RIP PHYLLIS DILLER. THX FOR ALL THE LAUGHS, DOLL. :(
“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.
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.”
