Joan Rivers has known plenty of rich people.

There are the old rich, guarded and distant; she won't name names. “These are people I still sup with and pretend I like.”
There's the poker-rich Annie Duke, her “Apprentice” opponent; Rivers doesn't pretend. “I didn't like her … It had nothing to do with poker; I wouldn't have liked her if she played (bleeping) bingo.”
There are the show-business rich, including her. And there are the people she meets in “How'd You Get So Rich?” Many came up with one basic idea.
“You know you blow bubbles and it makes a bubble?” Rivers said. “This guy made one that makes five bubbles. You understand? Big (bleeping) deal.
“Lives next door to Barbra Streisand ... His dog has … a psychiatrist … She's making the dog feel relaxed. How much more relaxed can you be? You can lick your (self).”
During the six weeks of the show, we'll meet a dozen such people, including the guy who created goofy “Billy Bob Teeth.” He says he has $50 million; for fun, he crushes pickup trucks with a bulldozer.
Larry Jones, president of TV Land (which airs the show) points to the guy who stumbled into riches via laziness: “He wanted to reach his (TV) remote and didn't want to go over the top of the blanket. So he cut holes in it – and then created the Slanket. The guy is worth millions.”
Once he had the idea, Rivers said, he was far from lazy; that's common among the new-rich.
“They all work like dogs,” she said. “There's not one person that said, '9 to 5 is my deal.'”
That includes a guy who was 2 when his Cuban parents sent him alone to live with relatives in the U.S.
“He lived with 18 people in two rooms,” she said. “Worked his way through Harvard cleaning toilets.” He became a big-time lawyer, specializing in franchises. “Now (he) owns the biggest house in Miami.”
Then there was the Californian whose leisure – married to a doctor in Bel Air – ended abruptly.
“At the age of 49, he came to her after they had come back from skiing at Vail … and he said to her, 'I'm leaving you for a 19-year-old with a shaved head.' And she had no money.”
People told her she was good at make-up. Soon, she was doing it for the “Titanic” movie, then was creating waterproof make-up.
“She started to sell camouflage to the armies,” Rivers said. “She now sells it worldwide – but only, as she says, 'to armies I like.'”
Each half-hour profiles two such people. There are also quick visits with people Rivers confronts in Beverly Hills or Miami. “You walk down a street and somebody goes past you in a Maserati or a Lamborghini or whatever those stupid cars are, and you go, 'How'd you get so (bleeping) rich?'”
Rivers says (bleeping) and its variations often – or, at least, more often than you expect from a tiny 76-year-old woman who grew up comfortably as a doctor's daughter and graduated from Barnard. Her feistiness sort of reflects a previous generation.
“I had a grandmother who came over (from Russia) with 13 children and no husband,” Rivers said.” (She) cleaned fish and every one of those children went through college and were dentists and doctors and school teachers. It's the old way of doing it.”
Or the new way, for some. That Cuban immigrant, featured in the opener, started a lawn service at 7. Today, his Miami home has 13 bedrooms and 15 bathrooms.