The death of Phyllis Diller last month at the age of 93 marked the end of a true pioneer in stand-up comedy. Experts, including me, weighed in on Diller’s legacy in the world of comedy, but none of the sound bites really did her justice.
It may be hard see from such a distance the enormous impact she made on comedy. It would not be an overstatement to say she virtually invented womens’ stand-up. Before Joan Rivers, before everybody, Diller was the groundbreaker.
It was not without a price, however. She had to swallow a lot of dignity to get where she got, and the freakishness of her image — the fright wig, the garish muumuus, the cigarette holder, even her signature braying laugh — spoke volumes about the way women had to present themselves to get a laugh in pre-feminist times.
Today, comics from Tina Fey to Sarah Silverman can affect an everyday demeanour and find an easy acceptance from both sexes.
This was, sadly, not always the case. Female comics were threatening and had to unsex themselves to get the laughs.
Diller made herself up like an unattractive clown, but I met her, back in the ’80s, without her war paint and costume.
I found her to be an attractive, classy and chic lady.
But those were the times. Her contemporary, Totie Fields, was morbidly obese, then famously lost her leg to diabetes. Her fame soared even more — no sexual threat there.
Diller’s countless TV appearances proved her to be the mistress of the one-liner — cleverly crafted and perfectly timed. Many male comics had mined their domestic life with joke after joke about their wives, but Phyllis was the first to make her husband, Fang, the target of her jokes. Women making sport of their husbands? Now that was revolutionary. Fang, incidentally, never existed, but was a hybrid of her multiple husbands and a great imagination.
Of course, Diller didn’t exactly emerge from a vacuum: there were a lot of sketch and film comediennes since the age of vaudeville and silent movies. But the only antecedents to her remarkable career were the ribald, outlandish stag comediennes of Miami Beach such as Belle Barth and Pearl Williams.
Barth and Williams are forgotten today and were ignored by much of society in their heyday in the ’50s and ’60s. They were never on TV because they performed in a style that was too sexy and “dirty” to ever put on the mass airwaves.
We could go back even further to Jean Carroll, who performed a very genteel version of female stand-up in the ’40s and early ’50s. Carroll, who died at 98 in 2010, worked fast onstage, cramming a ton of jokes and observations into a short TV-friendly set. An attractive woman dressed in couture clothing, she may have been the real pioneer, but an early retirement shunted her out of the history books.
Not the case with Phyllis Diller. Her influence is massive, her jokes remembered and quoted. She will live on in the media and in our collective memories.
Miss ya!
Post City Magazines’ humour columnist, Mark Breslin, is the founder of Yuk Yuk’s comedy clubs and the author of several books, including Control Freaked.