In the end, I numbered and scanned 52,569 individual note cards from the Phyllis Diller gag file.
Hanna BredenbeckCorp numbered and scanned 52,569 index cards from Phyllis Diller's gag file. Prior to this archival effort most estimates for the numbers of cards were in the 40-50,000 range.
Spanning the 1960s to the 1990s roughly. The index was donated in 2003, so there were certainly no
Exact dating on the cards may give a better range, particularly if the text can be searched or if there's a database that can be sorted by date.
Via https://hypothes.is/a/UbW8nERrEe6xjEseEEEy1w we can use the rough dates: 1955-2002 which are the bookends of her career.
This gives us a rough estimate of:<br /> 2002-1955 = 48 years (inclusive) or 17,520 days (at 365 days per year ignoring leap years)
52,569/17520 days gives 3.000513698630137 or almost exactly 3 cards (jokes) per day.
Going further if she was getting 12 laughs (jokes) per minute (her record, see: https://hypothes.is/a/MTLukkRpEe635oPT5lr7qg), then if continuously told, it would have taken her 52,569 jokes/12 jokes/minute = 4,380.75 minutes = 73.0125 hours or 3.0421875 days to tell every joke in her file.