades Fire.
“Unfortunately, no, the ashes did not survive,” she said. “I just didn’t think to grab them. Why would I? I didn’t think our house was going to burn down. It’s L.A. — it’s not like we haven’t evacuated before. I could just go get a scoop of the house and call it a day, and have my mom, Uncle Tommy, and my dad and all the dogs. I’m probably going to go do that.”
Melissa did take her mother’s Emmy, a photo of her father and a drawing her mother did of Melissa and son Cooper when evacuating. She also had a ring of her mother’s that she had recently worn to an event as well as her parents’ watches.
After the fire, Melissa moved five times in 11 weeks. She’s now settled in a rental in the L.A. area. Will she rebuild? She’s thinking about it but taking a “wait and see” approach.
“I don’t know yet,” she said. “I’m not letting go of my lot, but I’m trying to stay very disciplined in our thinking because, honestly, nobody knows how anything is going to go. Luckily, my house has its plans, so it would be a much easier process. … Fortunately, I can sort of take a wait and see. I don’t want to be the first one, and don’t want to be the last one.”
On the brighter side, two months after the fires, Melissa, the self-described “worst bride ever,” married attorney Steve Mitchel in Jackson Hole, Wyo.
They “absolutely” thought about postponing the wedding. “A lot of people said we should, and a lot of people said we shouldn’t,” she said. However, the “loudest voices saying, ‘Do not cancel,’” were friends who had also lost homes in the L.A. fires, so they pressed on.
The wedding was “very nontraditional,” which is what she wanted. “I always said, ‘I want to have a party where a wedding breaks out,” Melissa said, “and that is what we did.”
Her vows fit the nontraditional theme because “I’m not gonna promise anything in a room full of people,” she said of her second wedding. “I’m not having you put that on tape to come back and bite me. And I don’t think I can vow to do something, but I can vow to not to.”
The one thing she did do was a mother-son dance with “my little man,” Cooper. The 24-year-old recently moved out on his own but also lost everything in the fire. “He’s been rebuilding too,” she said of her only child.
Melissa and her 24-year-old son, Cooper, both appear in the comedy special. (Stephanie Diani/NBC)
How does she stay positive when bad things happen?
“I don’t think I necessarily stay positive,” Melissa replied. “I stay in forward momentum. My mom used to say: ‘You get a weekend wallow.’ Obviously, that’s a saying, [you may need more than one weekend], but that means you get an appropriate amount of time, and then you get up and you start moving forward.”
She continued, “I learned that with my dad. Some days, moving forward was only that I was able to get out of bed. And the same with my mom. You had to allow yourself to have the days where you couldn’t, and then the next day you could get across the room. It’s about chin out, eyes forward, because your forward momentum will make things change. Better or worse, that’s to be seen. But if you’re just sitting in it, you’re doing nothing. So it’s not so much optimism or good attitude, it’s more I’ve been raised and taught: You go forward.”
Joan Rivers: A Dead Funny All-Star Tribute airs May 13 at 10 p.m. ET on NBC. The uncensored cut streams on May 14 on Peacock.
