Phyllis Diller and Her Comic Craft

August 22, 2012, 12:23 pm

By JASON ZINOMAN

Early in her career, Phyllis Diller, who died on Monday at age 95, made fun of her legs and her figure. Later, she took aim at her wrinkles and plastic surgery. “I've had so many things done to my body,” she began a joke, “that when I die, God won't know me.”

Fat chance. Even the most clueless deity would recognize her unmistakable laugh. Ms. Diller apparently started making that marvelous quack as a child. Her father called her “the laughing hyena.” Onstage, this confidently joyful guffaw emerging out of a gaping mouth became her signature and something of a playful argument that her insults were rooted in fun, not anxiety.

In 1961, Arthur Gelb wrote in The New York Times that Ms. Dille r was “the leading member of that rare breed of nightclub entertainer - the female stand-up comic.”

Half a century later, Ms. Diller  - who was around so long that she starred in a television series with Gypsy Rose Lee  -  was a comedy titan. Yet she remains underappreciated.

Ms. Diller was long seen as slightly old-fashioned, her self-deprecating one-liners out of step during the brash comedy revolution and boom of the 1970s and '80s. Stand-up comedy, however, is about form as much as content. And Ms. Diller was too singular a voice to be a stereotype. She was not playing a retiring, apologetic wallflower. She dished out insults to her fictional husband, Fang, the same way that borscht belt comics mocked their wives. “Fang is a good loser,” she said. “He lost 11 jobs in one year.”

With her cigarette holder, her spiky shock of hair and her colorful costumes, Ms. Diller looked like a sight gag to some people. Joan Rivers, who followed in her f ootsteps, posted this on Twitter: “The only tragedy is that Phyllis Diller was the last from an era that insisted a woman had to look funny in order to be funny.”

That may be true, but one could also argue that Ms. Diller's persona aged well. You can find her look-at-me flamboyance at a Lady Gaga concert, and when Eddie Murphy did stand-up, he punctuated jokes with a loud laugh in a similarly strategic way.

Ms. Diller, a suburban mother when she started comedy in her late 30s, was the original domestic goddess. While Roseanne Barr delivered cantankerous one-liners without varnish, Ms. Diller, an influence on Ms. Barr, turned the long-suffering housewife into a figure with brassy style, even glamour. Her voice had the sophisticated snap of a screwball heroine. Asked why she started doing stand-up, she said in an interview in the late '60s: “My husband kept nagging me to do it, and I finally decided, What the hell?”

The way she portrayed her family in her act may have seemed harsh, but to her, it was closer to a fantasy. In her memoir “Like a Lampshade in a Whorehouse,” she said it wasn't until she retired that she realized her comedy “was actually a form of therapy.”

Ms. Diller and Ms. Rivers - the most critical founding mothers of modern stand-up comedy - provide a fascinating contrast. When Ms. Rivers burst on the scene in the 1960s, she employed some of the same barbed, self-mocking spirit. She also had an ethnic, New York persona and used her husband real name in her comedy. Ms. Diller seemed more all-American, hailing from Lima, Ohio, but she also had a more theatrical, overtly self-created stage presence.

While Ms. Rivers reinvented herself a few times, Ms. Diller stayed fairly consistent until she retired about a decade ago. In style, however, Ms. Diller belonged to a previous era: She was less conversational and confessional. She stuck to material that anyone could relate to (sex, food, famil y) and generally kept jokes clean (albeit with innuendo).

Ms. Diller would appear in any popular format: television, movies, roasts, theater. As a kid, I first saw her on “Scooby-Doo,” where her cartoonish look fit in seamlessly. She sang and could, when necessary, play it straight. While she talked incessantly about her ugliness (“I got a figure that just won't start”), her TV appearances showed she could also be flirtatious. She was a nimble, game, old-school entertainer. Her comic hero was Bob Hope, who also specialized in wiseacre one-liners. Unlike Mr. Hope, she rarely paused to milk laughs out of a long stare. Her delivery was more frantic. She overpowered crowds with punch lines.

Witness her virtuoso classic bit about her mother-in-law (“Jell-O with a belt”). For almost six minutes, economical fat jokes just kept coming like those chocolates in the famous “I Love Lucy” episode. Eventually, the most stone-faced audience member had to crack a smile. The subject matter is consistent, but the delivery varied. She dragged out syllables, pivoted into pauses, raised eyebrows, deadpanned, and when the crowd started to clap, she let out her laugh, like a pro, goosing a round of applause.

About comedy, Ms. Diller was a technician. She didn't smoke, but she used that cigarette holder because she liked what it did to her posture onstage. Like any great comic, she was sensitive to the sound of words. “The joke ends, preferably, on an explosive consonant - like cut,” she told Yael Kohen for the forthcoming oral history, “We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy.”

In a joke-filled speech delivered at the 92nd Street Y in 1992, Ms. Diller said she had been interested in death since was a child. Because her parents had her when they were relatively old (her father was 55; her mother 38), she attended many funerals at a young age. She transformed this gloomy reality into something lighter, saying that she didn't need to believe in heaven or hell, because life is wonderful enough.

“I will regret my death; I know that,” she said in the speech, letting loose a quick honking laugh before nailing the landing. “I know I'm going to miss me.”

One thing's for sure: She's far from alone.