Phyllis Diller, the housewife turned humorist who aimed some of her sharpest barbs at herself, punctuating her jokes with her trademark cackle, died Monday morning in her Los Angeles home at age 95.
“She died peacefully in her sleep and with a smile on her face,” her longtime manager, Milton Suchin, told The Associated Press.
Diller, who suffered a near-fatal heart attack in 1999, was found by her son, Perry Diller. The cause of her death has not been released.
Bing: Phyllis Diller’s best jokes
She was a staple of nightclubs and television from the 1950s — when female comics were rare indeed — until her retirement in 2002. Diller built her stand-up act around the persona of the corner-cutting housewife (“I bury a lot of my ironing in the backyard”) with bizarre looks, a wardrobe to match (by “Omar of Omaha”) and a husband named “Fang.”
Wrote Time magazine in 1961: “Onstage comes something that, by its own description, looks like a sackful of doorknobs. With hair dyed by Alcoa, pipe-cleaner limbs and knees just missing one another when the feet are wide apart, this is not Princess Volupine. It is Phyllis Diller, the poor man’s Auntie Mame, only successful female among the New Wave comedians and one of the few women funny and tough enough to belt out a ‘standup’ act of one-line gags.”
She inspired a generation of female comics, including Ellen DeGeneres and Whoopi Goldberg, who remembered Diller on Twitter Monday.
“We lost a comedy legend today,” DeGeneres wrote. “Phyllis Diller was the queen of the one-liners. She was a pioneer.”
“A true original has died,” Goldberg wrote of Diller. “There was NO One like her, no 1 looked like her sounded like her. A FUNNY FUNNY.”
Diller described herself as “one of those life-of-the-party types,” in an interview with AP in 1965. “You’ll find them in every bridge club, at every country club. People invited me to parties only because they knew I would supply some laughs. They still do.”
She didn’t get into comedy until she was nearly 40, after her first husband, Sherwood Diller, prodded her for two years to give up a successful career as an advertising and radio writer. Through it all, she was also a busy mother.
