Phyllis Diller

From Philosopedia

Diller, Phyllis (17 Jul 1917 - )

In Lima, Ohio, Diller was the daughter of Perry Marcus Driver and his wife, the former Frances Ada Romshe. She attended Lima Central High School, then studied for three years at Sherwood Music Conservatory in Chicago, Illinois. For a time, she studied at Bluffton College in Bluffton, Ohio.

In the mid-1950s, while a housewife, mother, and advertising copywriter, she made appearances on The Jack Paar Show and was a contestant on Groucho Marx's quiz show, You Bet Your Life.

At the chic Bon Soir night club in Manhattan, her act included making jokes about her fictional husband, Fang, all the while smoking from a long cigarette holder and cackling with an unusual laugh that came across as sometimes being funnier than her jokes. Diller was one of the first of the female stand-up comedians.

An actress and an author, Diller in 1965 received the Best TV Comedienne Award from the TV Radio Mirror. She accompanied Bob Hope and his group to South Vietnam during Christmas 1966; appeared in numbers of plays and movies, wrote several books, and was a producer-writer of the Phyllis Diller Shows (1963-1964). In David Kristof’s and Todd Nickerson’s Predictions for the Next Millennium, Diller is quoted as predicting the following for the year 3000:

• The constants all through the centuries will be the same: wine, women and song. Other than that, life will be very different technologically. In the year 3000 the universe will be expanding as it will forever, infinitely. We will probe outer space but never find life as evolutionized as ours. We were not created by a deity. We created the deity in our image. Life began on this planet when the first amoeba split. Mankind will still be seeking God, not accepting that God is a spirit; can’t see it, touch it, only feel it. It’s called Love.

In The Globe Tabloid, Summer 2003, she told a reporter

• I believe in nature. I’m a thinker, a scientist. I can’t buy all the religious stuff, so I’m an atheist. Plus, I’m also disturbed that most wars are about religion – including the current on. I don’t want to have anything to do with that. When you die, it’s over.

(See her on YouTube with Dean Martin and at her Farewell Performance in 2006.

{CA, Freethought Today, September 2003}