Joan Rivers’s directions for her own funeral service were printed in the program the ushers handed out on Sunday at Temple Emanu-El on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

“I want my funeral to be a big showbiz affair with lights, cameras, action,” the paragraph-long directive said. “I want paparazzi and I want publicists making a scene! I want it to be Hollywood all the way. I don’t want some rabbi rambling on.”

So after reading from Ecclesiastes, Rabbi Joshua M. Davidson told the invitation-only audience of mourners that he was not about to be that rabbi. More than an hour of tributes and reminiscences followed from friends who occasionally found themselves turning to Rabbi Davidson, the synagogue’s senior rabbi, as if to say not “Can we talk?” — one of the phrases Ms. Rivers made famous — but “Can we talk like that here?” after uttering language not usually heard in a place of worship.

“Sorry, rabbi,” the columnist Cindy Adams said. She was not the only one who looked his way.

But there were stories that can be repeated in a newspaper, stories that made the crowd of hundreds laugh — like the one the television personality Deborah Norville told about watching Ms. Rivers scatter a friend’s ashes around a rose bush at Buckingham Palace. Or the one Ms. Norville told about how, instigated by Ms. Rivers at a party in France that was threatened by heavy rain, they rented costumes worthy of Louis XIV — magisterial robes and powdered wigs. They even got a costume for another guest, Walter Cronkite.