A Hoot

In interviews she called herself "a life of the party type."
Is there anything better?
What a way to careen through life, laughing at yourself and the world, creating your very own signature laugh, kind of a cackle-guffaw and letting us all chuckle along too.

Phyllis Diller.
Crazy wigged, eyebrows arched, dolled up in fashions that tended toward train wreck, tossing off her one-liners about her fictitious husband Fang and about herself.  ("When I told Fang I was going to have my face lifted, he said, 'Who'd steal it?'" and the favorite of women everywhere: "Housework can't kill you, but why take a chance?")

Though her act revolved around how she "buried the laundry in the backyard" and couldn't cook to save her life, she was a gourmet, an accomplished pianist and a painter, someone her friends described as utterly kind and generous. Perhaps what I loved best was that she told the Associated Press it took reading the book The Magic of Believing to give her "the courage" or that nudge she needed to step up on a stage at 37 and try out her act.

Mostly, she was a hoot, a gal who, like anybody else, had her own bundle of troubles but she chose to laugh. And her manager said that she died peacefully in her sleep with a smile on her face.

The Smithsonian says it has  50,000 of her jokes, each typed up on an index card, a lovely thing to leave us.