QUEEN OF THE CACKLE: Phyllis Diller wasn't the first female standup comedian, explained Gerald Nachman in Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, but she was the first to make it respectable, "to drag female comedy out of the gay bars, back rooms, and low end resorts and go toe-to-toe with her male counterparts in prime clubs." As to her pissed-off, self-deprecating housewife shtick, she once said that "I was saying all the things women were thinking but not saying," and her 50,000+ index cards of jokes are part of the Smithsonian collection.
She passed away today at the age of 95, and they don't make legends quite like that anymore. Here she is on The Ed Sullivan Show, 1969.
