Phyllis Diller

For 37 years Phyllis Ada Driver did not perform for money. She grew up an only child in Lima, Ohio, studied piano for three years at Chicago's Sherwood Music Conservatory, heard her teachers play, and concluded she would never be that good. She transferred to Bluffton College, eloped with Sherwood Diller in 1939, left school without a degree, and raised six children — one died in infancy — on very little. By the early 1950s she was writing advertising copy and running promotion for KSFO radio in San Francisco. Her husband spent two years pushing her to try an audience. On March 7, 1955, at a North Beach basement club called the Purple Onion, she finally did.

What she built at the Purple Onion was not an act but a character: the fright wig, the sack dresses, the holder with a wooden cigarette in it because she never smoked, and the cackle that told the room she was in on the joke. The material was her own supposed ugliness, her housekeeping, and an invented husband named Fang. At her peak she was clocked at 12 laughs a minute. She toured for 15 years, worked steadily in television, made three films with Bob Hope, and became a piano soloist with symphony orchestras billed as Dame Illya Dillya.

The joke was always that she was ugly, and the argument about that has never closed. Lucille Ball was the biggest comic star in the country, but she worked inside a script and a set. Diller stood alone at a microphone, and by her own account had never seen another woman doing it. Comedians and critics since have argued that the self-insult ratified exactly what it mocked, teaching a generation of women that the price of the microphone was self-contempt. Others call it a Trojan horse that got her onto stages with no other opening. She also talked openly about her 15 cosmetic procedures, the first at 55, when nobody admitted to any. Joan Rivers, who heard rage in the act rather than apology, walked through the door Diller had made, and so did everyone after her.

She wrote every joke herself and kept them all. The gag file was a steel cabinet of 48 drawers holding more than 50,000 index cards, filed by subject, and in 2003 she gave it to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, which put it on display in 2011 alongside a wig, the gloves and the cigarette holder. She had already quit stand-up in 2002, after a last show at the Suncoast in Las Vegas. What was left was the painting she had done since 1963 and the voice work — grandmothers, queens and one ant monarch in A Bug's Life. She died of heart failure at home in Brentwood on August 20, 2012, at 95.

Phyllis Diller's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Phyllis Diller's Housekeeping Hints book
  Her first best seller, and the act in print 1966
• The Pruitts of Southampton television
  ABC sitcom, later retitled The Phyllis Diller Show — Golden Globe nomination 1966
• The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show television
  A variety hour of her own 1968
• Dame Illya Dillya symphony appearances other
  Piano soloist with orchestras across the country, 1971 to 1981 1971
• The Joys of Aging & How to Avoid Them book 1981
• Like a Lampshade in a Whorehouse: My Life in Comedy book
  Memoir, written with Richard Buskin 2005

• November 4, 1939 aged 22 Elopes with Sherwood Diller and marries in Bluffton, Ohio She left college without a degree. Six children followed, one of whom died in infancy.
• 1952 aged ~35 Goes to work in Bay Area radio as a copywriter She had already been a newspaper women's editor and a department-store ad writer.
• March 7, 1955 aged 37 Makes her stand-up debut at the Purple Onion in San Francisco, at 37 A two-week booking stretched to 89 consecutive weeks.
• 1958 aged ~41 First national television appearance, on Groucho Marx's You Bet Your Life Jack Paar and Ed Sullivan followed and made her a name.
• 1966 aged ~49 Co-stars with Bob Hope and tours Vietnam with his USO troupe Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! was the first of three films with Hope.
• 1971 aged ~54 Begins 10 years as a symphony piano soloist under the name Dame Illya Dillya The San Francisco Examiner called her a fine concert pianist with a firm touch.
• January 15, 1975 aged 57 Receives a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame
• 2002 aged ~85 Retires from stand-up after a final show at the Suncoast in Las Vegas She cited advanced age and a lack of lasting energy.
• August 20, 2012 aged 95 Dies of heart failure at home in Brentwood, Los Angeles, at 95 Her ashes were scattered at sea.

• Joan Rivers 1933–2014
  Comedian and the first woman to host a late-night network talk show influenced
• Groucho Marx 1890–1977
  Comedian who turned the verbal insult into the engine of American comedy, from vaudeville and the Marx Brothers pictures to 14 years of You Bet Your Life. television debut with
• Johnny Carson 1925–2005
  Host of The Tonight Show for thirty years and the model for American late-night television. guest of
• Lucille Ball 1911–1989
  Comedic actress and producer whose I Love Lucy pioneered the sitcom format and changed television. contemporary
• Lenny Bruce 1925–1966
  Prosecuted into bankruptcy for obscenity, and modern stand-up runs directly from him. shared the club circuit with