Tony Tripoli turned to a badly-dressed Kim Kardashian to try and rouse Joan Rivers from her coma

It was August 2014 and Tony Tripoli was desperate.

His friend and Fashion Police boss Joan Rivers was in a coma after a botched outpatient procedure at New York’s Yorkville Endoscopy.

He so badly wanted the 81-year-old comedy legend to wake up and make the world laugh again.

So Tripoli turned to something he knew would normally pique her interest: bad fashion.

‘Kim (Kardashian) had been photographed wearing an especially distasteful garment the night before. I said to Joan, “You have to see this dress,”‘ Tripoli tells The Daily Beast.

‘Melissa (Rivers, Joan’s daughter) and I joked that if anything could wake Joan from a coma it was Kim Kardashian wearing yet another dress that was too small for her.’

Tripoli, who was head writer on Fashion Police and is now an executive producer of the show, also read some tweets to Rivers from celebrities who had taken to Twitter to express well wishes for – celebrities whose fashion and behavior she had trashed.

‘Joan called Rihanna a whore every week, and Katy Perry, who she trashed — all these people tweeted their thoughts for Joan,’ he said. ‘Katy Perry wrote that what was the point of dressing up in “dumb outfits” if Joan wasn’t there to trash it.’

Tripoli recalls saying to Rivers: ‘Can you believe all these girls we’ve been so rough on this whole time ‘got it?’

He now says: ‘That part of being famous was being made fun of by Joan Rivers. … Reading these tweets that really revealed that these celebrities had been in on the joke all the time, and it was fine.’

Rivers never emerged from the coma and died on September 4, 2014.