Joan Rivers

For a whole generation of television watchers, award season was associated with Joan Rivers, since no night of glitter and glamour was complete without her razor-sharp commentary from the red carpet, where she would take everyone down a peg or twelve. Joan Rivers, often cruel but always hilarious, was maybe the greatest and purest female comic of all time.

She was so skilled that she not only became Johnny Carson's permanent guest host on The Tonight Program, which was a huge accomplishment for anyone, but she also became the first woman to have her own network late-night talk show, The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers, in 1986. Since then, no other woman has had her own late-night talk program on a major network. Joan Rivers was so unrelentingly humorous that she was able to knock down walls that were instantly re-erected and haven't been torn down for more than 30 years.