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The Morning GIF: RIP Phyllis Diller

The legendary comedian died in her sleep Monday at the age of 95.

 

Lorraine Murphy

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Posted on Aug 21, 2012   Updated on Jun 2, 2021, 12:32 pm CDT

Here at the Daily Dot, we swap GIF images with each other every morning. Now we’re looping you in. In the Morning GIF, we feature a popular—or just plain cool—GIF we found on Reddit, Canvas, or elsewhere on the Internet.

RIP Phyllis Diller, one of the greatest comedians of the 20th century. Diller died yesterday in her sleep at the age of 95 at her home in California. According to her son, who found her, she died with a smile on her face.

Although her entire schtick was self-deprecation at its most extreme (she once said her body looked like a sack of doorknobs, no two the same size) she was nonetheless iconic in the women’s liberation movement for simply not giving a rat’s ass. As the Los Angeles Times film critic said:

She inevitably looked like a Barbie doll left out in the backyard during a rainstorm followed by a drought, sounded like she had consumed a pack of Camels and six highballs for breakfast, and she owned the joint.

This GIF comes from the Muppet Show via the Napsmear Tumblr, and it’s one of the rare occasions where the guest star was clearly at least as outré as the talking dogs, narcissistic pigs, and courtly frogs of the ensemble cast. As you can tell from the full clip, her sax appeal was on a par with her sex appeal, but she was, as always, a good sport about it, and game for anything.

Ladies and gentlemen of the afterlife, you’d better get the party started. The guest of honor has just arrived.

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*First Published: Aug 21, 2012, 7:26 am CDT