While installing the “Complete New Yorker” on my old laptop PC, I performed a search for a recently-deceased comedienne.  Some cartoon results:

• Frank Modell, Dec. 13, 1969 — “No, we would not like to hear the same line as delivered by Phyllis Diller.” (Teacher, surrounded by children dressed for a Nativity play, to a little girl costumed as an angel.)

• Whitney Darrow, Jr., Aug. 4, 1975 — “Guess what I dreamed last night. I dreamed I was at a dinner where Bob Hope, Phyllis Diller, Buddy Hackett, Milton Berle, Alan King, Flip Wilson, and Henny Youngman were roasting me.” (Woman talking to her husband as they eat breakfast.)

Other snippets:

• Talk of the Town, James Lardner, Sept. 3, 1984 — “[Dr. Albert Lowry, “America’s most interviewed real-estate educator,” at the New York Penta Hotel] told about some of the deals he had made, one involving some property that he had bought from Phyllis Diller. He traced most of the financial failures of the real estate field to a tendency to forget the old maxim “Caveat emptor.” Dr. Lowry is the author of the best-seller “How You Can Become Financially Independent by Investing in Real Estate.” He offers further advice in a two-day seminar that costs $495. Many of those in the audience of the free lecture swarmed to the registration table with their checkbooks at the ready.”

• Talk of the Town, William McKibben, Sept. 17, 1984: “…the Amazing Kreskin, a mentalist who has made nearly 300 appearances on the Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin & Johnny Carson shows. Phyllis Diller once called him ‘a male witch who should be burned at the stake.'”