You'll be hard-pressed to find an obituary notice that doesn't use phrases like “ground-breaking,” “trail-blazing,” or some such. La Diller used self-deprecating humor as the thin edge of the wedge, with which she worked her way into the overwhelmingly-male field of stand-up comedy.
Here's her first TV appearance, on Groucho Marx's “You Bet Your Life” on January 30, 1958. (Then, as now, utterly implausible game shows were a standard route to a showbiz career.)
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(Groucho, by the way, died 35 years ago yesterday, but it was his bad luck that Elvis had died a couple of days earlier, so not many people noticed. I'm sure he'd have had something to say about that.)
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