Joan Rivers and I were bonding; at least I thought we were. She was telling me that she never feels as alive as when she's doing stand-up. "I can't wait to get onstage," she said. She performs most weeks at the Laurie Beechman Theatre near Times Square. "I'm so happy onstage."

That's sort of the way I feel about writing, as nerdy as it sounds. Some of the most fun I've ever had is during a second draft. But Joan corrected me: The work isn't what it's about for her, at least not entirely. She listed some of the setbacks she's famously suffered over the course of her long and strenuous career, as her daughter Melissa and I sat in her highly decorated library off Fifth Avenue, and listened. The two were about to embark on a 10-day publicity tour for the second season of "Joan and Melissa: Joan Knows Best?" their foray into reality TV.

"My firing from Fox," Joan remembered. "Edgar's suicide. Getting banned from late night. The most important thing was you cannot show your child you can be defeated in life. What a terrible example: Your father committed suicide and your mother gave up? My whole career was, 'I'll show them! You'll be sorry.'"

I met Ms. Rivers through interior designer Mario Buatta, who sits at her right or left handI can't remember whichat her epic Thanksgiving dinners. He suggested I attend her stand-up show and he would introduce us. I welcomed the opportunity because there's something quintessentially New York about Joan Rivers, even though she's lived long stretches of her life in L.A. and currently divides her time between the two. Maybe it's that samurai attitude, plus the fact that she was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Larchmont. Besides, as far back as the '60s and the "Ed Sullivan Show," I thought she was one of the most brilliant comedians I'd ever seen. In the same league as George Carlin and Richard Pryor. It wasn't just the material. It was the energy, the sense of improvisation; you felt you had the privilege of getting to watch a great mind at work.

"The really great jokes don't get into the file," she told me. She was referring to her meticulous joke file, featured in her 2010 documentary, "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work." "They'll come to me onstage."

Melissa observed: "When she first walks out on stageyou do this big breath, taking in the energy of the room." Melissa has been attending her mother's shows since she was a toddler. "It's almost like a workout. You come out and go, 'So'"

"When she was small I'd forget my act," Joan said. "She knew it so well I'd say, 'Do my act.'"

I'd actually met Joan before. It was 1987 at Caesar's Atlantic City. I was doing a piece about the Caesar's Palace empire, where Joan was one of the headliners. I met Melissa, too. And Garry Shandling, Joan's opening act at the time and Melissa's sometime baby sitter. "Garry had the fun job of watching me between shows," Melissa remembered.

I'm pleased to report that Joan Rivers remains as funny as ever, perhaps even more so offstage than on. Few of her jokes come at anyone's expense, except her own, and expletives, with which her act is liberally seasoned, are nowhere to be found. She's a proper lady. And for everything that's been said about her mixed results with plastic surgery she looked fabulous the day we got together.

In private, Joan's obsessions sound little different than those of a thousand other Upper East Side mothers. Getting into the right schoolsfirst for Melissa and now for Melissa's 11-year-old son, Cooper. Who knew that Melissa, in her early 40s, attended Park Avenue Christian, a tony preschool, before the family moved to Los Angeles? Joan admitted that she wouldn't reveal the school's full name to her Jewish relatives. "I said, 'It's called Park Avenue.'"

She also remembers her arguments with Melissa over where she would go to college. Melissa was considering institutions of higher learning with a healthy party component: the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Colorado at Boulder. She ended up at the University of Pennsylvania, the result somehow preordained by her mother's powers of persuasion, or at least her pocketbook. "I said, 'You can pay for everything west of the Mississippi,'" Joan said. "It's all about college. Your whole life they say, 'Where did you go to school?' At my age you can't remember; their nurse will say."

"We had negotiated on Tulane," Melissa recalled.

"I didn't want any city under sea level," Joan said.

"Don't say New Orleans," Melissa cautioned, one eye on the ratings.

"I say build a hill," Joan said.

I suggested that Cooper's applying to L.A. private schools, which he's apparently in the process of doing and where their show is set (the conceit is that Joan is Melissa's permanent houseguest, having moved into her basement, and can't help but editorialize upon her daughter's life and relationships) would make for riveting reality TV: sweating standardized-test results, hitting up Hollywood heavyweights for letters of recommendation, and artlessly dropping names during the parent interview while insinuating you can bring triumph to their capital campaign.

"It would be the most amazing thing to film if I didn't feel it would jeopardize his chances," Melissa mused.

Joan was willing. "I'm all showbiz," she said. "What the hell."

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