Joan Rivers

Joan Rivers broke into late night before almost any other woman got the chance, hosting Fox's The Late Show starting in 1986 — a move that cost her her relationship with Johnny Carson and nearly her career, and she kept working anyway. That's the throughline for her whole life in comedy: relentless, self-deprecating, often savage material delivered by someone who refused to be sidelined by an industry that kept trying to sideline her. She was still releasing new stand-up and winning new awards well into her 80s, decades after most careers would have quietly ended.