Phyllis Diller

Phyllis Ada Diller, born Phyllis Ada Driver on July 17, 1917, in Lima, Ohio, was an American stand-up comedian, actress, author, musician, and visual artist who became one of the first female comics to achieve household-name status in the United States. She died on August 20, 2012. Among the comedians who have cited her as an influence are Joan Rivers, Roseanne Barr, and Ellen DeGeneres. Her stage persona was built around self-deprecating humor, wild costuming, exaggerated hair, and a distinctive cackling laugh.

The only child of Perry Marcus Driver, an insurance agent, and Frances Ada Driver, Diller grew up in Lima, where she attended Central High School and discovered her comic abilities early. Her surname had been anglicized from the German "Treiber" several generations before her birth. She studied piano for three years at the Sherwood Music Conservatory of Columbia College Chicago before concluding that her teachers and mentors played with greater skill than she believed she could attain. She subsequently transferred to Bluffton College, where she studied literature, history, psychology, and philosophy. In 1939, she met Sherwood Diller, a classmate's brother, and the two eloped, marrying in Bluffton on November 4 of that year. She left college without completing her degree and spent years primarily as a homemaker, raising five children; a sixth died in infancy.

During World War II, the family relocated as Sherwood took work at the Willow Run B-24 Bomber Plant in Ypsilanti Charter Township, Michigan, and later transferred to Naval Air Station Alameda in California. Diller began working as a women's editor at a small newspaper and as an advertising copywriter for an Oakland department store. In 1952, she joined KROW radio in Oakland, filming several 15-minute television episodes of Phyllis Dillis, the Homely Friendmaker, in which she offered absurd advice to homemakers while dressed in a housecoat. She later worked as a copywriter and director of promotion and marketing at KSFO radio in San Francisco, and as a vocalist on a music-review television program called Pop Club.

On March 7, 1955, at age 37, Diller made her professional stand-up debut at The Purple Onion, a basement club in North Beach, San Francisco. Prior to that appearance, she had tested her material only before fellow PTA members at Edison Elementary School. The initial two-week booking at The Purple Onion extended to a record 89 consecutive weeks. She wrote her own material and maintained a file cabinet of gags, drawing early influence from Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, and Jonathan Winters while developing a comedic persona centered on a surreal, self-mocking femininity. Her stage look featured garish, baggy dresses, oversized hair, and a cigarette holder fitted with a wooden cigarette, as she did not smoke.

Her first national television exposure came as a contestant on Groucho Marx's quiz show You Bet Your Life in 1958. Repeated bookings on the Jack Paar Tonight Show led to an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, which broadened her national profile. Beginning in 1959 and continuing through the 1960s, she released multiple comedy albums, including Wet Toe in a Hot Socket!, Laughs, Are You Ready for Phyllis Diller?, and The Beautiful Phyllis Diller. In the early 1960s, she performed at the Bon Soir in Greenwich Village, where Barbra Streisand served as her opening act. She accompanied Bob Hope to Vietnam in 1966 as part of his USO troupe and co-starred with him in the films Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! (1966), Eight on the Lam (1967), and The Private Navy of Sgt. O'Farrell (1968).

In 1964, Diller brought her talents to Broadway, appearing in Hello, Dolly! Her film work spanned more than 40 productions, beginning with Splendor in the Grass in 1961. Television credits included Night Gallery, The Muppet Show, CHiPs, The Love Boat, Cybill, Boston Legal, and 11 seasons of The Bold and the Beautiful. She became a semi-regular on The Hollywood Squares starting in 1967, appearing in 28 episodes through 1980, and made recurring cameo appearances on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. Her voice acting roles included the monster's wife in Mad Monster Party?, the Queen in A Bug's Life, Granny Neutron in The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, and Thelma Griffin in Family Guy. Diller was also publicly recognized by the cosmetic surgery industry for being among the first celebrities to openly discuss plastic surgery.