1973, portrait by Allan Warren, Wikimedia Commons
I absolutely adored her when I was growing up. Phyllis Diller‘s (1917 – 2012 ) appearances on The Merv Griffin Show, The Mike Douglas Show, and The Tonight Show certainly informed my sense of humor as a youth. I still leave myself as the main target of my own barbs.
Diller was a raucous, zany comedian, with a sense of self-deprecation bordering on flat-out self-mockery. In old age, she described herself as a sex symbol for men who don’t give a damn, and she embraced Bob Hope‘s remark that she was so ugly that a peeping Tom once threw up on her windowsill.
She joked about female bodily imperfections ahead of Joan Rivers but, unlike Rivers, who appeared on stage without props or wacky wigs, with Diller it was all an act. She created a persona of a woman with wild hair, flailing cigarette holder, splayed feet, absurd costume, loud, cackling laugh when she was a housewife.
She made more than 40 films, including three in the 1960s with Hope, who also described her as “a Warhol mobile of spare parts picked up along a freeway”. Diller appeared with Hope in 23 television specials and 11 USO tours, seven in Vietnam.
Her first film was Splendor In The Grass (1961), playing the outrageous Texas Guinan, and her last was as herself in the documentary I Am Comic (2010). But, Diller was most at home playing comedy clubs and cabarets. Her stand-up appearances on television developed into a huge cult following for her outrageous one-liners.
“I want to be 65 again; the way I looked when I was 30.”
She was simply the best at the art of the addled look, the slow burn, and the dry put-down.
In 1967, Diller brought her distinctive schtick into a popular television sitcom, The Pruitts Of Southampton. The show was based on the novel House Party (1954) by Patrick Dennis (that Patrick Dennis, author of Auntie Mame). It also starred Gypsy Rose Lee and gay actor Richard Deacon in a sort of upside-down The Beverly Hillbillies. Paul Lynde, John Astin and Marty Ingels had supporting roles. The Pruitts Of Southampton ran for 30 episodes. Her character was a matriarch of fabulously rich family fallen on hard times: “Things are so tough, my daughter is thinking of getting married just for the rice.”
In the fall of 1968, NBC signed Diller to a weekly variety series hoping she would have the same kind of success that her friend Carol Burnett had achieved on CBS. The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show was canceled after three months.
She was born Phyllis Driver in Lima, Ohio. She studied piano at the Sherwood Conservatory in Chicago and Bluffton College, a Mennonite school in Ohio, with the intention of becoming a music teacher. There she met Sherwood Diller and they married in 1939. Diller didn’t finish school, becoming a housewife, and a mother of five children.
The Dillers moved to the Bay Area and struggled to make a living. She found work in local newspapers as an advertising copywriter, moving on to PR jobs while regaling anyone who would listen with barbed accounts of her domestic life. By this time, she thought she could be as funny as the men she saw on television, and in 1952, Diller was hired to do short bits KROW radio and fifteen-minute segments for an afternoon show Phyllis Dillis, The Homely Friendmaker, where, dressed in a housecoat, she offered “advice” to homemakers.
A real pioneer, Diller performed in the nightclubs of North Beach, the bohemian section of San Francisco humming with counterculture offerings: jazz clubs, strip joints, gay bars and beatnik hangouts. Diller made her debut at The Purple Onion. When she came onstage in second-hand evening clothes, highlighted by a ratty fur piece and a cigarette in an elegant holder, the predominantly gay audience was immediately charmed.
Diller had her big break on Jack Paar‘s Tonight Show in 1958, after years of trying to get booked. Her appearance led to an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, which made her nationally famous. She continued to perform stand-up around the country. A then-unknown Barbra Streisand was Diller’s opening act at the The Bon Soir, a Greenwich Village nightclub in 1960.
The Dillers divorced in 1965 and she married actor Warde Donovan a few months later. Donovan turned out to be a bisexual alcoholic, and after three months she filed for divorce, yet they reconciled on the day before the divorce was to have become final. Their marriage lasted another decade. Robert P. Hastings was her partner, from 1985 until his death in 1996.
While continuing to do her stand-up act she developed a musical act in the persona of pianist “Dame Illya Dillya”, appearing with symphony orchestras across the US. She played for laughs, but also for real; she was an excellent concert pianist. No joke.
She had to settle out of court with the Diller family over accusations that she was libeling them in her act. Her routine included a fictional husband called Fang. Diller:
“The last time I said let’s eat out, we ate in the garage.”
She was underrated as an actor. She remains the warmest and most comedic Dolly Levi I ever witnessed. On Broadway in Hello, Dolly! in 1969 opposite Richard Deacon‘s Horace, Diller brought her comedic wit along to bounce down those red carpeted steps in her own special way.
Diller loved The Gays:
“Gay men have the most wonderful sense of humor, they are willing to laugh. They appeal to me and I appeal to them.”
Diller returned the favor. Her one-liners skewered her gawky looks and her domestic life, but she never stooped to the homophobic humor of the time, even though gays were an easy mark during her era. Two of her best friends were gay guys: George Chakiris, who won the Academy Award for West Side Story, and poet/musician Rod McKuen.
Diller:
“Joan Rivers and I both absolutely insist that we never would have got started without our gay audience. They were the first to actually accept us as funny women.”
She paved the way for Chelsea Handler, Margaret Cho, and Sarah Silverman. She was the first female standup to headline in Las Vegas. In addition to being a performer, Diller was a writer, recording artist, spokesperson, gourmet cook, entrepreneur, philanthropist and humanitarian.
She was much-loved within the industry.
Diller joked about being old for 40 years:
“I am at an age where my back goes out more than I do.”
Diller’s later life was dogged with medical problems, including a heart attack in 1999. Her last big-time stand-up appearance was in Las Vegas in 2002. Three years later, she wrote:
“I miss the laughter. I do miss the actual hour … that hour is a high; it’s as good as you can feel. A wonderful, wonderful happiness, and great power.”
Diller took her final bow in 2012 at 95 years old. She enjoyed her nightly martini right up to the end.
Here are 10 of her best jokes:
“Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.”
“On my honeymoon I put on a peekaboo blouse. My husband peeked and booed.”
“I’ve buried a lot of my laundry in the back yard.”
“I was the world’s ugliest baby. I have photos of my folks leaving the hospital with sacks over their heads. I asked my mother how to turn off the electric fan. She said: ‘Grab the blade’!”
“Old age is when the liver spots show through your gloves.”
”I’ve been asked to say a couple of words about my husband, Fang. How about short and cheap?”
”Fang hates work. One day he called in dead.”
”We still have a souvenir from my mother’s last visit. A Persian throw rug. She sat on the cat.”
“Joan Collins was so popular as a teenager, she was 21 before she discovered that cars had front seats; since then, she’s had 15 husbands, four of her own.”
“Ronald Reagan, if you ever get to be president, and I think you may, and there’s a depression— try not to have it at a bad time, like when everybody’s out of work.”
