With her shock of hair and cackling laugh, Phyllis Diller, who died Monday in Los Angeles at 95, was a gale force in comedy for nearly half a century.
And she was one of the first women with such a job.
“Can you name one other one?” she asked, the last time I talked to her, about five years ago. “Well, there weren’t any.”
“I didn’t mean to be a trailblazer,” she told me. “I just needed a job and my talent was being funny. And I didn’t even recognize that fact. It was my husband – Sherwood Diller – who was the person who kept insisting that I become a comic.
“We argued about it for two years,” Diller said. It finally culminated in her first gig, at a Red Cross hospital.
“There were four people in the audience – all four of them in bed,” she says. “Nobody laughed. One guy re-enlisted. Two of them died.”
It was all uphill from there.
A native of Lima, Ohio, Diller said it was a succession of fellow Ohioans who helped her early career.
“The first person that really, really recognized me and liked me a lot was a fellow Ohio person, Jack Parr,” she said.
“That exposed me to another Ohioan Bob Hope, who God knows he thought I was the funniest thing since dill pickles,” Diller said. “Bob Hope took me to a different level and made me feel that I was really funny.”
Part of her appeal was that distinctive explosion of a laugh.
When she was talking about the practice of early television, she said it was always better performing live than rehearsing over and over on tape. “I love live performance. It’s scary but it’s real. Let’s compare it to artificial insemination. Ha HA!”
And there went that famous laugh.
“That’s my real laugh. I can’t help that,” she said. “Sometimes I’m lying in bed trying to go to sleep and I will laugh out loud at something I thought about.”
At 90, she was still being offered a few roles – including a plastic surgery patient on “Nip/Tuck” that she didn’t take.
“I’ve been offered some things that, oh, I wish I’d been offered when I had the strength and energy to do them,” she said.
Still, Diller added, “When they need a 90-year-old woman they always come and ask me. I’ve played two dead ladies and it’s so easy to do – lie there and open your mouth.”
Still, she was able her distinctive voice to a variety of animated projects into her 90s. On the small screen she’s been heard on “Animaniacs,” “The Wild Thornberrys,” “Hey Arnold,” “Jimmy Neutron,” “King of the Hill,” “The Powerpuff Girls,” “Family Guy” and “Robot Chicken.” On the big screen, she was the voice of the Queen in “A Bug’s Life.”
“Those voice-overs, those are simple,” Diller said. “You can show up in your jammies and your curlers.”