Comedian's passport deemed suspicious

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on January 6th, 2010

A Continental gate agent flagged the passport of Joan Rivers, citing the comedian’s two names. (Her name is Joan Rosenberg, but she goes by the name Joan Rivers. You may have heard of her. Apparently Continental gate agents aren’t familiar with her.)

Transportation security had a very bad couple of weeks.

But, when you base transportation security on shaky premises and refuse to base it on good, solid logic because it might be “unfair, irrational or degrading” to someone, then you have a situation where Joan Rivers misses her flight.

We know that Rivers hasn’t exactly been burning up the airwaves with television appearances lately, but she’s an icon. Even a Continental gate agent should have known that Joan Rivers couldn’t be a terrorist. Or is the Continental gate agent (and the airline’s policy with regard to security) so totally disconnected from reality that she wasn’t aware that it was absolutely ridiculous to cause Rivers to miss her flight back to New Jersey? Just how concerned are they with appearances that they would hassle a 76-year-old Jewish grandmother from Brooklyn?

The TSA is in worse shape than we can imagine.

She managed to snap off a few classic Rivers lines.

“If I were going to make up an alias, I wouldn’t pick Rosenberg. I’d pick Jolie or Pitt,” said Rivers, back home Monday in New York with her sense of humor intact. “Do terrorists wear Manolo Blahniks? I can tell you Donna Karan does not make anything that hides a bomb,” she said.

Perhaps the gate agent was a history buff… she might have suspected that Rivers was related to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and might therefore be carrying a small atomic bomb in her carry on.

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