Born Phyllis Ada Driver in Lima, Ohio. Growing up with old parents (her father was 55, and her mother was 35 when she was born), she was exposed to death from a young age. Later she said that this had led her to appreciate life and use comedy as a therapy method.
After graduating from Lima’s Central High School, she studied piano at the Sherwood Music Conservatory of Columbia College Chicago and then history, literature, philosophy, and psychology at Bluffton College.
In Bluffton, she met Sherwood Diller, and the couple eloped in 1939. After the wedding, she dropped out of school, became a housewife, and cared for their five children.
In 1952, after the family moved to Alameda, CA, Diller began to work at KROW radio in Oakland, CA. That same year, she filmed a series of 15-minute segments for the Bay Area TV station titled Phyllis Dillis, the Homely Friendmaker, offering absurd advice to homemakers.
In 1955, at 37, she worked as a vocalist for a music-review TV show called Pop Club. The hosts, Don Sherwood and Willard Anderson, found her hilarious and invited her to the show. Following her success, she debuted as a stand-up comedian at San Francisco’s The Purple Onion nightclub. Diller’s perfect timing, cackling laugh, and pin-point one-liners about suburban life captivated the audience, and the show ran for almost two years.
With no female comedians as role models in a male-dominated industry, Diller’s first performances draw materials from her experiences as a housewife who reads advice columns. Over time, she developed a persona, presenting a caricaturist form of femininity. With baggy dresses, clownish hairstyles, and a fake cigarette, she ridiculed her lack of sex appeal and spoke about looks, ineptitude as a mother, and her made-up husband. Later, she also joked about her love of plastic surgery.
In 1958, at 41, Diller made her first national television appearance on Groucho Marx’s show You Bet Your Life. Afterward, she got invited to various talk shows, including the Tonight Show and The Ed Sullivan Show, bringing her national fame; her performances were fully booked throughout the US, and she released multiple comedy albums.
By the early 1960s, she began to perform alongside her mentor Bob Hope, appearing in more than 20 of his TV specials and working with him on several films, including Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! Eight on the Lam, and The Private Navy of Sgt. O’Farrell.
By then, Diller became a household name, regularly appearing on numerous television programs. She also furthered her acting career, performing in over a dozen movies and as a dubbing artist, utilizing her signature voice to portray a wide range of characters, from the Monster’s Mate in the 1967 film Mad Monster Party to the Queen in the 1998 animation A Bug’s Life.
In 1966, 49 years old Diller received her own TV show, The Pruitts of Southampton, better known as The Phyllis Diller Show. There, she played a wacky widow who struggles to maintain an appearance of wealth despite being heavily in debt.
During the next three decades, Diller continued to appear in many TV shows and to voice act in several series, including Robot Chicken, Family Guy, Cow and Chicken, Hey Arnold!, The Powerpuff Girls and Animaniacs.
She was also an accomplished writer, publishing her first book, Phyllis Diller’s Housekeeping Hints, in 1966 and her last, The Joys of Aging & How to Avoid Them, in 1981.
By the end of the 1990s, while in her 80s, her health began to decline, and in 2002 she retired from stand-up. She continued to make TV appearances and was featured in talk shows and comedy specials such as The Aristocrats.
Diller died at 95, after a 50-year-long career in which she published four books and appeared in 365 films and dozens of TV shows. As one of the first solo female comedians in the US, she inspired generations of stand-up comedians, such as Joan Rivers, Lily Tomlin, Ellen DeGeneres, and Margaret Cho.
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