As I have mentioned before, I have joked for years that my laugh has a life of its own. I told people I needed to name it so I had someone to blame when it comes out in force, especially at inappropriate times. Since I modeled my laugh after Phyllis Diller after the first time I heard her as a kid, that seemed to be the most appropriate choice. A few months ago some people were posting pictures with me commenting on hearing Phyllis, which resulted in the social media algorithms feeding me old clips of hers, I decided I really wanted to know more about my laugh’s namesake. So, I bought her autobiography and boy what a ride.
Phyllis jokingly told people she was first thought to be a tumor. On July 17, 1917, she was born. Her dad asked the doctor if it was a boy or a girl and the doctor said I can’t tell! Growing up, she never got hugs or kisses from her parents. Her mother was distant and Phyllis joked that she was still trying to get an abortion, even after Phyllis was 30 years old. She was close to her father as she went on sales trips with him when he was doing door-to-door sales.
She married a ne’er-do-well from a family of losers, but to his credit, he pushed her toward a career in show business. It should be noted that he did so only because he wanted her to be his cash cow. Although many assume that he was “Fang,” the recurring rotten husband in her stand-up routine, she denies that he was. However, so many of the barbs in her routines are clearly echoes of him and his family. When Phyllis’ star was on the rise he started faking heart attacks for attention and was becoming even more unbearable. She finally divorced him in 1965 after spawning six children with him.
Phyllis made her professional debut in 1955 at the Purple Onion. For the next few years she was a typical struggling comedian. She had been trained as a concert pianist and was able to incorporate that into her acts, as well as pick up some side gigs to make money. Her break came in 1958 with a performance on “The Jack Paar Show,” during which she cracked up the host by tugging on her short green-dyed hair and saying, “This isn’t hair, these are nerve ends.” She perfected the persona of a crazed housewife, and in 1962 she played Carnegie Hall in a show titled “Just Phyllis Diller.”
What I found the most interesting about Phyllis was her outlook on life. Having grown up being told she was hopelessly ugly, she credits her mindset to a book she read in 1951. ” ‘The Magic of Believing’ became a system of thought for me as well as a way of life,” she says, offering the author Claude M. Bristol’s theories of tapping the subconscious as “a shield against all of the negative vibes.” Believe in yourself and give yourself the power became her mantra. “From here on it was straight up, all the way. I had a whole different slant. I believed that everything was going to work out, so even the setbacks that I’d experience wouldn’t matter. Everything I’d touch would turn to gold.”
Her popularity exploded in the 1960’s. Phyllis honed her image as a wild woman with out of control, electrified hair, psychedelic minidresses, rhinestone-studded boots and AK-47 delivery. Over the next three decades, she was sought after by nightclubs, for movies and on television. She did her last stand-up show at 84, in Las Vegas. Her second act was taking up painting and selling her artwork at gallery shows.
Phyllis was also a trail blazer for her transparency about plastic surgery. She eventually had a face-lift in 1971. “I underwent another 14 surgical procedures over the next 15 years,” she wrote. The operations became such a big theme in her routine that she received an award from the American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery for having “the courage to proclaim her surgery and show her results publicly.” She had her breasts reduced, teeth straightened, tummy tucked, forehead lifted, cheeks implanted, and nose fixed. “I had to do something. I was so wrinkled, I could screw my hats on,” she says.
Like so many comedians, Phyllis Diller found a way to turn anguish into jokes, and her autobiography, “Like a Lampshade in a Whorehouse,” written with Richard Buskin, contains plenty of both.