JOAN Rivers calls them her chaperones; elegant English satirists Kit and The Widow call themselves her fluffers. Their role is to warm up America's First Lady of Comedy for her grand entrance in flowing pink chiffon on one of only six dates on her first British tour.

Ironically, saucy-mouthed singer Kit and his dapper piano accompanist are as chilled as champagne, freezing politicians and Andrew Lloyd Webber alike with a glassy stare, and waspishly sending up Miss Rivers on I Honestly Thought She Was Dead and a pastiche of I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face.

Regal bitching of the English kind makes way for the American tornado. With Kit's image of Joan as a "Siamese Cat caught in a wind tunnel" freshly imprinted in the mind, the cat's whiskers enters, prowling and fabulous in plastic glamour, only her gait betraying her 71 years. She doesn't need warming up. Joan Rivers is a blowtorch.

Her motor-mouth delivery exceeds the speed limit from start to finish, a rude and raucous hour and whatever later. Victims lay strewn on the roadside: Bush, the Clintons, Winona Ryder, cheapskate first husbands; Jewish and Islamic women and finally English toffs.

She works off the front row and then moves onto her band, who appear to be inactive, nervous stooges in monkey suits until they play her off at the finale. By then, so quick, so current, so sassy on sex, Rivers had York on laughter flood alert.

Updated: 11:07 Tuesday, October 12, 2004