In the end, I numbered and scanned 52,569 individual note cards from the Phyllis Diller gag file.

Oliar, Dotan; Sprigman, Christopher (2008). "There's No Free Laugh (Anymore): The Emergence of Intellectual Property Norms and the Transformation of Stand-Up Comedy". Virginia Law Review. 94 (8): 1848. JSTOR 25470605. Retrieved September 16, 2020. There is also evidence in the [Diller archive…at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.] file suggesting that Diller appropriated from other sources [apart from self-creation or using her writing team], including newspaper comic strips and comedy books. For example, a number of Diller's jokes about her dysfunctional marriage to her fictional husband 'Fang' appear to have been inspired by a comic strip, 'The Lockhorns,' that Diller followed obsessively over the course of nearly a decade. The Diller joke files contain hundreds of 'Lockhorns' panels cut out of newspapers and mounted on index cards.

Fang, her onstage pet-name for her husband, Sherwood.

Diller says that she always let the audience do the editing of her material for her. If people didn't laugh, or get it right away, the joke didn't survive. "You never blame the audience," she says. Thus, her advice to aspiring comics: "Go out and try it, and if you find out from the audience that you're not funny, quit."

"The [joke] file is like a tree," says Diller. "Leaves drop off, and new leaves are added—the new stuff pushes out the old." Along with this cache—Diller refers to it as "my life in one-liners"

There was a time, she once quipped, when she had worked for an editor "who was so mean that he used to eat thumbtacks for breakfast with skimmed water."

“I think the most important thing I can say about Phyllis Diller,” says Bowers, “is that she was like Betty Friedan and the Feminine Mystique. Just like Friedan, Phyllis Diller chronicled the daily lives of woman. But she did it with laughs.”

Bowers remembers arriving at Diller’s home in 2006 to arrange for the donation. “She was the most organized donor I’d ever met.” “She had a rack of her costumes that she wished to donate. Each costume came with a plastic bag attached to it and inside the bag, she had carefully included not only the props—her cigarette holder, the head-dress, the gloves, the shoes—but also a photograph of her wearing the entire ensemble. She was better at curation than I was,” Bowers jokes.

“The file is like a tree,” Diller told the magazine’s Owen Edwards in 2007. “Leaves drop off, and new leaves are added—the new stuff pushes out the old.”

Although Diller generated a lot of her own material, she elicited some gags from other writers. One of her top contributors was Mary MacBride, a Wisconsin housewife with five children. A joke obtained from another writer includes the contributor’s name on the index card with the gag.

In 1970 Diller starred as Dolly Gallagher Levi in Hello, Dolly! for three months at the St. James Theatre on Broadway. Diller followed Carol Channing, Ginger Rogers, Martha Raye, Pearl Bailey (in a version with an all-black cast) and Betty Grable in the role and was replaced by Ethel Merman, who closed out the show in December 1970.

In addition to Phyllis Diller’s gag file, the Division of Culture and the Arts at the National Museum of American History holds costumes, props, television scripts, photographs, books, and audio recordings illustrating Diller’s diverse career that spanned almost half of a century.

Diller’s most iconic costume pieces—an unkempt wig, wrist-length gloves, cloth-covered ankle boots and a bejeweled cigarette holder, all of which became synonymous with her comedic persona.

Diller debuted at the famed Purple Onion in 1955.

According to The Guinness Book of World Records, each time Phyllis Diller exploded onto a nightclub floor, she notched up 12 laughs per minute, twice as many as her mentor Bob ("Rapid Robert") Hope.

DILLER: And, you know, of course they always say to Californians that we don't have seasons. Of course, that is not true. We have fire, flood, mud and drought.

Light travels faster than sound. That's why some people seem bright until they speak.

an imaginary husband she called Fang.

“I admire her ability for organization too. My jokes are still mostly in my head. She got hers on paper in alphabetical order.

Later, she’s was doing jokes about racism, like, ‘The word bigot is a contraction for big idiot.’”

“I really admired that she had everything so organized on catalog cards,” she said.

Heidi Rotbart, owner of Heidi Rotbart Management who in the 1980s became Diller’s traveling secretary,

In 1958, she made her television debut opposite Groucho Marx on the game show, “You Bet Your Life.”

Direct access to the list box: table of contents , directly to ZK I: List 1 or ZK 2: List 1 – or to the "Jokerzettel" ?

While Phyllis Diller created much of her own material, she also used jokes from other writers. Sometimes she purchased several jokes at a time from one writer, while in other circumstances fans mailed her jokes. Many of these contributors were wives and mothers from across the country who had similar experiences to share with Diller. When a gag was contributed by a writer other than Diller, the index card with the gag notes the name of the writer and often how many jokes were obtained and at what price.

Phyllis Diller’s groundbreaking career as a stand-up comic spanned almost 50 years. Throughout her career she used a gag file to organize her material. Diller’s gag file consists of a steel cabinet with 48 drawers (along with a 3 drawer expansion) containing over 52,000 3-by-5 inch index cards, each holding a typewritten joke or gag. These index cards are organized alphabetically by subject, ranging from accessories to world affairs and covering almost everything in between.