Phyllis Diller:PHYLLIS DILLER, who has died aged 95, was a raucous, zany comedian, with a special line in 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 treasured Bob Hope's remark that she was so ugly that a peeping Tom threw up on her window sill.
She patented this frank, outspoken line in female bodily imperfections well 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 comic persona – wild hair, flailing cigarette holder, splayed feet, absurd costume, loud, cackling laugh – when in fact she was a housewife from Ohio.
She made dozens of movies, including three in the 1960s with Hope (who also described her as “a Warhol mobile of spare parts picked up along a freeway”).
Her natural habitat was the comedy and cabaret club, with stand-up appearances on US TV on the Tonight Show and later the Ed Sullivan Show, where she developed a huge cult following.
Born Phyllis Driver in Lima, Ohio, where her father was an insurance agent, she attended Bluffton College with the intention of becoming a music teacher.
There she met Sherwood Diller and they married in 1939. They moved to California and struggled to make a living, Sherwood in a variety of jobs, Phyllis in local newspapers and as an advertising copywriter, and finally regaling private parties with barbed accounts of life in the kitchen. She made her debut at the Purple Onion, a San Francisco nightclub, in 1955. She achieved a national breakthrough on Jack Paar’s Tonight Show.
The Dillers divorced and Phyllis’s second marriage, to Warde Donovan, ended within a year. She had to settle out of court with her first husband’s family over accusations she was libelling them in her act. Her routine included a fictional husband called Fang, whose idea of a seven-course dinner was a six-pack and a bologna sandwich. From 1985 until his death in 1996, she was the partner of Bob Hastings. She is survived by her son, Perry, and daughters, Suzanne and Sally.
Phyllis Ada Diller, born July 17th, 1917; died August 20th, 2012.