Naturally Phyllis Diller Didn’t Know She Was Funny And Without Fang’s Help, We May Never Have Known, Either

Had it not been for the original Fang pushing her 40 years ago, Phyllis Diller might be sitting in an Alameda, Calif., senior-citizens center wondering why everyone else was laughing.

“I was just that natural. I didn’t know I was funny,” says Diller, relaxing in the penthouse suite of a downtown San Francisco hotel. “Oh, I did some amateur things, PTA and entertaining the sailors, neeeeeeeeeeee-ha-ack-ack-ack (or however you might spell the trademark Diller laugh). But it was always around my music, because that’s where I had my training.”

Back in 1955, however, Fang was seeing TV catch on like gangbusters, seeing comics like Milton Berle and Sid Caesar capturing the fancy of middle America.

“He’s thinking, ‘Hey, my wife’s funnier than that,”’ says Diller, who was living in Alameda and working in the promotions department of KABL radio at the time. “He was seeing money.

“Neeeeeeeeeeee-ha-ack-ack-ack.”

The chuckle isn’t nearly as broad as it might be on stage, but Diller is playing to an audience of only two. Besides, she’s getting great mileage from her expressive (and like the rest of her, often plastic-surgeried) eyes, which can turn an innocent line blue or impart considerably more meaning to an innocuous sentence.

Anyway, for all intents and purposes, the rest is history: six-a-day gigs at the old North Beach nightclub, the Purple Onion; discovery; stardom; movies; television.

“Ten years, 10 years it took me to feel comfortable doing this,” says Diller. “OK, now I’m a round peg in a round hole, but for 10 years, it was just agony.”

And she really didn’t have anyone to talk to about it. Outside of the legendary Moms Mabley on the chitlin’ circuit and Rusty Warren and her “Knockers Up” party records, women just weren’t doing stand-up in the mid-‘50s.

“Men, either, if you think about it,” says Diller. “It was all teams - Martin and Lewis, George Burns and whoever he was working with over the years. Teams. And then me, by myself.”

She recalls nights when the flop sweat would be so bad it would burn holes in her trademark leather boots. But she also remembers she quickly discovered she was a beacon to legions of mid-‘50s women.

“Nobody likes ironing, but I was the first to talk about it. Half my act was about how much I hated to iron,” says Diller, who is now nearing 80. “I was saying things all the women thought about, but didn’t say. The women adopted me first, and then dragged their husbands along. But by then, it was too late, I was famous.

“Neeeeeeeeeeee-ha-ack-ack-ack.”

But even with women loving her, she didn’t motivate others to follow in her footsteps for some time.

“It was me, alone, for maybe 10 years,” she says. “Then Joan Rivers came along. And she and I were the only ones for another 10 years. Then it started blossoming and a lot of girls came up and said, ‘Hey, let’s do this.”’ But Diller feels sorry for many of the younger comics who glutted the market when every street corner had a comedy club.

“They really have nothing serious to talk about,” says Diller, who was 37 when she launched her career. “When I started out, I came with the baggage - the husband, the neighbors, the kids, the dog, the cats, all that crap. And then you have these cute little darlings. They’re young, they’re cute, what do they have to bitch about? The audience really doesn’t care about their math teacher. You need the baggage.”

An exception was Roseanne.

“She called herself the domestic goddess,” Diller says. “I wish I’d come up with that. God, what a great line. She started out doing domestic humor, kids, all that crap. She had that same attitude toward housework and housekeeping that I did - you’re not going to get a Pulitzer Prize no matter how good you are at it.”

Diller says her basic routine hasn’t changed over the years. She does “an hour of straight laughs.”

“I update the same old premises - Fang and all those relatives, and current people and stuff going on, too, like the president and his bad knee.

“Neeeeeeeeeeee-ha-ack-ack-ack.”

Chatting, Diller speaks slowly and carefully, but on stage, she continues to deliver lines at her familiar machine-gun pace.

“I’m too nervous to work any other way,” she says. “That’s how I established my rhythm. In fact, I’m in the Guinness Book of (World) Records for most laughs per minute - 12.You can’t get any more than that. Bob Hope told me that. He’s such a mechanic; he goes for six.

“I’ll tell you how I do it. You know when you do one-liners, it’s setup, payoff, setup, payoff. I do setup, payoff, payoff, payoff, payoff, payoff. See how much time I saved? Every few words, you get a laugh.”