Phyllis Diller stands in the spotlight on a Las Vegas stage, bedecked in a red sequined dress and a multi-hued fright wig. “You know you’re old when your walker has an airbag…and your liver spots show through your gloves…and your birth certificate is on a scroll…and somebody compliments you on your alligator shoes, and you’re barefoot,” she quips.

“Ha ha ha HA ha ha.”

Diller’s trademark raucous laugh ricochets around the room, along with that of the audience.

Diller fired off seemingly her entire repertoire of self-deprecating aging jokes in her final performance, captured three years ago in an award-winning documentary, Goodnight, We Love You. The film will have its Washington premier during the Senior Beacon’s InfoExpos on Sept. 8 and 18. Since hanging up her sequins and wigs, Diller, now 88, has hardly retired. In a telephone interview with the Senior Beacon from her 10,000-square-foot mansion outside Los Angeles, she chatted about her past and her newest endeavors, including her autobiography, which was published earlier this year. Diller’s decision to stop her grueling touring schedule of up to 125 shows a year did not come lightly. But she said there was only so long she could joke about aging before she became a joke herself.

Bowing out on top

“I watched some of my colleagues go beyond their peak, and that’s sad. I wanted to stop someplace at the top of my abilities,” noting that in his later years Henny Youngman would do his show sitting down, reading from cue cards, while Frank Sinatra had a teleprompter that would say “talk.” While her rapid-fire jokes recited from memory — Diller once calculated that she told her audiences more jokes per hour than any other comedian — was taxing, it was the travel that ultimately led to her decision to retire, she said. Diller had several incidents in which she had to leave the stage because she feared a fainting spell. She now wears a pacemaker.

“I don't miss the travel,” she said. “I miss the laughter. I do miss the actual hour [of performing]. I don't want to sound like I'm on dope, but that hour is a high; it's as good as you can feel. A wonderful, wonderful happiness, and great power.” After retiring from the stage, Diller spent more than a year recounting her life in her autobiography, Like Lampshade in a Whorehouse, a punch line from one of her jokes.

But writing the book was a painful job. Although the text is interspersed with some of Diller’s best one-liners, the book is really a moving account of a woman who dealt with many obstacles: two disastrous marriages, a schizophrenic child, the struggle for a career in the man's world of comedy.

From housewife to queen of comedy

Diller’s foray into comedy began out of necessity. As a 37-year-old San Francisco housewife with five children and a chronically unemployed husband 50 years ago, a jittery Diller stood in the spotlight at a nightclub called the Purple Onion and managed to turn her difficult home situation into a slew of gags.

One was: “Fang [Diller’s comedy-routine name for her husband] is the cheapest man alive. On Christmas Eve, he puts the kids to bed, fires one shot and tells them Santa committed suicide. On Thanksgiving, we didn’t even have a turkey. We had a meatball with a feather in it.”

During her first show, Diller rolled out her entire repertoire of jokes not realizing she was supposed to do a second set later — and most of the original audience members stayed on. So she gamely repeated her act and hurried home to write more jokes. Today, she has thousands, all stored according to subject in card catalogues at her home.

Her early days on the road were bumpy. Her very worst venue was at a basement club in Washington, D.C.

“The audience was made up of traveling salesmen and hookers,” she recalled. “I was bombing with my precious jokes about irony and children. And Bob Hope came in.

“He saw through the whole thing. He saw a person not giving up, not blaming the audience, getting on with the material, sailing through it just like it was working, bowing and leaving the stage.”

Hope, who had seen Diller on Jack Paar's “Tonight” show, told her she was great. That encounter led to three movies together, 22 television specials and many personal appearances, including a trip to Southeast Asia to entertain U.S. troops during the Vietnam War.

Role model for women comedians

Being a single woman on stage in the early days didn’t help matters. “I came along 10 years before Joan Rivers and Totie Fields. It took about 20 years for the doors to open for women comedians,” said Diller, who helped pave the way for Lily Tomlin, Rosanne, Whoopi Goldberg, Ellen DeGeneres and others who followed.

“She led the way and showed us how to conduct ourselves, not only as comics, but as human beings,” Joanne Worley recalled in Goodnight, We Love You. Over the years, two of her children died and one was institutionalized. She met the man of her dreams when she was 68, but he died of a stroke eight years later. Recounting the tragedies in her life for the book was tough going, Diller said.

“There are things in the book that I hadn’t thought about — because I hadn’t wanted to think about them — for a long time. I didn’t know if I wanted to be so public with something so private,” she said. “Between the jokes and writing the book, I realized, who needs to go to a psychiatrist?” Those clothes

And what about that wardrobe? Several rooms of her mansion are devoted to her glittery dresses, her hats, wigs and shoes. But they don’t get much use these days. In her off-stage life, she often dresses in ladylike suits.

“Oh my dear, you’d never put the two together. I dress with such taste, you’d never know [I had those other clothes].

“That was all theatrical. When you’re playing to a crowd of three or four thousand, you’ve got to sparkle, you got to have something to reflect the light. The wigs and gloves became my trademark.”

Diller has always put a premium on keeping up appearances. She was one of the first celebrities to admit to a facelift. In fact, she’s gotten a lot of mileage out of her plastic surgeries in her comedy routine. One joke: “I’ve had so much work done, no two parts of my body are the same age.’”

The final curtain

Beyond the book, Diller keeps up with a dizzying social life and spends time painting in a studio in her home. She is also promoting Goodnight, We Love You, which won the Audience Choice award for best documentary at the San Diego Film Festival last year.

Producer and director Gregg Barson decided to make the film after meeting Diller while his wife was on a work assignment one day.

“She said we should do lunch, but Phyllis never called,” he recounted. Weeks later, out of the blue, she invited him over to her house.

“She was showing us her fur coats. There were Picassos hanging next to her paintings. It was the coolest day of my life,” Barson said. Two or three years later, I read that she was retiring, and I thought that it had to be documented.”

So Barson filmed her final show in Las Vegas and later interspersed it a wide-ranging interview with Diller about her life and career; cameos from numerous stars, from Roseanne Barr to Lily Tomlin; and footage and stills from Diller’s early days.

The film ends with Diller’s signature final line, “Goodnight, I love you.” She walks slowly off the stage, down a corridor to her dressing room and literally closes the door on her career. She never looks back.

The Associated Press contributed to this article.