Whatsofunny“SO THEN I WENT INTO THE DRESS DEPARTMENT. I TOLD THE [SALES]LADY I WAS A MEDIUM. WELL, SHE ASKED ME TO CONTACT HER DEAD UNCLE, FRED” – PHYLLIS DILLER
What’s so funny about this? This is a one liner from the late comedian, Phyllis Diller who just passed this year. I don’t do a lot of material from stand-up comics, dead or alive, but I can’t resist one-liners based on wordplay and puns. Phyllis Diller was a pioneer in many ways. In fact she was one of the very first female stand-up comics. She had a very sharp wit and a very sharp tongue. She was great with insults, and she was often the brunt or the theme of her own put-down jokes. The fancy term for this is “self-deprecating.” Rodney Dangerfield is the male comedian best known for this kind of self-put-down; Woody Allen was good at it too. Phyllis Diller did it 20 years earlier. She wasn’t bad-looking but she was self-conscious about her appearance.
In this joke, she’s doing a routine about going to a department store. She’d had a hard time in every department. Here she’s looking at dresses and tells the salesperson that she’s a medium, referring to her dress size. She was no doubt hoping that the lady would show her a few dresses that were pretty and the right size for her. However, the word “medium” can have an altogether different meaning. It’s short for “spiritual medium” meaning a conduit or passage connecting two or more things. In this case it’s the world of the living and the world of the dead. Mediums are usually older, strange-looking women who hold séances, meetings of several people all of whom are hoping to contact other people from their lives who have died, passed on to the “other side”, but seem to still be hanging on. That’s why Phyllis Diller tells us that the saleswoman wanted her to contact her dead uncle, Fred, instead of showing her a size medium dress. I guess Phyllis looked more like an old gypsy fortune-teller than a typical customer. Here’s another one-liner of hers worth repeating: “I found a money-back guarantee on a beauty cream. Rushed down to the store, they took one look at me – paid me an advance!”
And THAT’s what’s so funny! - Thanks Phyllis