I hope you got to see Phyllis Diller perform once the way you should see any great stand-up comedian: Live and doing a real set. You can't appreciate most of these folks in five-minute hunks on some talk show. Really. I didn't know how good Ms. Diller was until I saw her on a stage, twenty feet from me and not concerned with having to get a couple of quick laughs and get off. She was really wonderful.
She was, of course, a pioneer — a woman of the time when the only way a non-male could get up and do an act like that was to make fun of her appearance and sexuality. Diller, Totie Fields, the early Joan Rivers…all of them stepped up to the mike and told you how ugly they were, how their husbands wouldn't make love to them, etc. In a short set, Phyllis sometimes talked about nothing else. To say these ladies had it rough is pure underestimation. It was ten times as hard for them as it was for an Alan King or a Bob Newhart. Phyllis, because she came first, especially had a lot more walls to knock down…which she did so that others might not be kept out. It helped that she was very funny but it was essential that she also be very determined. That she was.
I wish I had a great tale of spending time with her, getting to know her, etc. I saw her in person on stages and she was often the guest when I went to see a TV show taped. I once saw her in one of Red Skelton's famous "dirty hour" rehearsals where Red was supposed to perform that week's script for a test audience of CBS employees…but would actually tell filthy, irrelevant jokes the whole time. Phyllis Diller was the guest and she was professional enough to at least try to do the lines on the cue cards as written. But just to keep up with Red at all, she had to ad-lib some pretty randy stuff and she was a lot funnier than he was. Or maybe just wittier.
My one in-person contact with her came when we were casting voices for a CBS cartoon show I did called Mother Goose and Grimm, based on the comic strip by Mike Peters. We needed a strong voice for Mother Goose and someone — it may have been Mike — thought of Phyllis Diller. She came in to audition for us and she was very, very good. The big problems turned out to be that she wanted a vast amount of money and for us to work around a schedule that had her out of town and unavailable every time we'd need her in town and available. She was a tough one to scratch off the list of possible Mother Gooses.
I did take the opportunity to ask her about those Skelton rehearsals and I got the following impression: That she wasn't particularly fond of Mr. Skelton and hated working his "dirty hours" but that was the job. She became the preeminent female stand-up of her time partly because there weren't a lot of applicants for the position but largely because she was willing to work hard and put up with a lot. Swapping penis jokes with Red Skelton was probably nowhere near the worst of it. That perseverance was what got her to the top.
Well, that and being very, very funny. You need that too and she was.