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American journalist and TV personality Anderson Cooper came out as gay yesterday via friend and blogger Andrew Sullivan. Whether or not anyone was surprised by the announcement, reactions from the celebrity community have been overwhelmingly supportive. The best, worst, snarkiest and just plain weird are featured below:

Best: 

Joan Rivers: “[Anderson Cooper] came out! So, THAT’S why he never wanted to date me! I would’ve loved having Gloria Vanderbilt as my mother-in-law.”

Mindy Kaling: “I don’t care, I’m still gonna make a run at Anderson Cooper.”

Mia Farrow: “In a perfect world, I don’t think it’s anyone else’s business—Anderson Cooper.”

Columnist Nicholas Kristof: “Most important thing abt [Anderson Cooper] isn’t that he’s gay. It’s that he’s a first-rate journalist.”

Worst: 

The Fake CNN: ” Snooki unsure of father of baby. Anderson Cooper ruled out.”

Jack Black: “Anderson Cooper comes out, Tom Cruise is getting a divorce. I think we all know that something super-duper fabulous is going down!”

TV Host Billy Eichner: “[Anderson Cooper], was it Magic Mike?”

Snarkiest: 

Comedian Drew Harmon: “Anderson Cooper is gay. Also breaking: sun rises in East, sets in West.”

Rush Limbaugh (not via Twitter): “[Cooper’s announcement] might be the best ratings move CNN’s made in I don’t know how long.”

Comedian Erin Gibson: “Hooray! [Anderson Cooper] came out as gray!”

Weirdest:

Olympic Skater Johnny Weird-Voronov: “Very proud of [Anderson Cooper]. I recently shared an airplane ride with him and he smells of baby powder and sunshine. Well done sir.”

Dave Rubin: “BREAKING NEWS: CNN’s Wolf Blitzer has just come out as an actual wolf.”

It’s that line, delivered by Marie (Carrie Fisher) to Jess (Bruno Kirby), after learning that their mutual best friends Harry and Sally (yes, Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan) have switched up their friendship from platonic to “it’s complicated,” that makes Nora Ephron’s screenplay for When Harry Met Sally a work for the ages. (Yes, even more than that orgasm scene in Katz’s.) How a movie could be so light, so funny, so modern, could also manage to be so deftly universal and heart-piercing is the grand achievement of Ephron’s quite checkered career.

Very sadly, this career came to an end last night as Ephron lost a private battle with acute myeloid leukemia. But over the course of four decades, Ephron, an Upper West Side Jew raised in Hollywood by a team of play- and screenwriting parents, married the lightning-quick wit of Joan Rivers and the career ambition of Barbra Streisand in order to give birth to one of the most impressive – and sure to be emulated – lives a storyteller has ever enjoyed.

Harry garnered Ephron a solo Oscar nomination, though she already had shared a nod with Alice Arlen for adapting Silkwood (her first outing with Meryl Streep) and would later share another nomination with Jeff Arch and David S. Ward for Sleepless in Seattle, her second at-bat as director and first monster hit. Though she came from a prominent background that opened many doors to her, Ephron’s career history demonstrates an eager and talented employee who made sure to fill whatever room she was in, first as a mail at Newsweek and later as a writer for the New York Post, Esquire and New York (a magazine that would continue to extol and interview her as recently as this past year).

Her attention to detail and human folly characterized her work, and it’s those nuances permeating her work in all genres, both non-fiction and fictional, that elevated her humorous observations to something more prescient and evergreen. Working on an ultimately dismissed version of a script for All the President’s Men with then-husband, Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein, helped open even more doors for the writer in Hollywood in the mid-1970s. (It was the second marriage for Ephron; a third, to GoodFellas co-writer Nicholas Pileggi lasted until her death.)

Ephron was also, famously, willing to divulge her own personal hurts and humiliations, as she did in Heartburn, loosely translating her marriage to, betrayal by, and divorce from Bernstein. (The two had two sons together, Jacob and Max.) Streep and Jack Nicholson played the Ephron and Bernstein surrogates.

