NEW YORK (AP) — Joan Rivers was fearless.

Or, to be more accurate, a humorist who fearlessly spun fears into gold.

They were golden, Rivers’ potshots, put-downs and zingers (often aimed at herself) that mocked a world of vanities, foolishness and, yes, fear.

“The trouble with me is, I make jokes too often,” she told The Associated Press in 2013. “That’s how I get through life. Life is SO difficult — everybody’s been through something! But you laugh at it, it becomes smaller.”

So she made fears evaporate, at least for a moment. She blew them up with relish.

She was known as acerbic or even cruel, but often there was bitter honesty in the humour, and anyway her targets were big enough to take it. When she famously joked about Elizabeth Taylor’s obesity (“She has more chins than a Beijing phone book”) both Taylor and phone customers in Beijing handily withstood the assault.

She didn’t spare her own Jewishness, or larger Jewish sensibilities. (At least one of her jokes invoked the Nazi Holocaust and sparked an outcry from the Anti-Defamation League.) But offstage she took her Jewish identity seriously. Just last March, she quietly got inked at a Manhattan tattoo parlour with a tiny “6M” on the inside of her arm, a personal reminder of the six million Jews who died under the Nazis.

For her, even the Grim Reaper was fair game.

Last summer, Rivers — then 80 — rocked her audience at a Manhattan club when, midway through her set, she pretended to have a seizure. A moment later, satisfied she had punked the room, she teased those present by observing how they would have loved to see her drop dead in mid-act. Sure, it would be shocking and sad, she chortled. But what a great story to be able to tell afterward!