The most celebrated directors and actors clamored to work with Ephron over the years – Tom Hanks, Diane Keaton, Nicole Kidman, Mike Nichols, John Travolta. 2009’s Julie & Julia also helped turn the page in Streep’s own career, providing the opportunity to plum deep in a comedic but respectful look at chef Julia Child. Though her directorial debut, This Is My Life, showed some of the under-nourished signs of a fledgling director, it signaled one of Ephron’s signature storytelling motifs that would continue through other films like Mixed Nuts, You’ve Got Mail, Bewitched: strong women.

The dominant theme of the movies in which Ephron had a voice is that they feature women on equal emotional, professional, and romantic footing with their male counterparts. In Life, Dottie (Julie Kavner), is a single mother and struggling stand-up comic who suddenly finds success. Annie, the Ryan character in Sleepless, is a Baltimore journalist; Kathleen, the Ryan role in Mail, runs a family bookstore on the Upper West Side. She believes in the joy of reading and opposes the corporate monoliths out to destroy the charms of smaller stores. Though many (not all, however) of her female leads ended up with the guy, they remain defined by their own interests and experiences. The man need not complete her; he merely complements her.

Ephron had, typically, showed few signs of slowing down. A Broadway production of Lucky Guy, a new play late columnist Mike McAlary, is targeted for a Broadway opening in early 2013 and would mark Hanks’ Main Stem debut. But her crowning achievement will always be, for me, Harry, a film I have seen over two hundred times since it opened nearly 23 years ago. For all the classics like Casablanca and Gone With the Wind, and record-breaking moneymakers like Avatar and The Avengers, Harry is, by leaps and bounds, the single movie mentioned more than any other as a personal favorite in my conversations with people about movies they love. Why? Because of how Ephron tapped into its cross-generational appeal. She knew that a movie about love, insecurity, good food and real estate could reach just about anyone.

Ephron’s career and legacy are impressive enough to make even the most fulfilled and self-assured recite that other, oft-quoted line from Harry: “I’ll have what she’s having.”

What started out as a pretty entertaining contest show eventually made me cringe from the participants’ behavior, especially that of Joan and Melissa Rivers. Melissa went pretty far in the challenge before being fired and was allowed back for the finale to assist her legendary comedian mother, who won the title.

There is no arguing that Team Rivers is reality television gold. I would not be surprised if they are already inking the deal for their own show where they can carry on, name call, break things and have meltdowns on a weekly basis.

I don’t know these two women, yet I feel as though I’ve worked with them. I still remember my first job, where a production assistant took thousands of dollars worth of ad comps and threw them down the hallway in a fit of rage. Not only did she not get fired, she was moved into the department and job she’d been lobbying for.

Then there was the creative director who chucked a stapler across the room and another who ripped a phone out of the wall. I’ve also witnessed co-workers having tantrums similar to that of the junior Rivers, who when let go, cursed and yelled, ran in every direction and looked as though her head was going to spin around like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist.

I really don’t remember any of my former workmates getting pink slipped for their antics and, in fact, many—like the Rivers—were rewarded regardless. To this day, I still find myself wondering, why is dignity not a skill set required in the workplace?
“Over the last three decades, there’s been more license for [bad] behavior,” says Christine Wilson of Career-911. The Upper East Side executive coach also says that people can manage their behavior if they know there will be consequences, but unfortunately many times there aren’t any, so there’s no impetus to change.

Wilson points out that there are industries where special talents are made mystical, for example creative environments like advertising and fashion, or high stress Wall Street-type jobs. When the tantrum-thrower is a real performer, that’s when management’s thinking really gets clouded.

“Bosses could tell the people to take their bad behavior elsewhere, but with them would go the stream of income they generate,” the career consultant says. “So senior people get into a syndrome where they make excuses and point to the person’s results.”

Wilson also says that because the matter is never addressed, management will never know if the employee would have gotten even better results if he/she weren’t acting out all the time.

I can’t say anyone’s behavior on The Celebrity Apprentice was admirable, not even The Donald’s. But at least now I understand why Joan Rivers’ champagne flute smashing, Vegas poker bashing and general insult hurling was not only tolerated but embraced. She is a performer, garnering $250,000 for God’s Love We Deliver, which provides food free of charge to the seriously ill. And so the end justifies the means.
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Lorraine Duffy Merkl has been named Humor Writer of the Month by the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop. Her column appears every other week.